Tim Starling wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
It seems obvious to people who deal with small projects that usability is one of the big issue when it comes to the moribunt status of our small projects. The question I put to you, what are we going to do to first agree that this is an issue and then to deal with this issue. Do we care that 80% of our projects are failing?
I don't think the metric you propose is a particularly useful one. We could reduce it to 0% overnight by just deleting all the wikis that, by your definition, are failing. Or we could increase it to 90% by relaxing the project creation rules. It's not demonstrably bad for small projects to speculatively create wikis and then wait to see if they flourish.
Perhaps it would be better to evaluate our success in terms of our goals. We aim to bring the sum of all human knowledge to the people of the world in their own language. So how many words (or other unit of information) do we have in each language, and what do you get when you multiply that by the number of speakers of the language and sum over all projects? The result could be compared to older methods of information transfer, such as libraries.
-- Tim Starling
I would emphasize this message by pointing out that for nearly a full year of its existence, the Finnish language wikipedia would quite easily have qualified as a failing wikipedia. And look at where we are now. Closing in on the 200 000 article milestone. Sure, for other projects the time of gestation will be longer.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen