[Foundation-l] Criteria for the closure of projects.

[Mark Williamson]

>  I do not require all project to have 1000 articles. I would consider a
>  project for closure when they do not have a 90% localisation AND not 1000
>  articles. Also a new project does not start with zero articles. It starts on
>  average with a sizable number of articles *AND *a full localisation of the
>  most used messages.

That is how they start... now. You are proposing, from what I can
tell, criteria to be imposed on existing projects. If these two are to
be used together, then I wonder which projects will be closed? I'm
most curious about Wikipedia; although I know it has annoyed you in
the past, that is the project I care most about and I will admit it
freely, I have a tie to it and a bias towards it. I don't feel bad
when Wiktionaries and Wikibookses are proposed for closure on Meta,
but I lose sleep when Wikipedias are. I am human, I have feelings, and
that is how I feel.

>From the very start, I have been a strong believer in eventualism and
gentle prodding. I discussed this with Francis Tyers, and from what I
recall, he didn't buy it when we were doing preliminary work on adding
a couple of skeletal articles to the Tajik Wikipedia... and then all
of a sudden, new users came along. This, after 3 or 4 years of
existance and total lack of meaningful articles.

Most existing Wikis have their growth start either like the Big Bang,
or in fits and spurts. I am disappointed that we are now closing empty
Wikis, although I always knew it was only a matter of time before this
would happen. That the Chamorro Wikipedia is now saved, I consider a
great thing, and I hope it will remain open enough longer to attract
real users.

Many people have said "If nobody has come by now, they never will
come", but the rash of Wikis that were all created around the same
time have become active at different times across the years, right up
until the present. If we wait long enough, almost all of them can be
expected to become active. Wikis like Cheyenne, with 1700 mostly
elderly speakers, could possibly fail, but the vast majority of
currently empty Wikis are likely to flourish at some point.

We have had this discussion in the past, and that is why I started
SWMT. To my disappointment, the people who joined SWMT and made it
their own after I became less active in monitoring small Wikis have
all become strong proponents of the deletion of inactive Wikis. That
goes directly against my original reason for starting it - if these
Wikis are vandalized, having someone to monitor them removes that as a
possible problem. It appears that the people who have taken it upon
themselves to monitor these Wikis have decided that it is too much
work and that they'd rather just close 'em all up instead... I guess
for them, it is not a labor of love as it was for me, but rather a
dull maintenance task. I was always excited to see that someone had
added real content to a previously empty Wiki... I wonder about them?
Since I stopped watching, the Tigrigna Wikipedia has sprung alive...
did they smile? Did they add any helpful messages to guide the new
Tigrigna Wikipedians along? I wonder.

Deletionism is not the answer here. It has never been, and it never
will be. Now that we have tightened restrictions on new Wikis, I don't
see why we need to excommunicate any of the existing members of our
family, except the problem children (like ru-sib).

Mark