I would say that projects have a number of levels of activity:
1. dead
2. someone is running around tagging articles with the Project banner
3. there is genuine conversation (not just spam) on their Project talk
4. there is some kind of To-Do list that gets added to
5. items actually come off the To-Do list because they've been done
In my own editing, I've never seen level 5. I know of a few at levels 3 and 4.
There's a lot of level 2 and many are dead. I think you'd need a project at least
at level 3 to make it worthwhile to point a newbie at it, but that's no guarantee that
the conversation taking place will be encouraging or welcoming.
While I say I have never seen level 5, I am nonetheless aware of very small groups of
editors that act like they have a mission but seem to coordinate via User Talk than a
project page. I must say I tend to operate in that mode because I find the formalised
projects attract too many people who want to "lay down the rules to everyone
else" rather than get on and do the job.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Yaroslav M. Blanter
Sent: Saturday, 9 January 2016 2:34 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Community health statistics of Wikiprojects
On 2016-01-08 07:27, Samuel Klein wrote:
On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 12:45 AM, Jonathan Cardy
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
More broadly it would be good to know if
wikiprojects are good for
editor recruitment and retention. My hypothesis is that if someone if
someone tries out editing Wikipedia and is steered to an active and
relevant wikiproject then they will be more likely to continue after
that first trial edit. I simply don't know whether introducing people
to inactive wikiprojects is worthwhile or what the cutoff is on
activity.
That's probably right. I think a nice cutoff on activity would be:
ask all wikiprojects to come up with a banner to show to a subset of
newbies, to indicate how many newbies or impressions they want (what
they think they can handle), and to create a page/section with an
intro and projects for newbies, if they don't already have one. Any
project that can manage this is welcome to get a few newbies to work
with if they want, in my book.
Actually, already knowing how many WikiProjects are alive (for example, I watch several,
and most of them are dead) would be already valuable.
May be even posting a question at the talk page of every WikiProject whether the project
is alive and able to set up smth would give the answer. (Number of watchers certainly does
not - many projects are watched by a lot of inactive users).
Cheers
Yaroslav
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