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

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

2010/10/12 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> 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.

That's an unproven assumption. It might even be the opposite, i.e.
reinforcing Wikipedia might only increase the gap between the
projects.

> Sue was very clear
> that prioritising Wikipedia only applies to the WMF.

That's a bad decision. The WMF should try to balance the projects,
when the community has not done it alone.

> 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.

Regards,

Yann