Speaking of specialized lists, I'd like to suggest that this discussion would be well suited to Research-l, where many people who are interested in these kinds of questions read and write about them more frequently than they do on Wikimedia-l. I'm boldly adding that list to the recipients for this thread.
I have some thoughts about the substance of this discussion but they're a bit rushed at the moment. I may write more later.
Regards,
Pine
Luis, I have to say that you are the first person on WMF side who has
substantially engaged into this issue and I am very glad to see that :)
The products of your work are of the highest importance, as the community
is the most important part of our movement, not to say that it's the
movement itself.
I am finally relieved to know that we are on the path to rationally
understand what's going on inside of the community after short 14.5 years.
It would be good if you'd share your results with the rest of us.
As for this list: As MZ said, this list is important. However, there is no
doubt that it's far from being the only or even the most important
indicator of community health. It is just about one of the rare publicly
accessible data which could give a clue of what's going on inside of the
community, but could mislead, as well.
On Jun 2, 2015 04:39, "Luis Villa" <lvilla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Luis Villa <lvilla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> 3. Participation in the mailing list may be a misleading indicator of
> > >> activity or interest, as other regional or specialized forums (eg.
> > >> Facebook, GLAM-oriented lists, etc) have emerged in recent years.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Let me second this. My department is thinking about community health
> > > metrics (constructive suggestions welcome!), but I would not personally
> > > propose mailing list participation (especially this list) as a good
> > metric
> > > - decreased participation here may reflect many, many things, only some
> > of
> > > which are actually negative.
> >
> > This is not the only one indicator, but it's pretty consistent since
> > 2011 (take a look into [1]). In other words, something happened in
> > May. Maybe it's actually about the elections because people used other
> > means of communication for that.
> >
>
> Looking briefly at some of the highest-traffic months, it could simply be
> that people got tired of discussing high-controversy topics here.
> (Flamewars are good for traffic volume; not so great for community health.)
> I'm sure Facebook's increased acceptance also has a role. I suspect also
> that some announcements that used to come here now go to other, more
> specialized mailing lists.
>
> That last one points to a key thing: as MZ says, many people are subscribed
> to this list, but many don't read and don't participate, because this
> mailing list has an *awful* reputation, and people who want to get things
> done are going elsewhere. So "the decline of wikimedia-l" may be a sign of
> bad health of the overall community, or it may simply mean that the healthy
> and constructive parts of the community has moved elsewhere.
>
> To re-iterate what I said in the last email, I'm all ears for suggestions
> on creative community metrics. I'll add here that I'm also very open to
> suggestions on what a new wikimedia-l might look like. (I know some FOSS
> communities are having good experiences with discourse.org, for example.)
> No commitment that WMF can act on either immediately, of course, but I
> think it is worth starting both of those discussions.
>
> Luis
>
> --
> Luis Villa
> Sr. Director of Community Engagement
> Wikimedia Foundation
> *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share
> in the sum of all knowledge.*
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