[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

[Ting Chen]

Hello Gerard,

I agree with you, making MediaWiki more usable for beginners is more and 
more a pressing problem of ours.

Ting

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> Regularly I hear people say that Wikipedia is failing. When you then listen,
> there are all kinds of good reasons why Wikipedia is failing. Quality is
> low, issues with living persons, pov pushers a long litany of woes are all
> grounds to predict the imminent demise of Wikipedia. While all these issues
> may be grounds for concern, it is hardly indicative of failure. To me they
> are indicative of a wildly successful project coping with everything that is
> a consequence of success. I am of the opinion that most of our projects
> would love to have the same problems, the same issues, the same success as
> the few project that do well.
>
> For most of our projects a lack of content, a lack of community ensure that
> the project is irrelevant. No growth, no interest is more killing then all
> the woes that our big projects suffer from. At Wikimania 2008 a presentation
> was given by developers from UNICEF who had done proper usability studies.
> They found that 100% of their newbie testsubjects were not able to create a
> new article.
>
> This is serious. This explains why so many of our projects fail. We do not
> invite collaboration because people do not know how to. They do not know how
> to EVEN when they are explicitly invited to create a new article as they
> were in this research.
>
> At the Wikimedia Conference Nederland, Jan-Bart de Vreede indicated in his
> speech that Kennisnet is interested in implementing the UNICEF extensions.
> These extensions are now localisable in any language at Betawiki. At
> ExtensionTesting, all the extensions have been tested against stable
> releases. Bugs were identified and some bugs were fixed. As a consequence it
> is likely that some more MediaWiki installations will benefit from research.
>
> It seems obvious to people who deal with small projects that usability is
> one of the big issue when it comes to the moribunt status of our small
> projects. The question I put to you, what are we going to do to first agree
> that this is an issue and then to deal with this issue. Do we care that 80%
> of our projects are failing?
> Thanks,
>       GerardM
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