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

[Gerard Meijssen]

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