I am seeing a lot of "lack of support from WMF for these smaller projects" but not being a smaller projects editor I don't know what specific issues there are.
Can someone up on the situation send out more specifics? Thank you. On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:13 PM, M. Williamson <node...@gmail.com> wrote: > It's worth noting that several of the other English language projects suffer > similar levels of inactivity. > > 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. English > Wikibooks has only 10, which is more than can be said for most language > editions of Wikibooks, which are all but dead. > > There are two problems here, I think. The first one is lack of support from > WMF, which everyone likes to talk about a lot. The other one is the > assumption that these projects are worthwhile and that WMF or anyone else > *should* care about them. > > Let's say a GeoCities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities ) site about > your grandmother's pet cat somehow ended up being one of our sister > projects. Since it's not very useful to most people, it remains a very > low-traffic site, and WMF doesn't put a lot of energy into it. Then a lot of > people come along and bellyache that WMF is not giving Grandma's GeoCities > cat site any support and that it's undervalued, with the assumption that > just because it is a sister project, it should be treated exactly equally to > Wikipedia, with the unproven assumption that it offers just as much > potential and just as much educational value as our "flagship" site. Of > course that's nonsense, who cares about your grandmother's cats besides her? > > I do think some of the sister projects are extremely valuable (Commons in > particular; Wiktionary can be useful in some ways, same with Wikisource; > Wikibooks and Wikinews were at least nice ideas that don't seem to have been > well-suited to the Wiki process in the end), but I'm tired of the assumption > that people *should* support and care about sister projects just because > they're sister projects, without proving their usefulness or worthiness of > our support. > > 2011/9/12 M. Williamson <node...@gmail.com> > >> I do believe it means exactly that. >> >> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers includes all users with at >> least 1 edit in the last 30 days; that seems like a really low threshold >> though. I took the liberty of collecting some data based on that page: >> >> - 23 users with at least 30 edits in the last 30 days (= average 1 >> edit/day) >> - 8 users with at least 100 edits in the last 30 days >> - 2 users with at least 300 edits in the last 30 days ("super active"): >> Brian McNeil and Pi zero >> >> I was a bit shocked to see these numbers myself. Seems rather low, >> especially considering Wikinews is not like Wikipedia, where you only need a >> handful of active users at one time to work on articles, but rather requires >> high activity all the time to be a successful news outlet. English Wikinews >> is, in my opinion, a failed project, at least currently. I have tried on >> several occasions to switch to Wikinews as my primary news source, each time >> I end up asking myself why on earth I did such a thing because it's almost >> useless for people who want to stay informed about current events. >> >> >> 2011/9/12 Kirill Lokshin <kirill.loks...@gmail.com> >> >>> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Tempodivalse <r2d2.stra...@verizon.net >>> >wrote: >>> >>> > At least nine users have pledged to support this fork, and several >>> others >>> > (including non-WN Wikimedians) are interested - more than there are >>> active >>> > remaining Wikinews contributors. >>> >>> >>> Wait, does this mean that Wikinews had fewer than twenty active >>> contributors >>> prior to the fork? Or am I horribly misinterpreting the statement here? >>> >>> Kirill >>> _______________________________________________ >>> foundation-l mailing list >>> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org >>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l >>> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
