[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Chad]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Marcus Buck wrote:
>
>> What I want to say: please everybody get away from calling
>> projects "failure", "worse", "weak" or whatever. It's all
>> subjective. And it's entirely meaningless,
>
> I disagree, it's neither subjective nor meaningless.  Wikipedia
> has a mission to disseminate free knowledge.  It's an important
> mission and a powerful project.  The general public and mainstream
> media have a geniune interest in knowing how we are doing.  The 3
> millionth article in the English Wikipedia was a global news item,
> as was the PARC research that showed Wikipedia might not be
> growing so fast anymore.  The problem is that both reports are
> based on article counts, as if all articles were equal, and they
> aren't.
>
> For Wikipedia's future growth, we learned early on to use a
> wishlist, a list of red links to not yet existing articles.  But
> the items on that list are not equally important.  And the
> improvement of some existing articles can be more important than
> the addition of any new article.  We need better tools to help us
> understand which improvements are needed.  And we need to know how
> much we improved Wikipedia, even if no new articles were created.
> This is meaningful.
>
> We might have to go out to the people in Nigeria (or New York) and
> ask them what knowledge they need, and what tools are best suited.
> Perhaps it's the English Wikipedia that is best for them.  Then we
> might conclude that the Yoruba Wikipedia was a failed attempt,
> that never even reached 10,000 articles, and instead of 270
> languages we should only have 269 (or 41) languages of Wikipedia.
> Or on the other hand, we might discover some basic mistake that we
> did with the Yoruba Wikipedia, and once we fix that mistake its
> size and usefulness will start to grow faster.
>
>> If 988 people had no interest in looking up Michael Jackson,
>> then that's okay. We still served the 12 who had.
>
> Sure, but it's not likely that the interest for Michael Jackson is
> far lower in Denmark than in neighboring Sweden and Germany.  I
> still think the Danish Wikipedia has some trivial flaw that can be
> fixed.  I just don't know what it is.
>
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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I agree wholeheartedly. We need to get away from this idea that "more
projects in more languages is better." It's not. It's lead to the issue we
see now: dead projects lying around until somebody bothers to clean it
up or close it.

We tout the "Wikipedia in 270 languages" statistic quite often, and it's
something that is seen as an accomplishment. I would rather see how
many Wikipedias we have that are successes--measured in terms of
growth and a supportive community (of both readers and writers).

What good is a Revised-Lower-Eastern-Phoenician Wikipedia if
nobody uses it?

-Chad