On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Luis Villa lvilla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
- Participation in the mailing list may be a misleading indicator of
activity or interest, as other regional or specialized forums (eg. Facebook, GLAM-oriented lists, etc) have emerged in recent years.
Let me second this. My department is thinking about community health metrics (constructive suggestions welcome!), but I would not personally propose mailing list participation (especially this list) as a good
metric
- decreased participation here may reflect many, many things, only some
of
which are actually negative.
This is not the only one indicator, but it's pretty consistent since 2011 (take a look into [1]). In other words, something happened in May. Maybe it's actually about the elections because people used other means of communication for that.
Looking briefly at some of the highest-traffic months, it could simply be that people got tired of discussing high-controversy topics here. (Flamewars are good for traffic volume; not so great for community health.) I'm sure Facebook's increased acceptance also has a role. I suspect also that some announcements that used to come here now go to other, more specialized mailing lists.
That last one points to a key thing: as MZ says, many people are subscribed to this list, but many don't read and don't participate, because this mailing list has an *awful* reputation, and people who want to get things done are going elsewhere. So "the decline of wikimedia-l" may be a sign of bad health of the overall community, or it may simply mean that the healthy and constructive parts of the community has moved elsewhere.
To re-iterate what I said in the last email, I'm all ears for suggestions on creative community metrics. I'll add here that I'm also very open to suggestions on what a new wikimedia-l might look like. (I know some FOSS communities are having good experiences with discourse.org, for example.) No commitment that WMF can act on either immediately, of course, but I think it is worth starting both of those discussions.
Luis