[Foundation-l] It's not article count, it's editors

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com> wrote:
> Examples are: article views per hour, unique visitors, percentage of
> potential audience reached (unique visitors per million speakers). All of

Why are people without computers or reasonable access to computers
considered potential audience for editing a website?

Why are people whom are effectively illiterate considered potential
audience for editing an encyclopedia?

I agree that in some stretched sense of 'potential' it's absolutely
true; but since solving these problems is pretty far outside of the
activities of the Wikimedia foundation today,  are metrics which
include these people really that reasonable?

I don't believe they are.  In particular, using speaker estimates will
cause us to misunderstand the relative success of the site:  If the
penetration for X is better than Y is it because of something we've
done better or could do better? Or is it simply because Y has less
literacy and less access to technology?


(If we aren't to limit the scope of 'potential' to potential which can
conceivably reached within the scope of the WMF's mission then I would
propose that by far the most cost-effective way to increase our
overall "percentage of potential" would be to promote increased birth
rates in developed nations with high literacy and access to
technology)