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

[Andre Engels]

2008/4/10, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> Hoi,
>  For quite some time, we have had people arguing for the closure of projects.
>  I have seen many arguments pro and against closures. What has been missing
>  in all these projects are objective criteria why it makes sense to find
>  fault with a project.
>
>  I have come up with three objective arguments.
>
>    - 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.

With this I agree. Other examples are:
* A Wikipedia with only or mostly 'articles' of length 1 line or less
* A Wikisource with only or mostly source material in another language
than the project's own

>    - 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 disagree. I still don't agree that message localisation is an
important factor in allowing or disallowing a language; also, this
would put the limit high on the first project in a language, very low
for subsequent ones. A well-developing Wikipedia in a new language
might be excluded by this criterium, whereas a dead Wikisource or
Wikinews might easily reach the goal simply by copying from its
partner Wikipedia.

>    - A project should have at least 1000 articles. When there is nothing
>    to see what is the point ?

Development. As said by others, ongoing development is more important
than actual article number. I would measure this by active users - at
least 3 (or 5?) active users (measured by number of edits in a month.

Measurement in number of articles is also problematic because the
various types of projects are quite different in that. A Wiktionary
with 1000 words is still a small startup, a Wikinews with 1000
articles is quite serious already.


-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels