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@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@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

_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l


_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l