On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Sarah <slimvir...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:10, Jan-Bart de Vreede <janb...@wikimedia.org> > wrote: >> It seems that our natural reaction is to immediately question the numbers >> and the underlying studies. We are Wikimedians and will not rest until we >> are sure that we are looking at 100% accurate numbers. >> >> We could also look at this another way. Looking around me and talking to >> people about Wikipedia (and sometimes the other projects) I hear a lot of >> stories which demonstrate our inability to welcome everyone and motivate >> them to become regular contributors. The data strongly suggests the same >> thing. Instead of doubting the numbers, lets just assume that we are not >> doing well enough in this department. > > Similarly, regular editors will tell you there's a serious problem of > established editors leaving, because the quality of editing is still > too low. The problem with the survey is that it highlights the need to > attract new editors, based on some doubtful figures, without > addressing that experienced editors are becoming disillusioned. > > Sarah
The survey does highlight the need to retain current editors, as well as new editors who do join; if you look at the graphs that are posted, they highlight issues of retention (if someone joins, do they stick around over the long term? is the number of active editors growing or shrinking?) and retention was certainly a part of our board discussions. I don't think that we can or should focus just on recruiting new editors or just on helping out the ones we've got: it should be both. As Sue said in her letter, "I believe we need to make editing fun again for everybody: both new editors and experienced editors." Things like making MediaWiki easier to use, or making our social processes less of a pain in the neck, will arguably help everyone -- it's not an either/or issue, or a zero-sum game. And if there are things you can think of that would specifically help support our most active and core editors and project leaders, then please post those ideas too. (You might find the graphs from other languages interesting -- what is it about Russian?![1]). Like everyone else I want perfect data, and like everyone else I tend to be skeptical, and especially skeptical about research (I help people differentiate between good and bad scientific research for a living, and I've read a ton of good, bad, and mediocre Wikipedia research). Like everyone, I want answers about who we're really measuring (and where they come from, and why they came, and why they stuck around). I want to know what the indicators are of a healthy community, how we might measure that, and what things we might do to encourage it. I suspect there is a grain of truth in many theories (yes, the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the big languages, yes people do take wikibreaks) and I want to see good ideas for accounting for such things, and also for figuring out what else is going on as well. But I also strongly agree with Jan-Bart: it's important to remember that we simply have a lot of work to do. These lines are pretty stark -- and even if imperfectly, they plot a trend which is clear: "non-vandal newbies are the ones leaving," as the study authors wrote. And as for recruiting new participants, remember also that these trends are occurring while simultaneously Wikipedia's *readership* has skyrocketed -- we have millions more readers of the English Wikipedia today than we did in early 2007, yet fewer active editors in absolute numbers[2]. Why aren't people clicking the edit button? And if they do, why aren't they becoming Wikipedians? These and many other questions need to be answered. The Wikimedia projects have set a model for the encyclopedia industry, the internet, and the world. We, the members of these project communities, have done something utterly revolutionary in ten short years, and we are not just market leaders but also thought leaders. But we don't actually know what the rest of the story looks like. Are the projects self-sustaining? If so, for how long? Do we need to do different things than we have been to maintain big language editions, or get small language editions up to speed? Do we really have a successful collaborative project -- is our quality good enough, do processes work, do our current governance structures serve the mission well enough? Should we be worried that everywhere you turn there are people who use Wikipedia but don't edit it, or don't know that it's editable, or tried to edit but felt they couldn't continue for one reason or another? These are the questions that keep me up at night, and I think the answers are at least in part tied to the numbers that you see in the editing trends study. I know these aren't by any means new questions, and many, many people have done amazing work. The Foundation can hopefully help matters by having the money & resources to do things like researching trends and collecting the best ideas for making our projects better, and then acting on them. But we cannot, and should not, do it alone. -- phoebe (wmf board of trustees) 1. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results/Retention_Rates 2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia.org_audience_trend.jpg, http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l