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

[Thomas Dalton]

>  >    - 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.

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.