New subject: Please read: Fixing Incubator

25 Jul 2018

      My comments also inline, with unnecessary portions redacted.
Steven
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As of the last major evaluation of Incubator (last winter), there

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were 1,020 tests on Incubator with at least one valid page of content. One
   was the most recently exported project, which we generally keep as a
   duplicate on Incubator for administrative reasons. Of the other 1,019:

Woah, I didn't think it's so many.
Having these numbers is super-valuable, thanks.
How did you count? Is there a tool?

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502 (49%) were either "active" (defined as one new page creation

since the beginning of 2017) or "substantial" (defined as having at least
 25 mainspace pages), or both.  This included two that were approved but
 awaiting creation at the time.

Again, how did you count?
Are the terms "active" and "substantial" defined anywhere? Or did you

coin them ad hoc for this thread?
3. 500 is quite a lot. If we suddenly create wikis for all of them
according to my proposal, this will be a huge sudden addition of languages
to the interlanguage links list, at least in a few hundreds articles, and
this may be too many to add at once.
4. Do you know what is the per-project breakdown—Wikipedia, Wikivoyage,
Wikibooks, etc.?
Breakdown is available at https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Test_status_statistics#28 February 2018.  (The "almosts" are usually in comments inserted within the various subtemplates of "Template:Tests" on Incubator.) I first created those terms/criteria when I did my first review in the summer of 2017, except that at the time the date for new page creation was the mid-2016. I rolled that forward in the winter review. The criteria are arbitrary, but for my purposes as admin on Incubator, what I needed was (a) a good idea of what was going on, not necessarily perfection, and (b) to make sure that I was construing tests as active or substantial whenever that was reasonable. For a purpose like this, those criteria may be too generous.
I count the tests by hand, which is very labor intensive, and means I probably get some wrong. (The advantage, I guess, is that I have found tests whose content is invalid and deleted them over the course of time.)  There used to be a tool for at least part of it, but it hasn't been maintained for a long time, and I don't know how. It takes 6–8 weeks to do this, and I have a day job—which is why I only do it about twice a year.
Not all of the 500 are new languages. Some are second projects in existing languages. But there are plenty of new languages in that group, to be sure.
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Let's approve them[1] :)
I know that's a joke. FWIW, they all have other reasons not to be approvable. But I wanted to keep a closer eye on such projects.
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... I really don't want this
discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
policy. ...
Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those test projects.
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criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)
I can manage that.
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I guess that I'd do one of the following:

Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat

arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org in which there
were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a test
wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
2. Just use case by case intuition.
Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations, not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really reflect "activity". That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from IPs.
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  - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day
  to 2 months), then go dormant.

So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
active.
You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I disagree.)
That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules, and especially not ones customized by language. (To that end, I've started to collect a handful of really basic templates—not modules—in the fictitious Wp/qdp test, which people can subst: and then customize within their tests. But I haven't done nearly as much as I would like on that; there's too much else to do.) And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write or translate pages.
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Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.
In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.
*   The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or (c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible" aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this new regimen.
  *   It will also have to respond fairly quickly to new requests.
  *   FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the 2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).
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... I don't think that the current Incubator makes anything
easy for anyone, but hey, I may be missing something.
It doesn't. But remember that before the current policies and practices were in place, it almost became too easy.  I'm mostly with you on making things easier for people who have never done this before.  But I don't want to make it so easy that we get a lot of frivolous requests, incubations and projects. And believe me, there have been a lot of them over time. (I removed three new, frivolous requests just today.)

Re: [Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator