Re: [Caml-list] Activating wiki on ocaml github

[Adrien Nader <adrien@notk.org>]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 03, 2014, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> Now regarding previous wiki efforts: There are 1,650 subscribers on the
> r/ocaml reddit, and about 2-4 lingering on the page at any one time.
> Contrast this to r/haskell's 15,000 subscribers and ~60 users on the page
> at a time, and you get a sense of the user ratio. If we say only 1/20th of
> ocaml users are on r/ocaml, we get around 30,000 users in the world (very
> rough figure, of course). Bottom line: there aren't many ocaml users (yet).
> Now how many of these users are active participants in the community? Out
> of those, how many feel confident enough to contribute to documentation?
> Out of those, how many find the time? You quickly whittle it down to very
> few people.

I don't want to comment on the other things mentionned in this thread; I
only want to remind that these values cannot be used to extrapolate
anything. 

Probably the main thing (and I'm sure some will disagree with this) is
that haskellers tend to create more "buzz" and be more vocal. As far as
I can tell it's something few ocamlers are interested in doing or
getting the results of (i.e. sudden increases in new people and this can
be quite taxing for people active in the community).

Btw, don't get me wrong: I don't see this as something bad and I wish
ocamlers were a bit better at it but it seems to be mostly fit people.

Btw, the #ocaml IRC channel has gotten much bigger over the years, from
60 to 80 around 5 years ago (I'd have to check logs) to 200 currently.
As a channel operator, I'm happy there isn't too much noise and drama
there (though there have been some for sure) and that I can follow the
channel even at work while this is not the case for some other channels.

-- 
Adrien Nader