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

[Brian McNeil]

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 at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at 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 at 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 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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