[Foundation-l] Five-year WMF targets exclude non-Wikipedia projects

[Thomas Dalton]

On 10 October 2010 09:33, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Despite repeated assurances at Wikimania, on lists and on strategywiki,
> that the strategic plan was going to consider all Wikimedia projects as
> important, now at
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Five-year_targets the
> second target, «Increase the amount of information we offer» considers
> only the number of Wikipedia articles.
> «We're aware of the challenges around bot-created articles, articles of
> low quality, etc., and the limited focus on Wikipedia, so this metric
> shouldn't be seen in isolation, but is an important indicator.» Yes, but
> a wrong one.
>
> I'm, very, very disappointed: I have to conclude that all the words on
> community participation etc. were only empty rhetoric.

This was a concious decision and I believe it is explained in the FAQs
or somewhere (Sue certainly mentioned it in at least one of the
(many!) presentions I've seen her do about the plan - there are slides
for those somewhere too). In summary (from memory), the reason was
basically one of "bang for your buck". The vast majority of our users
are using Wikipedia and not the other projects, which means even a
small improvement to Wikipedia is likely to have more impact than even
a large improvement to one of the other projects. Sue was very clear
that prioritising Wikipedia only applies to the WMF. The community
can, and should, continue to improve the other projects, the WMF just
feels that its limited resources are better used where they will have
more impact.