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

[Gerard Meijssen]

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 at 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
> >>  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.
> >
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>
>
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