Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: using recent scholarship

[Aaron Halfaker]

Laura said:
> Classroom work is not worth it.  (And WMF isn't going to do the research
right to prove it one way or another.)

The data are public.  Have you performed an analysis to reach this
conclusion?

If not, I'd be happy to look for myself if you have a convincing
(and preferably quantitative) method for deriving a cost/benefit
relationship of classroom contributions.

-Aaron

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Laura Hale  wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen  wrote:
>
>>
>> Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used
>> tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors
>> working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited.
>> However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses.
>>  It is now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and
>> excerpt roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of
>> the writing was done.  In my opinion a way to attract professors is to
>> encourage them to use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki
>> articles. 
>>
>>
> No.  Categorically, no.  Most academics who are great scholars are poor
> teachers.  These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on
> Wikipedia with their classes.  You get students who plagiarise or who
> violate referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make
> arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class
> which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals.  You cannot have recent
> primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need
> that.  Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where
> doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense.  No.
>
> If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing
> training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's
> assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc.  Then you
> explain the benefits to them.  Classroom work is not worth it.  (And WMF
> isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)
>
> --
> twitter: purplepopple
> blog: ozziesport.com
>
>
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>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Brian Butler]

All fields have reviews, textbooks, popularization books, and encyclopedias ... 
but there are few scholars or disciplines that see creation of these resources 
(as valuable as they are) as their primary mission.   

For this discussion it's important for us to see that there are many ways in 
which this is highly functional.

Telling craftsmen (people?) to pay attention to end users needs rarely results 
in better design and it severely disrupts their social structures which are 
focused on intrinsic values.   In contrast, "entrepreneurs"/product 
creators/etc. are very focused on the match between artifacts and needs -- and 
their communities have very different ways of organizing and motivating 
participants.

While these distinctions are all a matter of degree, in most cases people (and 
groups) find it very difficult to be both/and.

...


On May 4, 2012, at 2:42 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:

> On Thu, 3 May 2012 20:51:27 -0400, Brian Butler wrote:
>> Yes -- Wikipedia is an exercise in knowledge mobilization, not
>> knowledge creation.
>> 
>> While there are some exceptions, most scholars are seeking to create
>> knowledge (and academic literature is part of that process -- hence
>> rarely is it useful for knowledge mobilization).
>> 
>> We don't expect a physicist (or an electrical engineer) to be able
>> wire a house (or even write instructions for how to do it) -- and we
>> don't expect an academic paper to useful for someone wanting to know
>> how to plan wiring.
>> 
>> Researchers/scholars, inventors, product developers and users are
>> usually different people.
>> 
> 
> This is actually not correct. At least in natural sciences we have 
> review articles - long papers which summarize the existing knowledge in 
> a particular field. These articles are usually much appreciated by the 
> community, get widely read and cited. My best cited paper - such a 
> review article - is cites 15 times more than my second best cited paper, 
> which is a regular article. We also write books (sometimes even 
> textbooks) and contribute to encyclopedias.
> 
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
> 
> 
> 
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: scholarly journals

[Richard Jensen]

ww.jstor.org  is available worldwide but most of its 1000-or-so 
journals are English language journals. (many published in the UK) 
.  It is broadening its reach --they have added 
numerousSpanish  French, & German journals  (eg 14 titles that start 
with "Revista"  & 18 that start with "Revue" and 23 "Zeitschrift")


about 18% of the content is available free to individuals with no 
library access.   All the tables of content are open access.Note 
that JSTOR has competitors such as Project MUSE with about 500 
journals (especially in the Humanities). Several publishers are 
setting up their own journal archives.  I do not know of any 
comparable sites based in Europe -- but India has a major site.

At 12:42 AM 5/4/2012, you wrote:

Hoi,
How well is JSTOR available outside of the English speaking world... 
The notion that English is the only language with a Wikipedia is 
obviously wrong.

Thanks,
Gerard




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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: scholarly journals

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
How well is JSTOR available outside of the English speaking world... The
notion that English is the only language with a Wikipedia is obviously
wrong.
Thanks,
 Gerard

On 4 May 2012 06:29, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> Open access journals are not going anywhere soon and hypothetical reliance
> on them would be a death sentence to Wikipedia because their range of
> coverage is so narrow.
>
> As for JSTOR, tens of millions of Wiki users get immediate full access as
> do patrons of 6500 libraries and practically all students in higher
> education in US, UK, Canada, etc.-  They have access  but do not use it
> when they edit for Wikipedia--I suggest they do not know about it. (about
> half the Wikipedia editors are younger than 23, suggesting that they are
> probably students with free access to library services.)
>
> As for scholarly articles, a common format is for the first part of the
> article to summarize the state of the art and the remainder of the article
> to present the author's original research. That first part is especially
> valuable for Wiki editors.  
>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Thu, 3 May 2012 20:51:27 -0400, Brian Butler wrote:

Yes -- Wikipedia is an exercise in knowledge mobilization, not
knowledge creation.

While there are some exceptions, most scholars are seeking to create
knowledge (and academic literature is part of that process -- hence
rarely is it useful for knowledge mobilization).

We don't expect a physicist (or an electrical engineer) to be able
wire a house (or even write instructions for how to do it) -- and we
don't expect an academic paper to useful for someone wanting to know
how to plan wiring.

Researchers/scholars, inventors, product developers and users are
usually different people.



This is actually not correct. At least in natural sciences we have 
review articles - long papers which summarize the existing knowledge in 
a particular field. These articles are usually much appreciated by the 
community, get widely read and cited. My best cited paper - such a 
review article - is cites 15 times more than my second best cited paper, 
which is a regular article. We also write books (sometimes even 
textbooks) and contribute to encyclopedias.


Cheers
Yaroslav



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: scholarly journals

[Richard Jensen]

Open access journals are not going anywhere soon and hypothetical 
reliance on them would be a death sentence to Wikipedia because their 
range of coverage is so narrow.


As for JSTOR, tens of millions of Wiki users get immediate full 
access as do patrons of 6500 libraries and practically all students 
in higher education in US, UK, Canada, etc.-  They have access  but 
do not use it when they edit for Wikipedia--I suggest they do not 
know about it. (about half the Wikipedia editors are younger than 23, 
suggesting that they are probably students with free access to 
library services.)


As for scholarly articles, a common format is for the first part of 
the article to summarize the state of the art and the remainder of 
the article to present the author's original research. That first 
part is especially valuable for Wiki editors.  



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Ben Kovitz]

Richard Jensen  wrote:

> Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's
> peak activity year was 2007.  A dozen people made 10 or more edits.  It
> has 26 citations and no bibliography.  There are no scholarly journals.
> Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published
> after 2007.  That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar
> with current scholarship.

> With a couple minor exceptions the youngest source cited in the
> footnotes is 2006. The newest item in the bibliography is one book from
> 2007,  I saw n=1 article in a scholarly journal (from 1969). Maybe it's
> ok for a college freshman but an English major so unaware of the recent
> scholarship would not get a good grade.

These sentiments worry me.

Our mission in making an encyclopedia is to provide the most important
facts about the most important topics, and present them in an accessible
way for the lay reader. (Salient facts about notable topics, if you
prefer.) We emphasize matters that have been settled after long
investigation and debate. When it comes to conclusions that rest on
complex thought that considers a wide range of information, we favor the
established scholarly consensus. Verifiability and reliability are at
the core of Wikipedia's approach to content.

Favoring the most recent scholarly publications opposes Wikipedia in
three ways. First, it opposes reliability. Scholarly publications are
actually a forum for debate. Scholarly publication is mainly a way for
the scholarly community to try out new ideas and, over years of
criticism and refinement, see which ones stand up to informed scrutiny
and which don't. Even the academic world, with its peer review and
high standards, is prone to fads and fashions. New ideas come and go.
Often, after a few years, ideas that dominated new scholarship come to
seem ridiculous. Remember lit crit?

Second, it opposes our selectiveness about the information we include.
In a topic that has already received scholarly interest for decades or
more, the main findings have been stable for a long time. Newer research
tends to favor ever narrower and more esoteric subtopics. At some point,
the salience of most new information or ideas being published drops
below the threshold for inclusion in an encyclopedia--that is, in a
*summary* of knowledge.

Third, it opposes verifiability. Scholarly journals are usually written
for a scholarly audience. They assume a reader with highly specialized
knowledge. They are often filled with jargon and they follow highly
refined conventions. Lay readers find them confusing and often
misunderstand them.

