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

[Tim Starling]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> 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?

I don't think the metric you propose is a particularly useful one. We
could reduce it to 0% overnight by just deleting all the wikis that, by
your definition, are failing. Or we could increase it to 90% by relaxing
the project creation rules. It's not demonstrably bad for small projects
to speculatively create wikis and then wait to see if they flourish.

Perhaps it would be better to evaluate our success in terms of our goals.
We aim to bring the sum of all human knowledge to the people of the world
in their own language. So how many words (or other unit of information) do
we have in each language, and what do you get when you multiply that by
the number of speakers of the language and sum over all projects? The
result could be compared to older methods of information transfer, such as
libraries.

-- Tim Starling