[Foundation-l] Minor projects withering and dying? Really?

[とある白い猫]

Certain projects are bound to loose active contributors. Projects like
Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikispecies or even Wiktionary do not have the same
growth curve as a general purpose encyclopedia. These tools have serious
competition as well. Statistically looking at numbers is unwise unless you
are going to look at it with a perspective. This is not to say these
projects are without problem, but that doesn't mean the wikis are failures.

  -- とある白い猫  (To Aru Shiroi Neko)


2011/9/13 David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>

> In the discussion of the Wikinews fork (may they thrive), I picked up
> some comments predicting the death of Wiktionary and Wikiquote,
> referring to the low numbers of regular contributors.
>
> I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent
> contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there,
> they're better.  Wikiquote is continually improving in coverage and
> accuracy, and Wiktionary has recently gotten new features (e.g. a
> separate citations tab) and is also going forward.  People are
> checking recent changes: last time I edited Wiktionary, I was adding
> citations to an article where the current list was in reverse
> chronological order, and I was too lazy to change it, thinking
> "someone else can fix this".  Before I got to the third citation,
> someone had fixed the sequence.
>
> The fact that progress is slowing isn't a sign of impending death.  As
> long as the wikis don't stagnate to the extent that they start to get
> taken over by spammers and trolls, I'm not going to hold a wake.
>
> As for Wikiquote being one of our less useful projects, that's
> possibly true, but only because the other projects are so awesome!
> The web is awash with crap quotation websites of with the same
> misattributed quotes being incestuously copied around - Wikiquote is
> one beacon of sanity in that whole mess.
>
> --
> David Richfield
> e^(πi)+1=0
>
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