Ben Kovitz
http://mypage.iu.edu/~bkovitz/
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Brian Butler]

Yes -- Wikipedia is an exercise in knowledge mobilization, not knowledge 
creation.

While there are some exceptions, most scholars are seeking to create knowledge 
(and academic literature is part of that process -- hence rarely is it useful 
for knowledge mobilization).

We don't expect a physicist (or an electrical engineer) to be able wire a house 
(or even write instructions for how to do it) -- and we
don't expect an academic paper to useful for someone wanting to know how to 
plan wiring.

Researchers/scholars, inventors, product developers and users are usually 
different people.

Wikis don't eliminate the roles -- they just make the different roles open to 
more

...

On May 3, 2012, at 5:29 PM, Ward Cunningham wrote:

On May 3, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote:

I would strongly encourage you to join the movement lobbying for openness in 
scholarly work. Otherwise, you're complaining about a problem that Wikipedians 
do not have the power to fix, because academics tacitly support a system in 
which knowledge is kept in the hands of the few who can pay for it.

Wow. I never made this connection. I'd always thought of the issue as the 
somewhat idealistic:

scholar => citizen

But you are absolutely right, the more immediate need is:

scholar => wikipedian => citizen

Of course citizens and wikipedians are sometimes hard to distinguish. But, with 
the distinction made, the path is more believably important.


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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: using recent scholarship

[David Goodman]

Actually, enthusiastic graduate students can do a great deal. They
already do; much of the  best content of Wikipedia on traditional
subjects has been due to them, working in the normal way within
Wikipedia. They are to be encouraged, but I agree with Laura that the
best way of encouraging them will be outside the classroom. The
fundamental reason is that graduate and other advanced academic work
is necessarily original research, not preparing encyclopedic summaries
of already well known material.

There will be some basic graduate survey courses where there is a
possible match, but even there we are asking the most conservative
profession in the world to change their ways to accommodate our
methods. Some faculty will nonetheless be fascinated by doing this,
and it is there we should focus. Nobody ever wrote a good article for
Wikipedia as a sense of duty or for a grade only; it requires being
fascinated by the subject, and fascinated by the opportunity to
explain it widely.

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Laura Hale  wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen  wrote:
>>
>>
>> Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used
>> tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors
>> working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited. However
>> much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses.  It is
>> now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and excerpt
>> roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing
>> was done.  In my opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to
>> use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. 
>>
>
> No.  Categorically, no.  Most academics who are great scholars are poor
> teachers.  These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on Wikipedia
> with their classes.  You get students who plagiarise or who violate
> referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make
> arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class
> which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals.  You cannot have recent
> primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need
> that.  Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where
> doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense.  No.
>
> If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing
> training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's
> assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc.  Then you
> explain the benefits to them.  Classroom work is not worth it.  (And WMF
> isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)
>
> --
> twitter: purplepopple
> blog: ozziesport.com
>
>
> ___
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> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>



-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[David Goodman]

They are more than an archive. They impose a very hefty surcharge on
their own account, beyond what they need pay for licensing the
backfiles from the publishers.  They spent the money very usefully in
the past: they have scanned and archived hundreds of thousands of
pages print journals at a time nobody else was doing it sand no
electronic backfiles existed, themselves developing the technology.
They continue to archive additional print publications--but since
there are so many people prepared to use what is now a mature
technology without charging anybody for it, perhaps this role is no
longer essential.

And making available backfiles that publishers have already digitized
costs very little by comparison. But their publishers are by and large
not profit-making commercial enterprises: they are primarily scholarly
societies, some of them prosperous, but most very precariously funded
themselves.




On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Steven Walling  wrote:
> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling 
> wrote:
>>
>> They do not have access to them, because they are unaffiliated scholars.
>> Dozens of editors want access to this content,[1] but can't have it because
>> JSTOR locks it down.
>
>
> A friend pointed out to me offlist that there is a slight error in my
> statement which merits correcting: JSTOR is not necessarily to blame here,
> since they are simply an archive, and have to fit in with how journal
> publishers license their content.
>
> So FWIW, the real solution probably starts with open access journals like
> those published by PLoS. Wikipedia could do a lot more to encourage use of
> the the open access content that already is available.
>
> --
> Steven Walling
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/
>
>
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>



-- 
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DGG at the enWP
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 2:29 PM, Ward Cunningham  wrote:
> On May 3, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote:
>
> I would strongly encourage you to join the movement lobbying for openness in
> scholarly work. Otherwise, you're complaining about a problem that
> Wikipedians do not have the power to fix, because academics tacitly support
> a system in which knowledge is kept in the hands of the few who can pay for
> it.
>
>
> Wow. I never made this connection. I'd always thought of the issue as the
> somewhat idealistic:
>
> scholar => citizen
>
> But you are absolutely right, the more immediate need is:
>
> scholar => wikipedian => citizen
>
> Of course citizens and wikipedians are sometimes hard to distinguish. But,
> with the distinction made, the path is more believably important.
>

Ward, as ever you have a talent for breaking complex ideas down into
clear statements :) I think this is right, yes, is a position that we
can get better at articulating as a community.

This is self-serving, but I just gave a short talk about this topic last week:
http://www.phoebeayers.info/phlog/?p=2377

cheers,
Phoebe

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote:

> They do not have access to them, because they are unaffiliated scholars.
> Dozens of editors want access to this content,[1] but can't have it because
> JSTOR locks it down.


A friend pointed out to me offlist that there is a slight error in my
statement which merits correcting: JSTOR is not necessarily to blame here,
since they are simply an archive, and have to fit in with how journal
publishers license their content.

So FWIW, the real solution probably starts with open access journals like
those published by PLoS. Wikipedia could do a lot more to encourage use of
the the open access content that already is available.

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Joe Corneli]

>> If as an academic, you see a problem where peer reviewed content is not
>> cited in Wikipedia, I would strongly encourage you to join the movement
>> lobbying for openness in scholarly work.

A distributed version of keepgrabbing2.py and a little bit of civil
disobedience on the part of some scholars and wikipedians would go a
long ways towards cutting this particular Gordian knot.  (We could
call the project KeepGrabbing@Home --- the search for intelligent life
on THIS planet.)

You may well disagree with this approach.  In fact, I see two options;
the other may be attractive.  (But I don't see any reason to imagine
that "lobbying" will get the job done.)

The two options:

   (1) building an infrastructure that makes the old one obsolete;
   (2) or recognizing the non-obsolescence of the old system, and
stealing whatever it has to offer.

Both courses can be pursued in parallel.

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Luca de Alfaro]

This is an EXCELLENT email, Steven.  +1 to it!

Luca

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote:

> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 2:41 AM, Richard Jensen  wrote:
>
>> JSTOR reports there were about 300 articles on Shakespeare a year in
>> scholarly journals in 1997 to 2006; none of them are cited, nor any since
>> then and only one before then.  This is typical as well of political and
>> military history. Wiki editors are not using scholarly journals. I assume
>> that is because they are unaware of them.
>
>
> Not at all.
>
> Wikipedians are *very much* aware that these journals exist. They do not
> have access to them, because they are unaffiliated scholars. Dozens of
> editors want access to this content,[1] but can't have it because JSTOR
> locks it down. They just now started letting people access content that is
> in the public domain!
>
> If as an academic, you see a problem where peer reviewed content is not
> cited in Wikipedia, I would strongly encourage you to join the movement
> lobbying for openness in scholarly work. Otherwise, you're complaining
> about a problem that Wikipedians do not have the power to fix, because
> academics tacitly support a system in which knowledge is kept in the hands
> of the few who can pay for it.
>
> --
> Steven Walling
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/
>
> 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_JSTOR_access
>
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>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: using recent scholarship

[Laura Hale]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Richard Jensen  wrote:

>
> Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books used
> tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous authors
> working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get cited.
> However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from university presses.
>  It is now possible to use google and amazon for their excellent search and
> excerpt roles --but those were not available back in 2006-8 when most of
> the writing was done.  In my opinion a way to attract professors is to
> encourage them to use their classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki
> articles. 
>
>
No.  Categorically, no.  Most academics who are great scholars are poor
teachers.  These poor teachers have created a lot of disruption on
Wikipedia with their classes.  You get students who plagiarise or who
violate referencing policies like MEDRS or who use academic sources to make
arguments that are FRINGE as a way of showing content mastery for the class
which violates Wikipedia's policies and ideals.  You cannot have recent
primary research in medical articles, and a lot of classes doing that need
that.  Beyond which, you're still talking a minor subset of articles where
doing a lot of citing of academic journals would make sense.  No.

