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

[Erik Zachte]

Gregory Maxwell:
> 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?

Your second question is redundant, few illiterate people will possess a
computer.

Agreed, participation level does not tell the whole story,

I'll quote my blog post:  
"The fact that age, literacy, standard of living (internet access), and
political climate all influence the real potential of possible editors in a
language are left out of consideration. For many of these factors good
numbers are not available (worldwide demographics per language), or hard to
quantify (effect of political climate) or changing rapidly (internet access
in 3rd world)." Especially the last one relates to your first point (think
mobile phones). 

So the metric is far from ideal. But still rather practical. It paints
vividly how we are not waiting for a few minor languages to catch up, but
how we have not reached large parts of the world yet.
See also strategy wiki: there are proposals to broaden our reach beyond
online access, and of course important initiatives are ongoing already, like
OLPC and other projects, were Wikipedia plays a part. 

And the same argument of being too blunt and non discriminating can be used
for most metrics. In fact I made it in so many words against article count,
which treats all articles as equally important.

Erik Zachte