[Themaintainers] Death of open projects and its rituals?

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Jan, I can give you at least one from a Wikipedia perspective. While
Wikipedia as a whole is looking quite robust, there are plenty of sub
projects that are currently dormant. Dormant meaning no recent activity,
but a query on the talkpage might or might not get a response from somebody
who still watchlists that page. Also the pages are still open for such a
query and potentially a revival if interest perks up again. Dormant
overlaps with two of your labels, alive and dead.

Another useful term is mothballed also known as closed or archived. In
Wikimedia terms this can mean an entire Wiki that is closed for future
editing but still hosted on the internet, such as for example the strategy
wiki. This was created for a strategic planning exercise in 2009/10 but can
still be viewed. Or it can mean a project, such as a subproject within the
english Wikipedia that has been marked as closed but kept for historical
interest.

Another subset of dead projects are the deleted ones such as the Klingon
language Wikipedia. Of course as the Klingon Wikipedia was deleted as a
copyright violation it could be restored in a few decades when Klingon
comes out of copyright.

Jonathan

On Thu, 6 Mar 2025, 2:45 pm Jan Dittrich, <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Maintainers,
>
> I recently started thinking about rituals for and memories of the end
> ("death") of projects [1]. How to send-off that project or idea of a
> future?
>
> This was based on some conversations with a colleague in academia as well
> as this call for papers [2]
>
> In particular, I wondered about the end of "open" projects, i.e. ones that
> say that their essence is "the code" and/or "the data" like open source
> software or open knowledge projects. I notices that when these projects are
> often clearly not "alive" anymore (that is, there is no community around
> the project that keeps it running or that could be asked),  these projects
> are not really "dead" either, since they are culturally assumed that
> someone could just come and continue. Thus, there seems to be a great
> hesitation to actually declare such projects as ended. However, there
> imagined end is often used to call for action, both inside such communities
> ("this feature could be the end of...") and outside of them (like the
> implied danger to Wikipedia in Wikimedia’s donation banners)
>
> I would be curious if you know
> -  interesting alternatives to the metaphors of "alive", "dead" and
> "grief" in this context (or alternatively, ideas on these metaphors and how
> they apply!) [3]
> -  texts about the rituals around ends of projects, particularly ones that
> have such a complicated relationship to a clear end as the mentioned ideas
> of open (data/software) projects.
> -  texts about the rhetorical use of imagined ends of (open) projects [4]
>
> Kind Regards,
>  Jan
>
>
> [1]: Or, instead of projects one could take a larger perspective and, a
> bit awkwardly say: "the not-happening of a future that seemed attainable by
> ones activity" (in contrast to "it would be great if things would just
> magically be so that...")
>
> [2] In German:
> https://www.soziopolis.de/ausschreibungen/call/aufhoeren-beenden-und-schluss-machen-in-organisationen.html
> ("Stopping, ending and breaking off in organizations")
>
> [3] I have thought of ossification, glaciation, weathering and
> decomposition so far
>
> [4] Might be connected to community appropriate "extreme case
> formulations" (A. Pomerantz, 1986) and/or my use of the concept in
> https://www.fordes.de/posts/disappointment_product_community.html
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