If you want academics involved, you go to research centres and doing
training at research centres where academics are taught about Wikipedia's
assessment process, what this means, how referencing works, etc.  Then you
explain the benefits to them.  Classroom work is not worth it.  (And WMF
isn't going to do the research right to prove it one way or another.)

-- 
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Ward Cunningham]

On May 3, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Steven Walling wrote:

> I would strongly encourage you to join the movement lobbying for openness in 
> scholarly work. Otherwise, you're complaining about a problem that 
> Wikipedians do not have the power to fix, because academics tacitly support a 
> system in which knowledge is kept in the hands of the few who can pay for it. 

Wow. I never made this connection. I'd always thought of the issue as the 
somewhat idealistic:

scholar => citizen

But you are absolutely right, the more immediate need is:

scholar => wikipedian => citizen

Of course citizens and wikipedians are sometimes hard to distinguish. But, with 
the distinction made, the path is more believably important.


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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Steven Walling]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 2:41 AM, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> JSTOR reports there were about 300 articles on Shakespeare a year in
> scholarly journals in 1997 to 2006; none of them are cited, nor any since
> then and only one before then.  This is typical as well of political and
> military history. Wiki editors are not using scholarly journals. I assume
> that is because they are unaware of them.


Not at all.

Wikipedians are *very much* aware that these journals exist. They do not
have access to them, because they are unaffiliated scholars. Dozens of
editors want access to this content,[1] but can't have it because JSTOR
locks it down. They just now started letting people access content that is
in the public domain!

If as an academic, you see a problem where peer reviewed content is not
cited in Wikipedia, I would strongly encourage you to join the movement
lobbying for openness in scholarly work. Otherwise, you're complaining
about a problem that Wikipedians do not have the power to fix, because
academics tacitly support a system in which knowledge is kept in the hands
of the few who can pay for it.

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_JSTOR_access
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: ignoring recent scholarship

[Juliana Bastos]

For my last semester class at the Brazilian Education Program I encouraged
students to use recent books and papers in Portuguese, instead of only the
traditional English textbooks copied from the WP:EN articles. This also
happened because the English proficiency level for some students was not so
good, so I had to make them use material in Portuguese anyway [1]. I
noticed this turned out to be a great way to have academic papers in
Portuguese to be known and read. This gets even easier because most online
journals in Portuguese are open source [2].

As for the debate on peak edits on English Wikipedia, I'd just like to add
a comment. I recently watched this documentary about Wikipedia [3] where
one of the Encyclopaedia Britannica editors said WP should be understood as
a game. I don't meant to raise the issue about WP X Britannica, neither I
actually agree with him, but this is what came to my mind while reading the
current discussion. What I mean is that eventually - and already now for
some articles - specialists will have to be recruited instead of the
average editor. I am participating in a project that tried to deal with
this issue, by making students edit for grades, but I'm certain there are
many other ways to do it.

Juliana.


[1] An example: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaniza%C3%A7%C3%A3o
[2] http://www.scielo.org
[3] http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-truth-according-to-wikipedia/


On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 8:58 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> 2012/5/3 Richard Jensen :
> > Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's
> peak
> > activity year was 2007.  A dozen people made 10 or more edits.  It has 26
> > citations and no bibliography.  There are no scholarly journals. Half the
> > citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007.
> >  That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current
> > scholarship.
>
> I sense low-hanging fruit here. What academic wouldn't want his paper
> to be cited more? Wikipedia is not an academic source, but it's a
> hugely popular one. A correctly-done campaign to get academics and
> their students to cite recently published papers will benefit
> everybody.
>
> > Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more
> > up-to-date.  
>
> ... Which shows that a lot of is very intermittent and haphazard, but
> often in a good way.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Felipe Ortega]

> De: Richard Jensen 
> Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities 
> 
> CC: 
> Enviado: Jueves 3 de Mayo de 2012 10:24
> Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like
> 
> I've been looking over a lot of history articles and the tupical pattern in 
> terms of edits is a bell-shaped curve with the peak around 2007.
> 
> For a good example see Shakespeare 
> http://toolserver.org/~tparis/articleinfo/index.php?article=William_Shakespeare&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia
>  
> look at the bar chart under "year counts..
> 
> By Nov 2007 the surge of editing virtually ended.  The article was then 83kb 
> in 
> length...it had a small burst of growth in late 2009 reaching 100k in June 
> 2009; 
> it is now 106k long.  Basically the article was mostly finished in 2007, and 
> has 
> had little change in the last 3 years. With a couple minor exceptions the 
> youngest source cited in the footnotes is 2006. The newest item in the 
> bibliography is one book from 2007,  I saw n=1 article in a scholarly journal 
> (from 1969). Maybe it's ok for a college freshman but an English major so 
> unaware of the recent scholarship would not get a good grade.
> 

Hi Richard.

I think the example is quite interesting. There is a surprising pike of 1,250 
edits in June 2007, and about 3,000 edits were added between May and October 
2007.

This made me think that there could be some possible causes behind this 
peculiar pattern. Indeed, I have found some organizational factors that we must 
consider to understand this case:

1. The effect of Wikiproject Shakespeare: It looks like it was founded in April 
2007 [1] [2].

"After we got ourselves organized, our first big project was bringing William 
Shakespeare to FA status" (from interview published on Signpost).

Thus, this is a good explanation for the febrile editing activity in subsequent 
months.

2. Apparently, it got FA status in August 2007 [3], and it showed up on the 
main page in October 2007 [4]. This can also explain the activity drop since 
then.

3. Yet another question is whether the fact that the article is currently 
semi-protected (and it is probably quite prone to vandalism, according to the 
high number of watchers) has some discouraging effect for new contributors.

Please, note that there are still new editors joining WikiProject Shakespeare 
in 2012.

Best,
Felipe.

[1] 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Shakespeare/Archive_4
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Shakespeare
[3] 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/William_Shakespeare
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:William_Shakespeare

> The look at the contributors
> http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=William_Shakespeare
> 
> of the 9 editors with over 100 edits, only two have been active on this 
> article 
> in 2012
> 
> Shakespeare received 648,000 views in April 2012, compared to 585,000 in 
> April 
> 2010 and  575,000 in April 2008.  As for the often heard fear that anyone can 
> edit it, note that 1100 editors are watching over that article and are 
> alerted 
> to any changes.  However none of them has added anything from the ton of 
> scholarship that has appeared since 2006.  
> 
> 
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Felipe Ortega]

> De: Yaroslav M. Blanter 
> Para: Felipe Ortega ; Research into Wikimedia  
> content and communities 
> CC: 
> Enviado: Jueves 3 de Mayo de 2012 11:48
> Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3  
> fewer
> 
>>  These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I
>>  concur with Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other
>>  languages, specially outside the group of large Wikipedias.
>> 
>>  The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities
>>  (for instance, it has also been studied in open source projects).
>>  However, the size of the community and the size of the group of core
>>  contributions does matter. Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be
>>  probably assumed by the rest of the group, whereas losing the same 3
>>  in a group of 20 is a very different story.
>> 
>>  Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive
>>  edits) is also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of
>>  this factor (that is, no sampling), against other relevant metrics
>>  (lifetime, number of edits or date of the first edit). It is not
>>  unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to have idle 
> periods of
>>  more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle period is usually
>>  shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 months).
>> 
>>  I mention this because, according to one of the comments on
>> 
>> 
>> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless
>> 
>>  the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim):
>>  "editors with more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this
>>  definition of "inactive editor" at least questionable under the 
> light
>>  of these results about idle periods.
>> 
>>>  The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less 
> likely to
>>>  leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is clearly
>>>  statistically significant.
>>> 
>>>  The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about 
> 20K
>>>  edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.
>>> 
>> 
>>  Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits,
>>  I would report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", 
> since absolute
>>  figures in the table are actually meaningful just relative to the
>>  performance of other editors. I would also try to normalize edits by
>>  lifetime, to compensate the fact that editors with longer lifetime had
>>  better chances to make more edits (which may hide fast-raising
>>  trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a different table for a
>>  different purpose...
>> 
>>>  I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we 
> take 10K
>>>  edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable 
> lifetime.
>>>  Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.
>>> 
>>>  So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do 
> not get
>>>  replaced.
>>> 
>> 
>>  In any case, I believe this is the key question to answer. Trying to
>>  characterize editors who stopped their activity, either temporarily or
>>  permanently, is only one half of the picture. The other half is
>>  learning what was the path that core editors followed till they got
>>  there, and why now we have fewer people following that path.
>> 
>>  Why is this interesting for the whole Wikipedia community? Just for
>>  the fun of counting edits? For the sake of competition? No. It is
>>  important because very active editors are supposed to have much more
>>  experience in the project, and that experience, that knowledge about
>>  the editing process, about how to interact with other community
>>  members, and how to build valuable content is a crucial asset for
>>  Wikipedia. Thus, I think that the focus should also include senior
>>  members outside the list of top editors, but with a long-time
>>  experience (e.g. +5 years). Let me recall that the vast majority of
>>  authors who have participated in FAs had a total lifetime of more than
>>  3 years (+1,000 days)  in Wikipedia, for all big languages (note: also
>>  for most of the middle-size Wikipedias).
>> 
>>  Last, but not least, there is another important connection with
>>  main

Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: ignoring recent scholarship

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/5/3 Richard Jensen :
> Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's peak
> activity year was 2007.  A dozen people made 10 or more edits.  It has 26
> citations and no bibliography.  There are no scholarly journals. Half the
> citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007.
>  That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current
> scholarship.

