[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

Thu Dec 4 08:22:00 UTC 2008

Tim Starling wrote:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>   
>> It seems obvious to people who deal with small projects that usability is
>> one of the big issue when it comes to the moribunt status of our small
>> projects. The question I put to you, what are we going to do to first agree
>> that this is an issue and then to deal with this issue. Do we care that 80%
>> of our projects are failing?
>>     
>
> I don't think the metric you propose is a particularly useful one. We
> could reduce it to 0% overnight by just deleting all the wikis that, by
> your definition, are failing. Or we could increase it to 90% by relaxing
> the project creation rules. It's not demonstrably bad for small projects
> to speculatively create wikis and then wait to see if they flourish.
>
> Perhaps it would be better to evaluate our success in terms of our goals.
> We aim to bring the sum of all human knowledge to the people of the world
> in their own language. So how many words (or other unit of information) do
> we have in each language, and what do you get when you multiply that by
> the number of speakers of the language and sum over all projects? The
> result could be compared to older methods of information transfer, such as
> libraries.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>   

I would emphasize this message by pointing out that for nearly a full
year of its existence, the Finnish language wikipedia would quite
easily have qualified as a failing wikipedia. And look at where we are
now. Closing in on the 200 000 article milestone. Sure, for other projects
the time of gestation will be longer.

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen