On 16/01/15 19:05, Trevor Parscal wrote:
I challenge the very foundation of arguments based on this 95% statistic.
The 95% statistic is bogus, not because it's inaccurate, but because it's misleading.
The number of MediaWiki instances out there is meaningless. The value we get from 3rd party use correlates much more strongly with the number of users, not the number of instances.
Consider the experience of using a MediaWiki instance running on a shared host. MediaWiki doesn't actually perform well enough in this environment to support a significant amount of usage. It's simply not possible that shared host installs can achieve enough usage to be relevant.
The 95% statistic may not be meaningful, but neither is this. The number of users involved does not reflect the importance of the information presented any more than that a project exists at all.
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
This applies whether a project has several thousand active users building a general encyclopedia of common topics, or a team of ten working on a collection of bird names, or even one single individual putting together a chronicle of their family history. MediaWiki is a platform that empowers all of these, and to turn your back on them directly contradicts Wikimedia's overall mission.
-I