I sense low-hanging fruit here. What academic wouldn't want his paper
to be cited more? Wikipedia is not an academic source, but it's a
hugely popular one. A correctly-done campaign to get academics and
their students to cite recently published papers will benefit
everybody.

> Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more
> up-to-date.  

... Which shows that a lot of is very intermittent and haphazard, but
often in a good way.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: ignoring recent scholarship

[Richard Jensen]

Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. 
It's peak activity year was 2007.  A dozen people made 10 or more 
edits.  It has 26 citations and no bibliography.  There are no 
scholarly journals. Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only 
one book was published after 2007.  That profile strongly suggests 
editors who are unfamiliar with current scholarship.


Happily the article on [[WIlliam Shakespeare's Style]] is MUCH more 
up-to-date.  



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: using recent scholarship

[Richard Jensen]

Current historical research appears first in journal articles and 
later in books (books take perhaps 3-5 years to get published in 
history!).  Convention papers are not so useful because historians do 
not usually circulate their convention papers widely.


The latest edition of a textbook will try to reflect recent 
scholarship but in history they rarely have footnotes so it is never 
quite clear what or who they are referencing.


Very few Wiki articles in history city any journals, and the books 
used tend to be out of date or else well known new books by famous 
authors working at the Pulitzer prize level--those prize books do get 
cited. However much less often does Wiki cite monographs from 
university presses.  It is now possible to use google and amazon for 
their excellent search and excerpt roles --but those were not 
available back in 2006-8 when most of the writing was done.  In my 
opinion a way to attract professors is to encourage them to use their 
classes to upgrade the scholarship in the Wiki articles. 



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Laura Hale]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 7:41 PM, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> JSTOR reports there were about 300 articles on Shakespeare a year in
> scholarly journals in 1997 to 2006; none of them are cited, nor any since
> then and only one before then.  This is typical as well of political and
> military history. Wiki editors are not using scholarly journals. I assume
> that is because they are unaware of them. 
>
>
>
They are not aware of the use of scholarly articles for use on
Shakespeare's article or period?  If period, there are many places where it
would be unlikely that an article could be sourced well using scholarly
texts.  Think most biographies of living people.  Think sports.  (And if
you're going to do sports, the best histories are found in books.) A lot of
this changes from discipline to discipline, topic to topic.   (MEDRS
generally prohibits the use of citing primary source research on English
Wikipedia for medical articles, so it would be inappropriate to do so.)

In the case of Shakespeare, what of those 300 recent scholarly works do you
think are seminal to put into the article?  Are there any that would likely
be problematic because of [[WP:FRINGE]]?

The reasons why people don't use academic articles are more complicated
than your simplistic comment would suggest.  I spent about three hours
crawling through a library looking for research related to Lauren Jackson
and I can tell you none of the academic work would likely apply.  I doubt
you could source an article on it.


-- 
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blog: ozziesport.com
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I
concur with Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other
languages, specially outside the group of large Wikipedias.

The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities
(for instance, it has also been studied in open source projects).
However, the size of the community and the size of the group of core
contributions does matter. Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be
probably assumed by the rest of the group, whereas losing the same 3
in a group of 20 is a very different story.

Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive
edits) is also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of
this factor (that is, no sampling), against other relevant metrics
(lifetime, number of edits or date of the first edit). It is not
unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to have idle periods of
more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle period is 
usually
shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 
months).


I mention this because, according to one of the comments on


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless

the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim):
"editors with more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this
definition of "inactive editor" at least questionable under the light
of these results about idle periods.

The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much 
less likely to
leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is 
clearly

statistically significant.

The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with 
about 20K

edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.



Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits,
I would report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", since absolute
figures in the table are actually meaningful just relative to the
performance of other editors. I would also try to normalize edits by
lifetime, to compensate the fact that editors with longer lifetime 
had

better chances to make more edits (which may hide fast-raising
trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a different table for a
different purpose...

I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if 
we take 10K
edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable 
lifetime.

Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.

So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they 
do not get

replaced.



In any case, I believe this is the key question to answer. Trying to
characterize editors who stopped their activity, either temporarily 
or

permanently, is only one half of the picture. The other half is
learning what was the path that core editors followed till they got
there, and why now we have fewer people following that path.

Why is this interesting for the whole Wikipedia community? Just for
the fun of counting edits? For the sake of competition? No. It is
important because very active editors are supposed to have much more
experience in the project, and that experience, that knowledge about
the editing process, about how to interact with other community
members, and how to build valuable content is a crucial asset for
Wikipedia. Thus, I think that the focus should also include senior
members outside the list of top editors, but with a long-time
experience (e.g. +5 years). Let me recall that the vast majority of
authors who have participated in FAs had a total lifetime of more 
than
3 years (+1,000 days)  in Wikipedia, for all big languages (note: 
also

for most of the middle-size Wikipedias).

Last, but not least, there is another important connection with
maintenance activity. Editors with special accounts (e.g. sysops) may
become idle for several days in article editing, but they continue to
perform administrative duties systematically. As a result, the trends
in the number of new admins and RFAs, and number of administrative
changes performed over time should also complement this picture 
(since

many, many admins were not among the most prolific editors when they
were appointed).

Best,
Felipe.



Thanks Felipe. You obviously raise very relevant questions (one more 
would be about blocked users, some of which I clearly recognize as 
inactive editors in the list), but they are subjects of real research 
like yours, not of smth I can do on a coffie-break taking a break from 
my own research (in a completely different field).


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Thu, 03 May 2012 03:41:59 -0600, Richard Jensen wrote:

JSTOR reports there were about 300 articles on Shakespeare a year in
scholarly journals in 1997 to 2006; none of them are cited, nor any
since then and only one before then.  This is typical as well of
political and military history. Wiki editors are not using scholarly
journals. I assume that is because they are unaware of them. 




But is there smth in these publications which is not in the standard 
textbooks and should be necessarily cited for the general audience? 
Shakespeare is pretty well covered by textbooks, and from what I know 
there were no breakthroughs in the last 50 years at least. We can not 
put all the info in one article.


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Richard Jensen]

JSTOR reports there were about 300 articles on Shakespeare a year in 
scholarly journals in 1997 to 2006; none of them are cited, nor any 
since then and only one before then.  This is typical as well of 
political and military history. Wiki editors are not using scholarly 
journals. I assume that is because they are unaware of them. 



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/5/3 Richard Jensen :
> Shakespeare received 648,000 views in April 2012, compared to 585,000 in
> April 2010 and  575,000 in April 2008.  As for the often heard fear that
> anyone can edit it, note that 1100 editors are watching over that article
> and are alerted to any changes.  However none of them has added anything
> from the ton of scholarship that has appeared since 2006.  

First, I'm simply surprised that there aren't more people who publish
articles about Shakespeare (or any other topic) and run to add its
summary to the relevant article. It's supposed to be good for them,
because it gives them and their research (and their opinions!) more
exposure, and it's supposed to be fine for Wikipedia, because they add
information which can be referenced in a peer-reviewed journal.

Second, maybe it's not that bad that not everything ends up on
Wikipedia. If they publish it in freely-accessible journals, it's
perfectly well-aligned with Wikimedia's goals - people should have
access to information and it doesn't have to happen through
wikipedia.org.

