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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