Re the argument that we should trumpet ourselves as, or even be be concerned as to whether we are the 5th largest site on the Internet.
Our remit is to make the world's knowledge freely available to all, and the Internet is by far the most important medium we use to do that. If fewer people were using the Internet, or fewer Internet users were visiting our sites, then yes that should worry us. At present we seem to be growing at the same rate as the Internet, if that changed it would be interesting to know why. If it was just 100 million people watching two hours a week less terrestrial TV and two hours a week more web TV and BBC Iplayer, and as a result our share of Internet time going down, then that would be interesting, though not very relevant.
Our position in the league table of largest sites does not matter, is out of our control and does not reflect our success as an organisation. If a grand merger of various porn sites meant that a porn site replaced us as the fifth site on the internet, but Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and porn all had the same share of the Internet as before, it would neither compromise our mission nor be a problem to us. Equally if some UN based anti trust measure forced Google to break into three equal sized chunks, would we care that we dropped into 7th place with the three babyGoogles in positions 2, 3 and 4?
There are plenty of metrics that would measure our success, our size relative to an assortment of search engines and social media networks tells us more about google and Facebook's success vis a vis their competitors than it tells us anything about us. What is damaging about the "fifth largest website" claim is that people pay more attention to the things that they measure success by.
I'd be more interested in:
1 Of the literate (or potentially literate) members of the Human race, what percentage visited one or more of our sites in the last 30, and 90 days (I hope we can all agree that the under 5s are outside our remit, though I suspect it would be difficult to agree whether our target audience is 80 or 90% of humanity).
2 If we commissioned an outside body to check 1,000 random facts on Wikipedia every month. How accurate would we be? And after a few months, what would the trend be?
If we remain a top ten site, or frankly a top fifty site, other people will notice and comment on that. We don't need to, instead we should measure and define ourselves in ways that more closely reflect our mission.
WereSpielChequers
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:29:49 +0200 From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Outdated manual To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4DA4299D.1040500@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
MZMcBride, 12/04/2011 02:32:
If WMF websites happened to be overtaken by Ask.com or some other website, it would be good to be forced to change the habit of how we describe them.
If you use more generic language, the likelihood of needing to update that language later decreases.
Yes, and my point is that it would be a bad thing: it's better if you're forced to consider it a problem (as it would be).
Nemo