--
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‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like

[Richard Jensen]

I've been looking over a lot of history articles and the tupical 
pattern in terms of edits is a bell-shaped curve with the peak around 2007.


For a good example see 
Shakespeare 
http://toolserver.org/~tparis/articleinfo/index.php?article=William_Shakespeare&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia 
look at the bar chart under "year counts..


By Nov 2007 the surge of editing virtually ended.  The article was 
then 83kb in length...it had a small burst of growth in late 2009 
reaching 100k in June 2009; it is now 106k long.  Basically the 
article was mostly finished in 2007, and has had little change in the 
last 3 years. With a couple minor exceptions the youngest source 
cited in the footnotes is 2006. The newest item in the bibliography 
is one book from 2007,  I saw n=1 article in a scholarly journal 
(from 1969). Maybe it's ok for a college freshman but an English 
major so unaware of the recent scholarship would not get a good grade.


The look at the contributors
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=William_Shakespeare

of the 9 editors with over 100 edits, only two have been active on 
this article in 2012


Shakespeare received 648,000 views in April 2012, compared to 585,000 
in April 2010 and  575,000 in April 2008.  As for the often heard 
fear that anyone can edit it, note that 1100 editors are watching 
over that article and are alerted to any changes.  However none of 
them has added anything from the ton of scholarship that has appeared 
since 2006.  



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Mateus Nobre]

It seems like a sad projection.

If you allow me to, I would call it ''the editors disenchantment''.

The editors start, paraphrasing the first e-mail, as ''growing cheerful
teenagers''. Then, comes the maturity in the project after a couple years
in.
But the ''adulthood'' isn't a new phase in the Wikipedia, the mature phase,
as it is supposed to be.
It's the end.

We're kept by our bunch of ''teenagers''. Why ''adults'' go away?

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:

>  The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most
>> of the names near the top of this list
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:EDITS[7]
>>  are blue linked which
>>
>> means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of
>> editor whod made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on
>>
>> my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year.
>>
>>
> Now, I wanted to do it sometime, but your mail motivated me to do it today.
>
> I counted the number of inactive users per number of contributions, taking
> numbers from the first 7000 in the list. Placeholders are counted as
> inactive, and this is a clear drawback, but there are too few of them to
> change the trend, and some of them may be inactive as well.
>
> The results first.
>
> Range (numbers) Range (edits)  #inactive  % inactive
>
> 1-200   over 93828  32   16
> 201-400 67561-93655 33   16.5
> 401-600 52024-67556 38   19
> 601-800 43587-51942 39   19.5
> 801-100037805-43432 51   20.5
> 1001-1200   33271-37791 61   30.5
> 1201-1400   30256-33260 54   27
> 1401-1600   27593-30250 50   25
> 1601-1800   25364-27571 60   30
> 1801-2000   23682-25360 80   40
> 2001-2500   19699-23574174   34.8
> 2501-3000   17089-19697167   33.4
> 3001-3500   14777-17086191   38.2
> 3501-4000   13049-14777199   39.8
> 4001-4500   11674-13048225   45
> 4501-5000   10495-11673195   39
> 5001-55009570-10495211   42.2
> 5501-60008699-9569 224   44.8
> 6001-65008011-8697 239   47.8
> 6501-70007379-8011 242v  48.4
>
> The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less
> likely to leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is
> clearly statistically significant.
>
> The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about
> 20K edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.
>
> I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we
> take 10K edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable
> lifetime. Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.
>
> So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do
> not get replaced.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
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> https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-l
>



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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Peter Ansell]

On 3 May 2012 06:08, Laura Hale  wrote:
>
>
> I'm not seeing a problem with running out of ideas.  I do see a bit of a
> culture that discourages people from using red links though.

I blame that on teachers that tell students not to use Red pens for
historical reasons (which they would never seem to be able to
elaborate on during cross-investigation). Some of the
red-link-delinkers may be teachers still trying to rid the world of
red text. It would be a nice sociology experiment to switch the
wikipedia CSS stylesheets to use a neutral colour instead of red and
see how many missing-wiki-links disappear and appear compared to
previously.

Peter

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Laura Hale]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:28 AM, David Golumbia  wrote:

>
>
> a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core
> areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively *finished*. there is
> nothing major left to do. that doesn't mean they will never change, or be
> expanded, etc., but as a general observation I think it has some* *strong
> *prima facie *evidence in its favor.
>
> i know that's controversial in and of itself, but i have an even more
> controversial observation that I rarely hear discussed in wiki circles:
>
>
This is a point of view that depends on where you are editing from.  There
are national sport teams, ESPECIALLY on the women's side that do not have
articles yet.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FIFA_national_women%27s_football_teams_by_class.pngcan
give you an idea of this problem for football, which has had
substantial work done to it.

The 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics are coming up.  This means a whole
bunch of NEW notable athletes will be eligible for articles.  There is a
need to improve these.  Many of the core articles related to sport need
work.

I'm not seeing a problem with running out of ideas.  I do see a bit of a
culture that discourages people from using red links though.

-- 
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Maryana Pinchuk  wrote:
> On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 7:28 AM, David Golumbia  wrote:
>>
>> As a longstanding research interest of mine, I have a thesis about this
>> topic, one which I expect to be controversial, and I would be very
>> interested to hear whether other Wiki researchers have considered; it's not
>> one I see in the NPOV work or other critical studies of Wikipedia, at least
>> so far, and it does bear on core features of Wikipedia itself.
>>
>> a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core
>> areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively finished. there is
>> nothing major left to do. that doesn't mean they will never change, or be
>> expanded, etc., but as a general observation I think it has some strong
>> prima facie evidence in its favor.
>
>
> "Finished" only very superficially. For example, take a look at the article
> on Simon Bolivar (not exactly a trivial figure in world history). It's quite
> long, illustrated with lots of images, and has a big list of notes, cited
> sources, and further reading. But if you take a minute to inspect the body
> of the article -- to read it closely -- you'll see that much of it is
> unreferenced, contradictory, confusingly structured, inconsistent in tone,
> missing core concepts, and strangely weighted in favor of some things and
> not others. To a casual reader who'll only look at the lead and maybe glance
> through the references, it does indeed look like there's nothing left to do.
> To an expert on Latin American history (or really anyone who takes the time
> to start looking up the primary and secondary sources), it's an exasperating
> mess that needs to get a complete overhaul from top to bottom.
>
> I'm not saying this to criticize the contributors to the article, of whom I
> am one. I'm saying this because I think many readers are fooled by the great
> efforts that Wikipedians have gone through to make articles look very
> polished and professional on the surface, even when their content
> desperately needs more copyeditors, reference adders, peer reviewers, etc.
>
> Maryana
>

Indeed. A few more thoughts:

* The big Wikipedias -- perhaps the top ten -- are impressively big.
But this only scrapes the surface of world languages, and by extension
global cultures and knowledge. The English Wikipedia is *22 times* the
size of the Arabic Wikipedia by article count alone, even though the
number of native speakers of each language is roughly comparable.

* The idea that kicked off this thread is correct: maintenance is an
issue we really haven't solved. And so is improvement -- how many of
our articles are simply mediocre? Most of them, for sure. Sometimes,
as a long-time observer, I look at the English Wikipedia and think:
"OK, it took us a decade to get the first draft done -- now the real
work begins."

* What about the rest of human knowledge? A globally-relevant
encyclopedia is a fairly narrow slice of the world's information. The
Wikimedia sister projects -- Wikibooks et al -- are just barely
finding their feet; there is a huge, and exciting, amount of potential
there for new contributors. Not to mention the rest of the free
knowledge ecosystem -- projects like localwiki that aim to record
highly-local knowledge for a specific place, etc. etc. I don't think
we should confuse the excitement that can come from contributing to a
collaborative project with something that is specific to Wikipedia.


>> i wonder about how Wikipedians consider and imagine the future as
>> something more than a site for the "ultimate Wikipedia"--do they, do we,
>> really think carefully about the needs of future people to have substantial
>> gaps in knowledge that it becomes their job to fill in? Have we, to some
>> extent at least, taken from our children (and their children, etc.)
>> something they would be better off having? and if so, what can we do to
>> return to them the curiosity and wonder and feeling that "human knowledge is
>> not finished" that are absolutely necessary to the development of knowing
>> individuals?

Yes! I like this framing a lot. The idea that knowledge isn't finished
-- that there is always more to be done -- is one of the core
important ideas we can reinforce.

There is a long-standing idea in old-school wiki culture to "always
leave something undone" -- to leave something for the next person. I
think this is what you are getting at -- it's actually a fundamental
part of the way the system works. And while I think that there are
lifetimes worth of things still to do on Wikipedia, perhaps the key
missing part of this is making it explicit: making hooks into the
system for better, easier, more obvious ways to help out. A blank page
is a pretty obvious invitation to start writing. A messy, complicated
article that already exists is not quite so obvious

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_in_progress
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_o

Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Samuel Klein]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:28 AM, David Golumbia  wrote:

> a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core
> areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively finished.
<
> much of the initial excitement about Wikipedia, speaking very
> impressionistically, appears to me to have been due to the fact that there
> was so much to do.
>
> now, in such a short time, there is so much less to do.
>
> that isn't just a negative for Wikipedia--it's a negative for everyone.
>
> I am a college professor. At one time, it was fun to have students scope out
> areas of knowledge and either write or consider writing Wikipedia entries
> for areas of study.
>
> Now, I have the opposite problem. For many topics I teach (but by no means
> all) I must tell my students to avoid Wikipedia, because it produces the
> instantly demoralizing effect: "it's all been done/said already."

Mathematics and Classics both share an interesting approach to this:
they strongly encourage students to work through the standard
references, proofs, demonstrations -- on their own, and ideally
finding a more elegant way to present a known idea, or a more general
statement that applies to more than one specific.

Students spend a great deal of their learning-time finding
crossreferences across topics, or working through a classic exposition
step by step, from first principles.  This has the benefit that
elegance and clarity, rather than "comperhensive coverage" becomes the
standard -- and this is something constantly improving.  students very
quickly find any errors in the work of their predecessors, as this is
also prized.  And in the areas where there is truly no improvement to
be made, a close reading and recreation of the work has great value in
itself: as a model of clarity for others to follow.

Modern mathematics is quite a joyful and not a demoralized field; we
could do worse than follow in those pedagogical footsteps.

Sam

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 5:03 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem isn't necessarily that people are finding that they've written
> what they know. On EN wiki and I believe the other large communities we are
> no longer recruiting editors into the core of very active editors as
> effectively as we used to. The community appears to be coming more closed
> and though we are only losing a small proportion of our very active editors
> we are failing to recruit their replacements. I.e. the numbers of new
> editors have dropped somewhat, but the number of new editors who stay has
> dropped far more steeply.


+1.

Maryana Pinchuk and I here at the WMF have recently been looking at English
Wikipedia editors who just made their first 1,000 edits to articles, and
we've hand coded their topics of contribution:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_milestones

It is stunningly obvious to us from observing a couple hundred of these
editors that there is:

A) still *tons* to write about, and editors know it. No one is asking them
to write particular articles, they're just doing it on their own.
B) these editors are not (yet) part of the core governance making community
for the most part

One of the more interesting things is that these editors are mostly
contributing to local culture, sports, media, and history about topics not
related to America, the UK, Australia, etc.

The traditional "core community" that comes from native English-speaking
countries has definitely moved on in focus from creating new articles to
trying to improve and expand on them. So much so that they recently tried
to propose that we don't let new editors create articles until they edit a
little bit (e.g. achieving "autoconfirmed" user rights).

But from looking at this sample of very active contributors to articles, it
is clear that any statement that there is nothing new to write about is
simply a problem of perception, because you're asking people from Western
countries who don't even see that you're missing good articles about every
politician in India, every soccer club in the Bulgaria, every Chinese
composer.

Just as the first ten years of Wikipedia expanded on the Britannica-style
concept of the encyclopedia, the next phase of English content development
appears to be coming from people whose understanding of what an
encyclopedia is goes way beyond covering dead white guys and textbook
concepts.

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Maryana Pinchuk]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 7:28 AM, David Golumbia  wrote:

> As a longstanding research interest of mine, I have a thesis about this
> topic, one which I expect to be controversial, and I would be very
> interested to hear whether other Wiki researchers have considered; it's not
> one I see in the NPOV work or other critical studies of Wikipedia, at least
> so far, and it does bear on core features of Wikipedia itself.
>
> a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core
> areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively *finished*. there is
> nothing major left to do. that doesn't mean they will never change, or be
> expanded, etc., but as a general observation I think it has some* *strong
> *prima facie *evidence in its favor.
>

"Finished" only very superficially. For example, take a look at the article
on Simon Bolivar  (not exactly
a trivial figure in world history). It's quite long, illustrated with lots
of images, and has a big list of notes, cited sources, and further reading.
But if you take a minute to inspect the body of the article -- to read it
closely -- you'll see that much of it is unreferenced, contradictory,
confusingly structured, inconsistent in tone, missing core concepts, and
strangely weighted in favor of some things and not others. To a casual
reader who'll only look at the lead and maybe glance through the
references, it does indeed look like there's nothing left to do. To an
expert on Latin American history (or really anyone who takes the time to
start looking up the primary and secondary sources), it's an exasperating
mess that needs to get a complete overhaul from top to bottom.

I'm not saying this to criticize the contributors to the article, of whom I
am one. I'm saying this because I think many readers are fooled by the
great efforts that Wikipedians have gone through to make articles look very
polished and professional on the surface, even when their content
desperately needs more copyeditors, reference adders, peer reviewers, etc.

Maryana



>
> i know that's controversial in and of itself, but i have an even more
> controversial observation that I rarely hear discussed in wiki circles:
>
> b) while the finishing of major facets of human knowledge is an explicit
> goal of Wikipedia, it turns out that in addition to its abundant positive
> consequences, "finishing" (or mostly finishing) areas of human knowledge
> has *very real negative consequences*. the most salient of these is:*leaving 
> future generations with the feeling and even the factual situation
> that "there is nothing substantial left to do."*
>
> much of the initial excitement about Wikipedia, speaking very
> impressionistically, appears to me to have been due to the fact that there
> was *so much *to do.
>
> now, in such a short time, there is *so much less *to do.
>
> that isn't just a negative for Wikipedia--it's a negative for everyone.
>
> I am a college professor. At one time, it was fun to have students scope
> out areas of knowledge and either write or consider writing Wikipedia
> entries for areas of study.
>
> Now, I have the opposite problem. For many topics I teach (but by no means
> all) I must tell my students to avoid Wikipedia, because it produces the
> instantly demoralizing effect: "it's all been done/said already."


> I don't think anyone can have anticipated this consequence 10 years ago,
> but I believe it is very real, and I wonder almost every day about how to
> handle it. because for many reasons, and I hope and believe there are
> people on this list who will sympathize with what i'm saying, what would be
> wonderful is if every generation could have the fun and excitement of
> building Wikipedia from scratch, rather than the demoralization that occurs
> when one happens to actually go look at a Wikipedia page on something about
> which one has the excitement of discovery, only to find it completely
> mapped out to a level of detail unimaginable just a decade ago.
>
> i wonder about how Wikipedians consider and imagine the future as
> something more than a site for the "ultimate Wikipedia"--do they, do we,
> really think carefully about the needs of future people to have substantial
> gaps in knowledge that it becomes their job to fill in? Have we, to some
> extent at least, taken from our children (and their children, etc.)
> something they would be better off having? and if so, what can we do to
> return to them the curiosity and wonder and feeling that "human knowledge
> is not finished" that are absolutely necessary to the development of
> knowing individuals?
>
> i am absolutely not denying that there will always be many parts of
> Wikipedia that can be fleshed out, many new areas of knowledge, Wikipedias
> in other languages, etc. I am talking primarily about historical events,
> major figures from every walk of life, major historical idea-based topics,
> and other central parts of human knowledge (esp. in the

Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Paolo Massa]

You might want to use WikiTrip for getting a visual grasp about the
number of edits received by a page over time.

For example, this is the WikiTrip for First World War (non cumulative)
http://sonetlab.fbk.eu/wikitrip/#|en|First_World_War|0
look at the chart on the top of the interface

Hope it helps.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 2:27 AM, Richard Jensen  wrote:
> I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical
> topics (in the English Wikipedia)
>
> I find that most of the important writing was done in 2006-8. Typically, the
> article reached maturity about 2008 and since then the rate of editing has
> plunged. In most cases I see only minor or maintenance editing since then.
>  The new material since 2008 is mostly cosmetic:  illustrations still get
> added, lots of links are made, new categories added, new lists are appended,
> vandalism is removed.  The citations are increasingly out of date.  The
> articles are long in tooth.
>
> Wiki is now resembling the old paper encyclopedias--they would get old fast
> and need constant updating either through yearbooks or new editions.
>
> Richard Jensen
>
>
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-- 
--
Paolo Massa
Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org
Blog: http://gnuband.org

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Felipe Ortega]

Hi all.

