[Foundation-l] Social networking (was: Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline)

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've not seen any concrete evidence that supports this.  Traffic in
> meta areas doesn't always translate into real productive work.

In one of the emails I explained it through data from a couple of
projects; without en.wp, of course, because statistics are too old.
However, I don't think that behavior is significantly different than
in French and Italian cases (according to the list activity).

There are no statistics for Commons [for which I know], except for the
list, where communication decreases, too.

Besides that, the only case which doesn't support the relation between
mailing list activity and project activity is a negative one. Japanese
Wikipedians talk more at the list, but their activity at the project
was in decrease for the period January-May 2008.

> I can't speak for project that I don't frequently use, but EnWP and
> Commons haven't started imploding as far as I can tell.

The main reason for raising this question is exactly to prevent
imploding. (BTW, we already have one implosion: The third Wikiquote,
Polish, has less than 50 edits per day, the fourth, German, has
somewhat more than 50 edits per day.)

Also, I would be happy if someone [like you] checks more
systematically statistics. I have very rudimentary knowledge in
statistics (yes, I know that curves of development are not not
straight forward and that a couple of paths are possible), so someone
with better knowledge in that field should check it. (And I think that
the question is very important. I would be very happy to see that I am
wrong.)

[1] - http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-October/046831.html