[Foundation-l] Criteria for the closure of projects.

Fri Apr 11 11:28:29 UTC 2008

I am not exactly sure why everybody really supports this proposal. I can
only say that if it is accepted most of the minor wikipedias which are
active on a level of several native speaker contributions per month, will
be closed. In this case, I will be the first one to encourage them leaving
WMF and migrating to some more friendly server. As an example, I used to
be a temporary admin in Lak Wikipedia, which has between 30 and 40
articles, and I am continuing to monitor the project. There are regular
contributions from native speakers, but they will probably never localize
100% messages since nobody has ever heard of betawiki, and people are only
interested in editing  pages. There is no chance it will reach 1000
articles in two years, as it has been suggested. I think it is very
typical of a project open BEFORE the new rules of the language
subcommittee were established. If you guys want a fork - welcome, go on.

Cheers,
Yaroslav

>>  >    - A project should have at least 1000 articles. When there is
>> nothing
>>  >    to see what is the point ?
>>
>>
>> It can take a long time for a new project to reach this goal. If we
>>  assume that a self-sustaining wiki project can grow exponentially (at
>>  least at first), the first couple hundred or thousand articles can
>>  take a long time. After this point, however, more articles will
>>  attract more editors, which in turn will produce more articles, ad
>>  infinitum.
>>
>>  I would prefer to see a condition which is based on annual growth.
>>  Active editing membership and number of articles should increase every
>>  year by a certain percentage until the project reaches a certain
>>  stable size. For very large projects, such as en.wikipedia, it's
>>  unreasonable to expect continued growth at a constant rate, so we need
>>  to include cut-offs where we don't expect a project to be growing at a
>>  constant rate anymore. Requiring growth in active membership can help
>>  to reduce bot-generated projects like Volapuk which has article growth
>>  but no new members.
>>
>>  10% article growth per year (which is 100 articles if your project has
>>  1000) is not an unreasonable requirement. 5% growth in active editors
>>  (1 new editor for a project that already has 20) would not be an
>>  unreasonable lower-limit either. Projects which can't meet even these
>>  modest requirements probably don't have a critical mass to continue
>>  growth and development.
>
> Requiring projects to have 1000 articles in a fundamentally flawed
> proposal, since all projects start out with no articles, so all
> projects would be immeadiately closed. If you're going to have such a
> requirement, it would have to only come into force after X years, or
> something, but then you have issues with when and how to reopen it,
> and when to reclose it if it still doesn't work.
>
> Requiring a certain growth rate sounds good. I think the cut-off point
> should be quite low (1000 articles, say). I'm not sure what a good
> rate would be for that first 1000 articles. Does anyone have
> statistics for how existing projects grew at the beginning? It the
> growth exponential at the beginning? I would expect not, since you
> probably get rapid growth during the first couple of months (for a
> Wikipedia: articles on general topics, geographical articles on the
> area that speaks that language, etc) which then tapers off as the
> novelty begins to wear off and then things follow an exponential curve
> from then on. That's just a guess though, I'd love to see the actual
> statistics if anyone has collated them.
>
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