Thanks for the debate and for sharing your figures and insights. I would like 
to offer some comments on this (below).


- Mensaje original -
> De: Yaroslav M. Blanter 
> Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities 
> 
> CC: 
> Enviado: Miércoles 2 de Mayo de 2012 15:53
> Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 
> fewer
> 
>>  The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most
>>  of the names near the top of this list
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS [7] are blue linked which
>>  means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of
>>  editor whod made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on
>>  my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year.
>> 
> 
> Now, I wanted to do it sometime, but your mail motivated me to do it today.
> 
> I counted the number of inactive users per number of contributions, taking 
> numbers from the first 7000 in the list. Placeholders are counted as 
> inactive, 
> and this is a clear drawback, but there are too few of them to change the 
> trend, 
> and some of them may be inactive as well.
> 
> The results first.
> 
> Range (numbers)     Range (edits)  #inactive  % inactive
> 
> 1-200               over 93828      32           16
> 201-400             67561-93655     33           16.5
> 401-600             52024-67556     38           19
> 601-800             43587-51942     39           19.5
> 801-1000            37805-43432     51           20.5
> 1001-1200           33271-37791     61           30.5
> 1201-1400           30256-33260     54           27
> 1401-1600           27593-30250     50           25
> 1601-1800           25364-27571     60           30
> 1801-2000           23682-25360     80           40
> 2001-2500           19699-23574    174           34.8
> 2501-3000           17089-19697    167           33.4
> 3001-3500           14777-17086    191           38.2
> 3501-4000           13049-14777    199           39.8
> 4001-4500           11674-13048    225           45
> 4501-5000           10495-11673    195           39
> 5001-5500            9570-10495    211           42.2
> 5501-6000            8699-9569     224           44.8
> 6001-6500            8011-8697     239           47.8
> 6501-7000            7379-8011     242v          48.4
> 

These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I concur with 
Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other languages, specially 
outside the group of large Wikipedias. 

The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities (for 
instance, it has also been studied in open source projects). However, the size 
of the community and the size of the group of core contributions does matter. 
Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be probably assumed by the rest of the 
group, whereas losing the same 3 in a group of 20 is a very different story.

Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive edits) is 
also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of this factor (that is, 
no sampling), against other relevant metrics (lifetime, number of edits or date 
of the first edit). It is not unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to 
have idle periods of more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle 
period is usually shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 
months).

I mention this because, according to one of the comments on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless

the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim): "editors with 
more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this definition of "inactive 
editor" at least questionable under the light of these results about idle 
periods.

> The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less likely 
> to 
> leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is clearly 
> statistically significant.
> 
> The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about 20K 
> edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.
> 

Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits, I would 
report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", since absolute figures in the 
table are actually meaningful just relative to the performance of other 
editors. I would also try to normalize edits by lifetime, to compensate the 
fact that editors with longer lifetime had better chances to make more edits 
(which may hide fast-raising trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a 
different table for a different p

Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[David Golumbia]

As a longstanding research interest of mine, I have a thesis about this
topic, one which I expect to be controversial, and I would be very
interested to hear whether other Wiki researchers have considered; it's not
one I see in the NPOV work or other critical studies of Wikipedia, at least
so far, and it does bear on core features of Wikipedia itself.

a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core
areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively *finished*. there is
nothing major left to do. that doesn't mean they will never change, or be
expanded, etc., but as a general observation I think it has some*
*strong *prima
facie *evidence in its favor.

i know that's controversial in and of itself, but i have an even more
controversial observation that I rarely hear discussed in wiki circles:

b) while the finishing of major facets of human knowledge is an explicit
goal of Wikipedia, it turns out that in addition to its abundant positive
consequences, "finishing" (or mostly finishing) areas of human knowledge
has *very real negative consequences*. the most salient of these
is:*leaving future generations with the feeling and even the factual
situation
that "there is nothing substantial left to do."*

much of the initial excitement about Wikipedia, speaking very
impressionistically, appears to me to have been due to the fact that there
was *so much *to do.

now, in such a short time, there is *so much less *to do.

that isn't just a negative for Wikipedia--it's a negative for everyone.

I am a college professor. At one time, it was fun to have students scope
out areas of knowledge and either write or consider writing Wikipedia
entries for areas of study.

Now, I have the opposite problem. For many topics I teach (but by no means
all) I must tell my students to avoid Wikipedia, because it produces the
instantly demoralizing effect: "it's all been done/said already."

I don't think anyone can have anticipated this consequence 10 years ago,
but I believe it is very real, and I wonder almost every day about how to
handle it. because for many reasons, and I hope and believe there are
people on this list who will sympathize with what i'm saying, what would be
wonderful is if every generation could have the fun and excitement of
building Wikipedia from scratch, rather than the demoralization that occurs
when one happens to actually go look at a Wikipedia page on something about
which one has the excitement of discovery, only to find it completely
mapped out to a level of detail unimaginable just a decade ago.

i wonder about how Wikipedians consider and imagine the future as something
more than a site for the "ultimate Wikipedia"--do they, do we, really think
carefully about the needs of future people to have substantial gaps in
knowledge that it becomes their job to fill in? Have we, to some extent at
least, taken from our children (and their children, etc.) something they
would be better off having? and if so, what can we do to return to them the
curiosity and wonder and feeling that "human knowledge is not finished"
that are absolutely necessary to the development of knowing individuals?

i am absolutely not denying that there will always be many parts of
Wikipedia that can be fleshed out, many new areas of knowledge, Wikipedias
in other languages, etc. I am talking primarily about historical events,
major figures from every walk of life, major historical idea-based topics,
and other central parts of human knowledge (esp. in the West, where
Wikipedias are closest to being "finished"), because these are the areas in
which the dispiriting effects I observe seem most worrisome.

David

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on
> historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)
>
> I find that most of the important writing was done in 2006-8. Typically,
> the article reached maturity about 2008 and since then the rate of editing
> has plunged. In most cases I see only minor or maintenance editing since
> then.  The new material since 2008 is mostly cosmetic:  illustrations still
> get added, lots of links are made, new categories added, new lists are
> appended, vandalism is removed.  The citations are increasingly out of
> date.  The articles are long in tooth.
>
> Wiki is now resembling the old paper encyclopedias--they would get old
> fast and need constant updating either through yearbooks or new editions.
>
> Richard Jensen
>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most
of the names near the top of this list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS [7] are blue linked 
which

means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of
editor whod made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and 
on

my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year.



Now, I wanted to do it sometime, but your mail motivated me to do it 
today.


I counted the number of inactive users per number of contributions, 
taking numbers from the first 7000 in the list. Placeholders are counted 
as inactive, and this is a clear drawback, but there are too few of them 
to change the trend, and some of them may be inactive as well.


The results first.

Range (numbers) Range (edits)  #inactive  % inactive

1-200   over 93828  32   16
201-400 67561-93655 33   16.5
401-600 52024-67556 38   19
601-800 43587-51942 39   19.5
801-100037805-43432 51   20.5
1001-1200   33271-37791 61   30.5
1201-1400   30256-33260 54   27
1401-1600   27593-30250 50   25
1601-1800   25364-27571 60   30
1801-2000   23682-25360 80   40
2001-2500   19699-23574174   34.8
2501-3000   17089-19697167   33.4
3001-3500   14777-17086191   38.2
3501-4000   13049-14777199   39.8
4001-4500   11674-13048225   45
4501-5000   10495-11673195   39
5001-55009570-10495211   42.2
5501-60008699-9569 224   44.8
6001-65008011-8697 239   47.8
6501-70007379-8011 242v  48.4

The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less 
likely to leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This 
is clearly statistically significant.


The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about 
20K edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.


I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we 
take 10K edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most 
probable lifetime. Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.


So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do 
not get replaced.


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[WereSpielChequers]

Those figures are specifically about the English Wikipedia. But the issue
is wider than that.

Comparing Feb 2008 and Feb 2012 for the whole of Wikipedia in all languages
there has been a 10% fall in the number of editors contributing over 100
edits a month. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm As some
language communities grew in that era and English declined rather more I
think that non-English as a whole was stable.

The problem isn't necessarily that people are finding that they've written
what they know. On EN wiki and I believe the other large communities we are
no longer recruiting editors into the core of very active editors as
effectively as we used to. The community appears to be coming more closed
and though we are only losing a small proportion of our very active editors
we are failing to recruit their replacements. I.e. the numbers of new
editors have dropped somewhat, but the number of new editors who stay has
dropped far more steeply.

