On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Milos Rancic <mill...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Luis Villa <lvi...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Andrew Lih <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> 3. Participation in the mailing list may be a misleading indicator of > >> activity or interest, as other regional or specialized forums (eg. > >> Facebook, GLAM-oriented lists, etc) have emerged in recent years. > >> > > > > Let me second this. My department is thinking about community health > > metrics (constructive suggestions welcome!), but I would not personally > > propose mailing list participation (especially this list) as a good > metric > > - decreased participation here may reflect many, many things, only some > of > > which are actually negative. > > This is not the only one indicator, but it's pretty consistent since > 2011 (take a look into [1]). In other words, something happened in > May. Maybe it's actually about the elections because people used other > means of communication for that. > Looking briefly at some of the highest-traffic months, it could simply be that people got tired of discussing high-controversy topics here. (Flamewars are good for traffic volume; not so great for community health.) I'm sure Facebook's increased acceptance also has a role. I suspect also that some announcements that used to come here now go to other, more specialized mailing lists. That last one points to a key thing: as MZ says, many people are subscribed to this list, but many don't read and don't participate, because this mailing list has an *awful* reputation, and people who want to get things done are going elsewhere. So "the decline of wikimedia-l" may be a sign of bad health of the overall community, or it may simply mean that the healthy and constructive parts of the community has moved elsewhere. To re-iterate what I said in the last email, I'm all ears for suggestions on creative community metrics. I'll add here that I'm also very open to suggestions on what a new wikimedia-l might look like. (I know some FOSS communities are having good experiences with discourse.org, for example.) No commitment that WMF can act on either immediately, of course, but I think it is worth starting both of those discussions. Luis -- Luis Villa Sr. Director of Community Engagement Wikimedia Foundation *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
