[Foundation-l] Criteria for the closure of projects.

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When a language, ANY language is not written in its standard script(s)
however difficult people may find them, we should not allow for it. When
Klingon is written per standard in its own script, then the Latin script is
a travesty.

What I proposed is really minimalistic. Requiring an annual growth of 10% is
dangerous. It may mean that at some stage the English Wikipedia is to close
because it does not grow by 10% any more... not good.

So please, consider the three criteria I proposed and leave it at that for
this thread.

Thanks,
      GerardM

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 8:23 AM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >    - 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.
>
> I agree with this condition. If en.wikipedia were written in a
> non-latin alphabet, that would be pretty unacceptable to most readers
> of it. This would also go for conlangs which do not have representable
> character sets (klingon comes to mind, although that project is
> already closed).
>
> I worry that this requirement, without further qualification, would
> restrict projects like an ASL project which uses glyphs instead of
> actual handsigns.
>
> >    - 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 would probably prefer a gradient scale, especially for languages
> which have only one project. 75% might be a good barrier to entry for
> the first project in a language, 90-100% for additional projects. This
> could be similar to the requirements set for the creation of new
> projects, but extended to include projects created before the language
> subcommittee made those rules.
>
> >    - 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
> 1000) 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.
>
> Doing something like this would enable us to automate the entire
> process. At the end of the year we calculate the growth rates of all
> the projects, and send warning notices to projects which have not met
> their required growth rates. two years of poor performance causes the
> project to get closed and moved back to the incubator. Plus, we don't
> set hard limits, which can be problematic for newly-created projects.
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>
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