The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most of
the names near the top of this list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS are blue linked which means
they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of editor who'd
made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on my projections
there will be over 200 by the end of the year.

This was a big issue of concern a year or so back and is one of the major
foci of Foundation investment. Hopefully one of the changes, more welcoming
templates, a WYSIWYG editor Wikipedia Zero will do the trick and restore
community health. The rate of decline has apparently bottomed out, but we
do have an ageing volunteer base that is getting top heavy in terms of
experience and I suspect age.  The greying of the pedia is going to be one
of our big challenges in the next few years.

I'm pretty sure this isn't a lack of content to add, if anything what we
are seeing is that vandalism is harder to find as the edit filters prevent
it in the first place, and we are running out of typos to fix.

WSC

On 2 May 2012 09:50, Gerard Meijssen  wrote:

> Hoi,
> I take it this is only about the English Wikipedia...
> Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
>
> On 2 May 2012 10:43, Richard Jensen  wrote:
>
>> the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now
>> than in 2007
>>
>> Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month
>> Mar 20123429  down 34%   from Mar 2007 = 5190
>>
>> Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month
>> Mar 201234,372  down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074
>>
>> I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to write
>> about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not a
>> fast-growing teenager any more. 
>>
>>
>>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I take it this is only about the English Wikipedia...
Thanks,
 GerardM

On 2 May 2012 10:43, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now than
> in 2007
>
> Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month
> Mar 20123429  down 34%   from Mar 2007 = 5190
>
> Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month
> Mar 201234,372  down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074
>
> I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to write
> about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not a
> fast-growing teenager any more. 
>
>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Richard Jensen]

the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now 
than in 2007


Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month
Mar 20123429  down 34%   from Mar 2007 = 5190   

Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month
Mar 201234,372  down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074 

I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to 
write about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not 
a fast-growing teenager any more. 




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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[WereSpielChequers]

Yet since Dec 2008 the total number of articles on the English Wikipedia
has risen by 50% - 2.6m to 3.9m
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm (and quite a few of
those that existed in 2008 have since gone). Word count per article was
also increasing from Dec 2008 to Jan 2010 (we don't seem to have word
counts for the last couple of years).

I rather suspect that editing on Olympics related stuff is on a four year
cycle, and that former Olympians may not be updated much till they die. -
We pick up large numbers of sportspeople in the Death anomaly project.

Otherwise the picture is more complex.

Intrawiki links will account for some of the increase in average word
count, it would be interesting to know whether articles in general tend to
get longer and the proportion of new stubs that get expanded per year.

The somewhat arbitrary criteria that actually apply at new page patrol have
in my experience been getting tougher, so the de facto minimum word count
needed for a new article to survive is probably rather higher now than it
was in 2006. This might help explain the increase in average word count per
article.

There is in my view a tendency among some wikipedians to prefer to start
new articles as opposed to improve existing ones, and new articles on major
topics are relatively rare.

There has been a major drive to up the minimum standards for certain types
of articles. This has involved a large group of editors and possibly
distracted them away from articles on major topics to improve less
important ones ( the unreferenced BLP project involved nearly 2% of all
articles).

In a similar vein the attempts by a group of more  deletionist editors to
get borderline and sometimes not so borderline articles deleted has got rid
of many relatively short articles, and distracted many other editors from
the articles that most need work to the ones that are most in danger of
deletion.

Specifically with your examples of major wars and major generals, the focus
of the Milhist project in recent years on "majestic titans" the project to
get a Featured Article on every Battleship is bound to have diverted some
editors away from wars and generals. It has certainly influenced my editing
and I'm not a member of the project or even particularly interested in the
subject.

The cumulative effect of all this may well mean that once an article gets
to a certain standard it can be quite stable for some years. Which might be
rather reassuring to our writers. But it would be worth testing a more
random group. There is also a good chance that wikiprojects effect the
articles in their purview, MilHist has long been our biggest and best
organised WikiProject, but generally WikiProjects have their own cycles of
enthusiasm and moribundity.

I suspect we also have a difference between areas where our editors are
subject matter experts and areas where they are not. Medicine is supposedly
a WikiProject with an unusually high proportion of editors who are subject
matter experts in real life. I couldn't single out a Wikiproject where the
editors had a low level of expertise, but I'm pretty sure that MilHist has
more than its fair share of teenage boys among the active editors. It would
be interesting to test to see if Medicine related articles were generally
more up-to-date than the average.


WereSpielChequers

On 2 May 2012 01:30, Laura Hale  wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Richard Jensen  wrote:
>
>> I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on
>> historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)
>>
>>
> Sports has this as a bit of a huge problem.  I've found a number of
> articles where they have not been updated since 2008 for Olympians and the
> upcoming Olympic Games where some of these athletes will compete in again
> have not been updated to reflect that yet.
>
> --
> twitter: purplepopple
> blog: ozziesport.com
>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Tue, 01 May 2012 18:27:07 -0600, Richard Jensen wrote:

I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on
historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)

I find that most of the important writing was done in 2006-8.
Typically, the article reached maturity about 2008 and since then the
rate of editing has plunged. In most cases I see only minor or
maintenance editing since then.  The new material since 2008 is 
mostly

cosmetic:  illustrations still get added, lots of links are made, new
categories added, new lists are appended, vandalism is removed.  The
citations are increasingly out of date.  The articles are long in
tooth.

Wiki is now resembling the old paper encyclopedias--they would get
old fast and need constant updating either through yearbooks or new
editions.

Richard Jensen



Well, obviously there are several classes of articles:

- Those of primary importance were indeed completed before 2008. They 
are sometimes referred to in discussions as "low-hanging fruit"  and the 
fact that they are more or less look complete (or , to reformulate it, 
an improvement is possible but sometimes is associated with advanced 
knowledge a typical editor does not have) is used as the most obvious 
explanation of the flattening of the number of active editors;


- Those which require constant attention (BLP, sports BLP in the first 
instance, as Laura correctly noticed, events, prizes etc); in 
particular, those which need to be created on the regular basis (like 
new events or new BLPs). Sometimes they are taken care of properly, but 
more often they get neglected and indeed remain at the 2008 or whatever 
level;


- Articles on less notable subjects (but still pretty much notable on 
encyclopedic standards): BLP articles of persons who did not make it to 
the school textbooks, geographic objects, events not exactly known for 
everybody etc. Most of these are in a pitiful state (for instance, many 
of the geographical aricles were bot created and remain stubs for years; 
as another example I recently discovered that an article on en.wp on 
Bernat Martorell, by far the most famous Catalan medieval painter, was 
one line, and I started to improve it). Most of the work is actually in 
this class of articles; I personally only work on these and see 
whatsoever no problems finding missing articles or stubs requiring 
improvement, but most of this work can not be done with only the primary 
school knowledge.


- Articles prone to POV and edit warring. They typically remain in a 
pitiful state, and there is nothing which can be done about it.


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Richard Jensen]

A random sample, or something systematic?


I've started with major wars (WWI, WW2, American Civil War, War of 
1812, 30 years war, Napoleonic wars, War of 1812;  and generals 
--Napoleon, Washington, Eisenhower, etc.) because they seem to 
involve both very high reader interest and the strength of many 
editors.  Is there a current list of the 100 or 1000 most viewed 
articles? I'd like to work from that. 




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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/5/2 Richard Jensen :
> I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical
> topics (in the English Wikipedia)

A random sample, or something systematic?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Laura Hale]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on
> historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)
>
>
Sports has this as a bit of a huge problem.  I've found a number of
articles where they have not been updated since 2008 for Olympians and the
upcoming Olympic Games where some of these athletes will compete in again
have not been updated to reflect that yet.

-- 
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
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[Wiki-research-l] long in tooth.

[Richard Jensen]

I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on 
historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)


I find that most of the important writing was done in 2006-8. 
Typically, the article reached maturity about 2008 and since then the 
rate of editing has plunged. In most cases I see only minor or 
maintenance editing since then.  The new material since 2008 is 
mostly cosmetic:  illustrations still get added, lots of links are 
made, new categories added, new lists are appended, vandalism is 
removed.  The citations are increasingly out of date.  The articles 
are long in tooth.


Wiki is now resembling the old paper encyclopedias--they would get 
old fast and need constant updating either through yearbooks or new editions.


Richard Jensen


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