Thursday, April 10, 2008

Criteria for the closure of projects

For quite some time, we have had people arguing for the closure of projects. I have seen many arguments pro and against closures. What has been missing in all these projects are objective criteria why it makes sense to find fault with a project.

I have come up with three objective arguments.
  • A project is not what it is advertised to be. For instance when a language is always written in a particular script, a project in any other script is problematic.
  • A project does not have at least 90% of the most relevant messages localised. For your information there are only 498 messages in this category at the moment.
  • A project should have at least 1000 articles. When there is nothing to see what is the point ?
The first argument is an absolute, never mind the size.

For the second and third I would argue for closure when both conditions are not met. When there is activity in either it may be reason for giving an ultimatum. The ultimatum would be that both conditions need to be met within three months.

The most important reason why we need viable projects is because it is sad to see so much time wasted by good people on projects that have little or no objective value. No value because nobody actively cares. Yes, people may come along and get an interest and eventually they will, but time of valuable people is wasted now and that is in my opinion a really strong argument.
Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

And you call this "objective criterias" ?

Please, go write to the guy who wrote hundreds of articles in the Wolof Wikipedia that you'll shut down the WP.wo because it has around 550 articles.

What is the matter with you wanting to shut down all small WP ? Who's people is it wasting time from ? Only the ones who cares about thoses projects.... unless they wouldn't spend time on it.

Africa is not America and, fuck, it won't be. We don't have reliable or cheap Internet connections. We are barely aware of Internet ; we are not aware of its capabilities ; we are not aware of Wikipedia.

But, we'll be extremely happy, and stronger once connected to discover that pioneers had worked on our local languages while we were developing.

We need our culture, we need out languages. Yes, we'll have skinny WP for years ; so what ? Are we using _your_ time ? Are we wasting computer|network|admin resource ? NO !

So please, let us deal with our stuff.

GerardM said...

Hoi,
The localisation for Wolof has improved a lot in the recent past. Ibou does a good job on it. The Wolof Wikipedia has activity and as a consequence I would NOT ask for it to be closed.

There are many projects that do not have any activity at all. They are the ones that are proposed to be closed. There are no objective criteria for the closure and consequently it is potluck what project gets closed and what project does not get closed.

Yes, you need your culture, your languages and they need to be fostered. We have currently a program that pays for the localisation of MediaWiki for languages from Asia, Africa and South America.. We PAY for better support for your language. But we really need to have something there, 1000 articles is not much, when three people write one article a week, you have them in a year.

Projects that are completely dead ARE wasting admin resources.

Thanks,
GerardM