[Foundation-l] nth largest site on the Internet, and what we should measure ourselves by instead

WereSpielChequers werespielchequers at gmail.com
Tue Apr 12 15:56:17 UTC 2011


Re the argument that we should trumpet ourselves as, or even be be
concerned as to whether we are the 5th largest site on the Internet.

Our remit is to make the world's knowledge freely available to all,
and the Internet is by far the most important medium we use to do
that. If fewer people were using the Internet, or fewer Internet users
were visiting our sites, then yes that should worry us. At present we
seem to be growing at the same rate as the Internet, if that changed
it would be interesting to know why. If it was just 100 million people
watching two hours a week less terrestrial TV and two hours a week
more web TV and BBC Iplayer,  and as a result our share of Internet
time going down, then that would be interesting, though not very
relevant.

Our position in the league table of largest sites does not matter, is
out of our control and does not reflect our success as an
organisation. If a grand merger of various porn sites meant that a
porn site replaced us as the fifth site on the internet, but
Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and porn all had the same share of the Internet
as before, it would neither compromise our mission nor be a problem to
us. Equally if some UN based anti trust measure forced Google to break
into three equal sized chunks, would we care that we dropped into 7th
place with the three babyGoogles in positions 2, 3 and 4?

There are plenty of metrics that would measure our success,  our size
relative to an assortment of search engines and social media networks
tells us more about google and Facebook's success vis a vis their
competitors than it tells us anything about us. What is damaging about
the "fifth largest website" claim is that people pay more attention to
the things that they measure success by.

I'd be more interested in:

1 Of the literate (or potentially literate) members of the Human race,
what percentage visited one or more of our sites in the last 30, and
90 days (I hope we can all agree that the under 5s are outside our
remit, though I suspect it would be difficult to agree whether our
target audience is 80 or 90% of humanity).

2 If we commissioned an outside body to check 1,000 random facts on
Wikipedia every month. How accurate would we be? And after a few
months, what would the trend be?

If we remain a top ten site, or frankly a top fifty site, other people
will notice and comment on that. We don't need to, instead we should
measure and define ourselves in ways that more closely reflect our
mission.

WereSpielChequers

> Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:29:49 +0200
> From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Outdated manual
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <4DA4299D.1040500 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> MZMcBride, 12/04/2011 02:32:
>>> If WMF websites happened to be overtaken by Ask.com or some other
>>> website, it would be good to be forced to change the habit of how we
>>> describe them.
>>
>> If you use more generic language, the likelihood of needing to update that
>> language later decreases.
>
> Yes, and my point is that it would be a bad thing: it's better if you're
> forced to consider it a problem (as it would be).
>
> Nemo
>
>



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