2008/4/10, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, For quite some time, we have had people arguing for the closure of projects. I have seen many arguments pro and against closures. What has been missing in all these projects are objective criteria why it makes sense to find fault with a project.
I have come up with three objective arguments.
- A project is not what it is advertised to be. For instance when a
language is always written in a particular script, a project in any other script is problematic.
With this I agree. Other examples are: * A Wikipedia with only or mostly 'articles' of length 1 line or less * A Wikisource with only or mostly source material in another language than the project's own
- A project does not have at least 90% of the most relevant messages
localised. For your information there are only 498 messages in this category at the moment.
I disagree. I still don't agree that message localisation is an important factor in allowing or disallowing a language; also, this would put the limit high on the first project in a language, very low for subsequent ones. A well-developing Wikipedia in a new language might be excluded by this criterium, whereas a dead Wikisource or Wikinews might easily reach the goal simply by copying from its partner Wikipedia.
- A project should have at least 1000 articles. When there is nothing
to see what is the point ?
Development. As said by others, ongoing development is more important than actual article number. I would measure this by active users - at least 3 (or 5?) active users (measured by number of edits in a month.
Measurement in number of articles is also problematic because the various types of projects are quite different in that. A Wiktionary with 1000 words is still a small startup, a Wikinews with 1000 articles is quite serious already.