[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[M. Williamson]

It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer
similar levels of inactivity.

English Wikiquote, which I've always considered to be one of our most
pointless and least useful projects, has a total of 5 users who make more
than 100 edits a month. This is a project in English, our highest-traffic
language, that has been open since 2003. That's ridiculous. English
Wikibooks has only 10, which is more than can be said for most language
editions of Wikibooks, which are all but dead.

There are two problems here, I think. The first one is lack of support from
WMF, which everyone likes to talk about a lot. The other one is the
assumption that these projects are worthwhile and that WMF or anyone else
*should* care about them.

Let's say a GeoCities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities ) site about
your grandmother's pet cat somehow ended up being one of our sister
projects. Since it's not very useful to most people, it remains a very
low-traffic site, and WMF doesn't put a lot of energy into it. Then a lot of
people come along and bellyache that WMF is not giving Grandma's GeoCities
cat site any support and that it's undervalued, with the assumption that
just because it is a sister project, it should be treated exactly equally to
Wikipedia, with the unproven assumption that it offers just as much
potential and just as much educational value as our "flagship" site. Of
course that's nonsense, who cares about your grandmother's cats besides her?

I do think some of the sister projects are extremely valuable (Commons in
particular; Wiktionary can be useful in some ways, same with Wikisource;
Wikibooks and Wikinews were at least nice ideas that don't seem to have been
well-suited to the Wiki process in the end), but I'm tired of the assumption
that people *should* support and care about sister projects just because
they're sister projects, without proving their usefulness or worthiness of
our support.

2011/9/12 M. Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>

> I do believe it means exactly that.
>
> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at
> least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold
> though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page:
>
> - 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1
> edit/day)
> - 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days
> - 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days ("super active"):
> Brian McNeil and Pi zero
>
> I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low,
> especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a
> handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires
> high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews
> is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on
> several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time
> I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost
> useless for people who want to stay informed about current events.
>
>
> 2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com>
>
>> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.strauss at verizon.net
>> >wrote:
>>
>> > At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several
>> others
>> > (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are
>> active
>> > remaining Wikinews contributors.
>>
>>
>> Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active
>> contributors
>> prior to the fork?  Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here?
>>
>> Kirill
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>
>