On 10 October 2010 09:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Despite repeated assurances at Wikimania, on lists and
on strategywiki,
that the strategic plan was going to consider all Wikimedia projects as
important, now at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Five-year_targets the
second target, «Increase the amount of information we offer» considers
only the number of Wikipedia articles.
«We're aware of the challenges around bot-created articles, articles of
low quality, etc., and the limited focus on Wikipedia, so this metric
shouldn't be seen in isolation, but is an important indicator.» Yes, but
a wrong one.
I'm, very, very disappointed: I have to conclude that all the words on
community participation etc. were only empty rhetoric.
This was a concious decision and I believe it is explained in the FAQs
or somewhere (Sue certainly mentioned it in at least one of the
(many!) presentions I've seen her do about the plan - there are slides
for those somewhere too). In summary (from memory), the reason was
basically one of "bang for your buck". The vast majority of our users
are using Wikipedia and not the other projects, which means even a
small improvement to Wikipedia is likely to have more impact than even
a large improvement to one of the other projects. Sue was very clear
that prioritising Wikipedia only applies to the WMF. The community
can, and should, continue to improve the other projects, the WMF just
feels that its limited resources are better used where they will have
more impact.