Thanks for all feedback,
To be sure, I do not think participation level as a metric makes other
metrics obsolete. My blog post can be read as forget article count, embrace
participation instead but that pushes things too far.
There are other metrics that bear witness of our accomplishments, but are
more meaningful than article count (which will always be a nice trivia).
Examples are: article views per hour, unique visitors, percentage of
potential audience reached (unique visitors per million speakers). All of
these seem better than the static 'article count' because they focus on
whether and how much our content is being used, in other words on the
relevancy of our work for the readers.
I can see that for outward communication we still need to emphasize somehow
that we do matter by telling what we achieved.
I would hope that internally we focus on metrics that point to the future,
to what is yet to be achieved, and what can serve as inspiration. In that
context participation level has its place.
Percentage of potential audience reached (see above) shares a characteristic
with participation level, namely that the largest languages don't
automatically get all attention. At the other hand any ordering scheme that
lets the 'Volapüks' of this world take top rank is putting the horse behind
the cart. By the way right now we cannot yet measure unique visitors per
project ourselves.
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In summary I would suggest: let us downplay article counts in future
external communications, and present our achievements in a way that
emphasizes how we matter to the public.
For ourselves let us celebrate language communities that thrive, and focus
on building communities where they are absent, or small compared to their
potential, the rest will follow.
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I would of course welcome advanced analysis of relations between metrics. My
hunch is that advanced analysis will yield interesting but complex
dependencies, and possibly produce multi-factorial composite metrics, which
will be less suitable as primary ordering principle, as they are above most
people heads.
Compare economics. News media present simple metrics like inflation rate,
unemployment rate, gross national product. Each of these is too broad to be
useful for advanced economic analysis, yet apparently best abstraction level
for general discussions.
Erik Zachte