It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer similar levels of inactivity.
English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous. English Wikibooks has only 10, which is more than can be said for most language editions of Wikibooks, which are all but dead.
There are two problems here, I think. The first one is lack of support from WMF, which everyone likes to talk about a lot. The other one is the assumption that these projects are worthwhile and that WMF or anyone else *should* care about them.
Let's say a GeoCities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities ) site about your grandmother's pet cat somehow ended up being one of our sister projects. Since it's not very useful to most people, it remains a very low-traffic site, and WMF doesn't put a lot of energy into it. Then a lot of people come along and bellyache that WMF is not giving Grandma's GeoCities cat site any support and that it's undervalued, with the assumption that just because it is a sister project, it should be treated exactly equally to Wikipedia, with the unproven assumption that it offers just as much potential and just as much educational value as our "flagship" site. Of course that's nonsense, who cares about your grandmother's cats besides her?
I do think some of the sister projects are extremely valuable (Commons in particular; Wiktionary can be useful in some ways, same with Wikisource; Wikibooks and Wikinews were at least nice ideas that don't seem to have been well-suited to the Wiki process in the end), but I'm tired of the assumption that people *should* support and care about sister projects just because they're sister projects, without proving their usefulness or worthiness of our support.
2011/9/12 M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com
I do believe it means exactly that.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page:
- 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1
edit/day)
- 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days
- 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days ("super active"):
Brian McNeil and Pi zero
I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low, especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost useless for people who want to stay informed about current events.
2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss@verizon.net
wrote:
At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several
others
(including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are
active
remaining Wikinews contributors.
Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active contributors prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
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