I wish we had the slides for this, but Jack Herrick of WikiHow presented at Wikimania 2012 on the features put in to promote more community growth.
There is video, however! And the exact time code is here: http://youtu.be/qI07vokWXBY?t=53m28s Quick transcription of that section of Jack Herrick's talk: "And sadly this problem seems to be getting worse. This is the famous chart, I'm sure a lot of Wikipedians have seen this chart... the blue line is the active wiki editors. It's been declining... it peaked in 2007. It's been declining or flat ever since. And that graph is more or less the same at WikiHow. We peaked in 2007... I have some theories about why 2007 was the magic year for wikis, but I won't go into that here..... I wasn't happy with those results, so I spent the last three years trying to turn that around." Jack: People leave WikiHow not because they don't like it, but because they've found somewhere more fun... http://youtu.be/qI07vokWXBY?t=1h09m01s Theories as to what happened in 2007 - Seigenthaler event and press. Facebook came in 2008... "and we weren't keeping up" http://youtu.be/qI07vokWXBY?t=1h10m50s -Andrew On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:09 PM, Krystle <krys...@wikihow.com> wrote: > > > On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 3:40 AM, Andrew Lih <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote: > >> That said, I still feel the "Facebook/Twitter ate my community" angle >> merits more analysis. The fact that all the major language Wikipedia >> editions dropped in that same 2007 time frame, as well as WikiHow, is still >> eyebrow-raising. >> > > Andrew - Do you have a source for the wikiHow data? I've been with the > project as part of the staff since it started and the community manager > since 2010 and don't recall a 2007 drop. wikiHow started in 2005 and I > think the community was still seeing growth at that time, though we only > started tracking metrics in 2009. Our 5+ edits trend since then looks like > this: > > > [image: Inline image 1] > > Please don't republish this graph - the data here is rather shaky (issues > like how [in]consistently it included user page edits or paid translator > edits, there is room for a project here gathering more accurate historical > data to compare apples to apples). It just gives a rough idea that's pretty > consistent with my anecdotal impressions from having been involved with the > community since it began. > > It's worth noting that in 2010 we started launching some on-ramping tools > that made it much easier to get to the fifth edit. I.e. you could easily > get to 5 edits with 5 clicks. > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > >
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