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

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Tue Dec 2 22:44:28 UTC 2008


Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Another way to approach the number would be; currently 80% of 
> our projects are failing. Improved usability may mean that this 
> number goes down to 60% maybe even 40%. This would be a big 
> improvement.

Gerard, you're very stubborn, even when you're wrong.  Look, I'm 
not against improving projects.  I'm not against you.  I'm just 
against using poorly defined metrics for measuring improvement.

A working metric could be the total number (not the share) of 
successful projects.  Do we have 130 successful projects today?  
(This is just a quick guess: 80 languages of Wikipedia having more 
than 10,000 articles, plus 50 other projects.) Maybe we can have 
170 next year.  This metric is not affected by whether or not 
Swahili Wikinews (supposedly yet another failed project) gets 
started.  Let's study whether the page creation extensions can 
make that number 160 or 180.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se



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