Indeed - when the only limits are on numbers of things a project has NOW, regardless of your intentions, under those limits, someone could propose and delete a Wiki with 900 pages that had 50% of the basic messages translated.
Certainly, that was not your intention - but that would be the rule.
Mark
On 11/04/2008, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
Gerard,
What you say in the below message is reasonable. Yet, is it not also reasonable to infer that your earlier messages have been poorly formulated? First and foremost, they have been construed by several list contributors as an intent to see projects shut down. Secondly, you've failed to dispel this belief to the extent that you felt resorting to "shouting" was appropriate.
My comment added nothing to the discussion at hand, nor was it meant to. Thus, I was surprised to get any response to me expressing amusement. Apart from being an expression of amusement, it was a gut reaction to seeing what I consider one of the cornerstones of constructive Internet discussion thrown up. I've shouted in the past month or so, I'll own up to that. I felt I was justified when about six hours away from my computer saw well over a hundred messages hit this mailing list. However, anyone who doesn't have at least a passing familiarity with RFC 1855 should read it stat. Were it up to me people would not be allowed on the Internet without passing an "Information superhighway driving test" and that would be a part of it, but here I digress.
You need to address the concern that has been raised. You may call the guidelines you would like to see "objective", you may have no intention of seeing any project closed as a result of their introduction, but you will not be alone in interpreting and applying them. Could you be introducing something that could be "misused" according to how you intend to see things progressed? Could someone else come along after you and shut something down by interpreting your objective guidelines in a way you had not foreseen? If so, then the guidelines still need work.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 11 April 2008 15:04 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Criteria for the closure of projects.
Hoi, It is no way to prevail if you ask me, it is only silly. To me it means that the thread is not know because otherwise it would be known that this same argument has been rehashed several times. Writing in upper case is understood as shouting and that is exactly what you do when you are frustrated. So it is completely appropriate in this situation as it expresses profoundly and effectively my sentiments.
Again, this proposal is about introducing some objective criteria in stead of the current situation where anything goes. Again, this proposal is NOT to close any projects down. I would personally only consider the closure of projects when no activity exist for quite some time.
Thanks, GerardM
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
I can't remember the last time I saw 1855 used to prevail in an argument. However, it never fails to raise a smile when someone cites an RFC. Reminds me of the decades I spent on Usenet. :)
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chad Sent: 11 April 2008 14:38 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Criteria for the closure of projects.
Please turn off Caps when posting. This has been internet standard since 1995[1]
-Chad
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855#page-4
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi. I DO NOT PROPOSE TO CLOSE ANY PROJECT
What I propose is to have at least some objective criteria.
Thanks, Gerard
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
I am not exactly sure why everybody really supports this proposal. I
can
only say that if it is accepted most of the minor wikipedias which
are
active on a level of several native speaker contributions per month,
will
be closed. In this case, I will be the first one to encourage them
leaving
WMF and migrating to some more friendly server. As an example, I used
to
be a temporary admin in Lak Wikipedia, which has between 30 and 40 articles, and I am continuing to monitor the project. There are
regular
contributions from native speakers, but they will probably never
localize
100% messages since nobody has ever heard of betawiki, and people are
only
interested in editing pages. There is no chance it will reach 1000 articles in two years, as it has been suggested. I think it is very typical of a project open BEFORE the new rules of the language subcommittee were established. If you guys want a fork - welcome, go
on.
Cheers, Yaroslav
> - A project should have at least 1000 articles. When there
is
nothing > to see what is the point ?
It can take a long time for a new project to reach this goal. If
we
assume that a self-sustaining wiki project can grow exponentially
(at
least at first), the first couple hundred or thousand articles
can
take a long time. After this point, however, more articles will attract more editors, which in turn will produce more articles,
ad
infinitum.
I would prefer to see a condition which is based on annual
growth.
Active editing membership and number of articles should increase
every
year by a certain percentage until the project reaches a certain stable size. For very large projects, such as en.wikipedia, it's unreasonable to expect continued growth at a constant rate, so we
need
to include cut-offs where we don't expect a project to be growing
at a
constant rate anymore. Requiring growth in active membership can
help
to reduce bot-generated projects like Volapuk which has article
growth
but no new members.
10% article growth per year (which is 100 articles if your
project has
- is not an unreasonable requirement. 5% growth in active
editors
(1 new editor for a project that already has 20) would not be an unreasonable lower-limit either. Projects which can't meet even
these
modest requirements probably don't have a critical mass to
continue
growth and development.
Requiring projects to have 1000 articles in a fundamentally flawed proposal, since all projects start out with no articles, so all projects would be immeadiately closed. If you're going to have such
a
requirement, it would have to only come into force after X years,
or
something, but then you have issues with when and how to reopen it, and when to reclose it if it still doesn't work.
Requiring a certain growth rate sounds good. I think the cut-off
point
should be quite low (1000 articles, say). I'm not sure what a good rate would be for that first 1000 articles. Does anyone have statistics for how existing projects grew at the beginning? It the growth exponential at the beginning? I would expect not, since you probably get rapid growth during the first couple of months (for a Wikipedia: articles on general topics, geographical articles on the area that speaks that language, etc) which then tapers off as the novelty begins to wear off and then things follow an exponential
curve
from then on. That's just a guess though, I'd love to see the
actual
statistics if anyone has collated them.
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