User:Mabeenot/sandbox

Functions of a WikiProject:
 * collaborative group
 * discussion board
 * directory of interested editors
 * assessment and categorization system
 * repository of guidelines, resources, and templates
 * placeholder for organizational purposes

Motivational structures:
 * Goal-oriented: backlog drives, number of FAs/GAs/DYKs, collaborations of the month
 * Maintenance-oriented: watchlists, recent changes, tagging and assessments
 * Reaction-oriented: providing responses to questions and concerns on talk pages upon request

Types of WikiProjects:
 * Topic projects: Military History, New Zealand, Dogs, etc.
 * Cleanup projects: GOCE, Wikify, Spam, Deletion Sorting, etc.
 * Recruitment/Retention projects: Teahouse, GLAM projects, etc.
 * School projects: various high school and college courses editing Wikipedia
 * Sandboxes/Workshops: AfC, Graphic Lab, etc.
 * Archives: Infoboxes, Awards, Edit Counters, Essays, WikiWorld, etc.

Discouraged types:
 * Advocacy projects: Seek to push a POV, advertise, drive tourism, etc.
 * Clubhouse projects: Selective or secretive organizations that offer benefits to members

Useful observations:
 * "a project with one extremely active editor might get the same amount done as a project with many mildly active editors" User:Mlm42
 * "it's not really the number of FAs/GAs a project has under its scope that is important, but rather the rate at which they are producing new FAs/GAs." User:Mlm42
 * "Discussions about the project may be minimal on the project pages when very little of controversy goes on within a project. Such activity may come in short bursts, or take place between editors at other talk pages." User:JimMillerJr
 * "the occasional post at the sub projects is met by the deafening sound of crickets" User:Skeezix1000
 * "I do not think that any silent project, or any project of apparently zero active members, is actually fulfilling its primary purpose. WikiProjects are social groups. They are not reading material." User:WhatamIdoing
 * "dead projects are a problem for Wikipedia because: 1) New people who stumble on them do not end up with a positive impression of Wikipedia. We directly invite them on the banners to hit the project's talk pages if they have questions or want to discuss things. They get to the page and discover lifelessness. The whole place looks "abandoned" when you can't find anyone at a place that is designated for people to congregate. They ask questions, they get no response, and they either feel ignored or they decide that Wikipedia is too complicated to figure out... 2) Fragmentation results in isolation and lots of little independent "warrens" that wrongly believe themselves to be the entire community. One result is WikiProject "guidelines" that directly contradict normal practice... 3) Having thousands of WikiProjects makes it hard to find the right one for any purpose. We end up with a bloated directory (have you tried to find a project in an unfamiliar area recently?) and even if you find a project with a plausible name, there's no guarantee that locating the project will put you in touch with an actual person." User:WhatamIdoing

Current tools for measuring WikiProjects:
 * WikiProjects by number of changes to all its pages
 * WikiProjects by number of watchers of its main page
 * WikiProjects by number of articles (dynamically updated)
 * Editor activity for any membership list
 * Assessments for each project
 * Popular pages (page views) by WikiProject

Information that would be useful:
 * WikiProjects by number/proportion of FAs/GAs
 * WikiProjects by number of active members
 * Edits to articles by a project's members in the past 6 months

Goals:
Develop a standardized, self-updating WikiProject membership list template that projects can voluntarily use to keep track of which members have been inactive on Wikipedia for a certain number of months/years and provide a database report on the largest WikiProjects by number of active users. Use this to refresh the WikiProject Directory and develop some sort of automation to keep it updated, possibly including a member count for each project to give a rough idea of its size.
 * Create standardized, automated membership list template/widget that is tied to activity data from this tool.
 * If building a widget, there could be a button to add/remove a username to the membership list, with the name automatically inserted alphabetically or by date.
 * Members that have been inactive on Wikipedia for 6 months to a year could be either color-coded as inactive or could be moved to a separate section of "inactive members."


 * Create a monthly report of WikiProjects by number of active members
 * A list of all projects where the number of active members equals zero or one should be posted to the talk page of the WikiProject Council for discussion of how these projects can be revived, merged, or marked as inactive/historical/defunct


 * Create a list similar to popular pages that notes the number of edits by project members