[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[George Herbert]

I am seeing a lot of "lack of support from WMF for these smaller
projects" but not being a smaller projects editor I don't know what
specific issues there are.

Can someone up on the situation send out more specifics?

Thank you.


On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:13 PM, M. Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> foundation-l mailing list
>>> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>>
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com