[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

M. Williamson, 13/09/2011 00:13:
> 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.

You're honest in reminding your own prejudices against the project, but 
that's a very bad example for your own thesis.
First, Wikiquote (in several languages) serves his purpose quite well 
and successfully; a dictionary of quotations can be considered a niche 
product compared to a vocabulary or an encyclopedia and this explains 
the not so high numbers but this doesn't mean it's less worthwhile of 
other more ambitious projects that don't work at all.
Second, the English edition has a particularly high number of anonymous 
edits and edits performed by less active editors: the ability to get 
contributions by readers seems a success to me, not a fault.
Third, you should not consider only absolute but also relative numbers. 
I remember a presentation of Erik Moeller at Wikimania 2010 where he 
showed views and activity stats of our projects to prove how some of 
them are failing; he even forgot to mention Wikiquote, but his own 
numbers showed that it was the project with the highest "return on 
investment", i.e. the views/activity (work) ratio.

In short, your own argumentation is an example of the problem itself, 
that is considering non-Wikipedia projects with Wikipedia-only criteria, 
creating the premises of the failure.

Nemo