Second question: what is Community Health anyway?

I know some users who maintain that focusing on the community part of Wikipedia is actually quite dangerous (there were even some nasty discussions coming out of it). Goes to say, that "community health" isn't just about making people feel happy; it's about making them happy to contribute their best in the tradition that we like (the five pillars; consensus; free-for-all content). So we can evaluate our table-of-nine in that direction. Anyway, if we want to reduce our nine recommendation fields to four or six, it's just a matter of synthesis: put together what comes close and you're there. The actual recommendations that we end up with might be different matter: maybe we come up with 16 or 25.

We've already mentioned the fact that Wikipedia seems to be losing momentum. That may not be too bad a thing, you know. If it means that we lose people who want to chat and socialize (like in Factbook and Twitter and Hyves) and those who want to share their knowledge are staying with us, we might even profit from it, making our daily work less hard, reducing the amount of conflicts and giving all of us a comfortable feeling of working at the same goals. Point is, that it's not working quite that way. Some people seem to thrive on the battlefield while not producing much, while others are put off so much that we never find them any more. The momentum that we need is a feeling that our hard work is rewarding and does bring us somewhere - both individually and as a whole. A "Yes we can"-feeling. Well, we've had that in our stormy first years - even if I dare say that it never came without bitter conflict as well. A little less euphoria and a little less conflict would do as well, wouldn't it?

One more point: Community Health as a task force intermingles with several others, especially when I read proposals they could go well with several others of other task forces. Best we can do now is to focus on our viewpoint, get our recommendations out as best we can and let HeadQuarters do the "Hey, where have I seem that before"-work. We might tweak our proceedings a little, bundle those fields and use the next four weeks to pour out recommendations that we're confident about. If we don't have much to mention about say, "Policy", then probably another Task Force will have some ideas.

Following this train of thought, we might bundle our nine recommendation fields as follows:

1. Vision and research. Includes: Vision and Goal-Setting, Research and Measures.
2. Teaching and guidance. Includes: Help and Tutorials, Usability/Tools, Rewards.
3. Organization and decision. Includes: Organizational Structure, Decision Processes, Policy.
4. Social networking. Includes Social Networking plus anything we can think of to revert the loss of users.

This works inwards out. Vision and research will probably be the motor of the Wikipedia movement, energizing anyting that follows. Teaching and guidance will always be the way to instruct people and keep them interested. Organization and decision-making is the domain once you're more deeply involved. Social networking is the place to reach out, at different levels.

BTW, best leave the current project pages as they are; synthesis can be done later.

Good point. Let's recap what the community health task force is trying to achieve. You're right that community health has to be seen as part of the bigger picture, and having a vibrant community doesn't matter if it's ineffective. But the foundation has asked us to look at why community growth has stabilized. Which means we have to look at why editors leave Wikipedia.

A "hazard" function for the top ten Wikipedias, showing the frequency at which users leave. The chance of leaving drops off quickly over the first 15 days of a user's activity.

The red line represents the restricted average number of days it takes for a user to reach the top 10% of Wikipedia's contributors. The blue line represents the time spent as a "core author". Although it usually takes around 200 days to reach the core, the time spent in the core ranges from 200 to 400 days.

Really, we're talking about two different groups. There are new users who try and "reject" Wikipedia, and there are core users who "burnout". New users and veterans. Rejects and burnouts. Some rejects and burnouts are totally inevitable. But a root assumption that guides this task force is that we can do something to reduce the number of rejects and burnouts, and increase the number of Wikipedians. If we don't accept that, we may as well pack up and go home. (Wait, we're already home.)

Re: Synthesizing together recommendations, I don't want to rule it out. But at this time, I don't think it's a good idea. Some of these recommendations have major shortcomings. (Or maybe they don't. But we need to discuss it.) When we get to the synthesis stage, I want to know that we're only putting together two strong ideas, rather than diluting a strong idea by combining it with a weak one.

I think the problem with trying to group areas together is that it is moving us towards the general and away from the focused and explicit.

It's moving in the wrong direction. We should be aiming towards providing recommendations that are actionable. Not presenting vague intentions.

We started off facing broad problems. Our remit is to suggest concrete ways in which those problems can be attacked.

I don't mind the idea of us having "16 or 25 recommendations" so long as we present, at most, four. Remember, we're not the only task force. If each task force came up with even four that would be overwhelming for the small staff of the WMF. And Philippe has explicitly asked us for no more than four. That's what our job is.

Even on a practical basis, I see far too little activity on the wiki for us to produce even five solid recommendations, so sixteen is beyond my imagining.

I agree that being specific is good. Not just because it will make it easier for the Board to understand and buy into our ideas, but because they'll probably give them something more actionable.

Let's keep trying to narrow down the list, and revisit the possibility of combining them only if we absolutely feel that it's best. We've spent a lot of time brainstorming, but not enough time actually evaluating which ideas are the best.

I'll go with you both. Brainstorming is done with - well, I thought it too useful to bring one new insight to the fore (see above) not to let it be known.

I'm going with Bodnotbod too, we're just one of a load of task forces and if we're able to produce three or four healthy recommendations that we are able to give a big boost, we've actually done quite well.

So now it's about those four recommendations that we'll bring about and give it our best shot, is it not? I'll be there through the holidays. By mid January we'll have them done.

All right?

Excellent! Well, the key now is trying to get from the list of nine down to a list of four, while still having the maximum impact.

That discussion is happening [[here.