Hello,
2010/10/12 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
On 10 October 2010 09:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@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.
That's an unproven assumption. It might even be the opposite, i.e. reinforcing Wikipedia might only increase the gap between the projects.
Sue was very clear that prioritising Wikipedia only applies to the WMF.
That's a bad decision. The WMF should try to balance the projects, when the community has not done it alone.
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.
Regards,
Yann