The lack of enough moderators and arbitrators drives away editors and donations. More info. |
For more info and discussion see User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive_93#Declining number of editors and donations. -- Timeshifter ( talk) 01:45, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
I'm someone who started here in March 2010 and am still going quite strong here. It is my firm belief that the people who stay here are usually the people who take the time to make minor edits and read around the project pages to find something they enjoy. I started off by trying to remove the word "perished" from articles, and when I found myself enjoying it I started to branch out, eventually finding NPP. I did it quite voluntarily, but the vast majority of new users don't, and that's when they run into trouble. People who want to immediately do everything, be it trying to gain every possible userright, immediately try to set speed records as vandal fighters/NPPers, or write a brand new article, tend to get smacked down because there's no possible way they can use those tools/complete those tasks as effectively as is necessary, and as much as we want to be nice we can't mess around in those areas. As Sue says in the interview, we can't expect people to immediately become great editors; it'd be helpful to promote, for instance,
WP:GOCE so editors can get a start doing something which won't run them into really severe trouble while simultaneously giving them a glimpse of just how diverse our topics are.
I also think we, the community, do understand our own dynamics better than the WMF does, and it'd be nice if the WMF acted on that premise. A look at the talkpage of New Page Triage (linked in the interview) and, dare I say,
WT:IEP and
WP:ACTRIAL, would indicate they're convinced they know what we need better than we do. New Page Triage will be helpful (at least to those of us who know what we're doing, which is a very small percentage of NPPers), but (the great majority of) the community rather clearly indicated what it wanted and thought was best for itself; alas, we're exactly where we were before that started. Not to say the WMF doesn't do a great deal of good work (indeed, without them I'm not typing this), but saying and doing are two different things; I'd like to see some more of the latter.
The Blade of the Northern Lights (
話して下さい)
04:21, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
As I noted last week, we accidentally spliced the publication of this issue - see last week's Opinion essay for "the other take."he he Cheers, Res Mar 21:57, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
I've been using the word the wrong way all these years...thanks for the grammar lesson I guess. Res Mar 03:35, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree the drastic decline in editors by mid-2007 does not follow patterns of normal population growth. Such drastic changes often indicate a key factor, such as a change in data-collection methods, or a massive societal change, such as a war, natural disaster, or government regulation. What happened in 2007? The closest factor seems to be a trendy movement among colleges and entire local schoolboards to ban use of Wikipedia in schools near the end of the 2007 summer break, and fewer returned for the 2007-2008 school year. To research this school-ban concept, I wrote an essay listing 18 major sources about the growing WP-ban from 2007:
•
WP:Schools and colleges banned WP in 2007-2008
Because U.S. schools voluntarily adopted the WP-bans, the decline would not be as drastic as if a bizarre U.S. Federal law (would be from 2006) had censored WP use after 2007, and the U.S. Govt rarely passes drastic legislation. Instead, however, when the growing support for school-bans is coupled with the yearly pattern of school vacations in May/June, then the rapid decline is worsened by students leaving for vacation, and fewer students returning to use Wikipedia in September for the next school year (2007-2008).
There is still a drop in WP editors for May/June each year, but the number returning in September has steadied over the past 2 years. The feared "free-fall decline" has ended, and globally, there are more active editors now, but slight drops in enwiki or dewiki, while Swedish WP has been unchanged as a steady number in 2011. -
Wikid77 (
talk)
09:53, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
As one of the two journalists involved in this story, I probably shouldn't comment; but please indulge me a little. What I say is just my personal take—not The Signpost's views or those of my co-author, Skomorokh, or anything Ms Gardner said aside from what we printed.
I think there's some truth in Erik Zachte's observation that there was always going to be flattening of the curve after the hype and after the project reached a certain level of maturity. Back in the early days, article quality and comprehensiveness were queasy, but we didn't care that much: a frontier mentality prevailed and we didn't have to compete quite so keenly for our reputation on the internet. Things started getting more serious from about 2005 onwards, and in the process, some articles that university lecturers might have once scoffed at gradually became better written than they themselves are capable of producing. We became more rule-bound (like all quality publications) and more demanding of all editors. In effect, we pulled away from "anyone can edit", and we should accept as inevitable that quality enforcement has made WP less "welcoming" to newcomers, many of whom lack the skills and patience to learn the patterns demanded of this cultural product. Openness and quality are thus pitted against each other in key respects, and although Ms Gardner points to causal connections between these phenomena, in other parts of the interview she acknowledges them as competing forces ("if we say that becoming an editor should be easy, really, that's a little delusional").
I find Ms Gardner's professionalism and dedication impressive. But the Foundation's great challenge is to engage more deeply with the editors of the Wikipedias; and by that I don't mean that their now massively increased numbers of employees should sit around passively browsing en.WP (which does happen a bit), but that a culture of actively communicating and empathising with the volunteers needs to run more deeply. One disappointing event last year was the WMF's vetoing of our community's decision to stop anon drive-by article creation; this would have required that newbies show that they're prepared to edit existing articles for just a little while before creating their first article. The WMF appears to see increases in article numbers as a highly significant metric of success, whereas a groundswell of en.WP editors know that committed long-term members come from newbies who are keen to improve articles, and are painfully aware that every stub-article created imposes large overheads on existing editors to reach a minimum level of utility for readers. Ms Gardner is aware of this "scut-work" problem, but I felt she didn't place it in this practical context.
We have reached a stage in our evolution in which we need a multi-pronged strategy to keep the labour-force growing, upskilling, and increasingly diverse. It's one thing for the Foundation to develop technical functionalities (although the visual editor does sound excellent); but we need from the WMF a commitment to partner with us in the following strategies:
Tony (talk) 14:38, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
The drop in editors has ended: The October and November usage stats have confirmed, along with 3rd quarter editor counts, that the count of active editors has stabilized at nearly 34,000 active editors (>10 edits per month), since June 2011 (October: 35,028 editors). We had discussed this likely outcome, several months ago, that the "free fall" or "hemorrhaging" of editors was obviously ending, at a bottom-out count of 34,000 people who will always edit English Wikipedia each month. The usage data, for the past 6 months (June-Nov.) has confirmed this same pattern of editors staying: each month in 2011 is nearly 99% of the 2010 active-editor counts. See table:
Year | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov |
2011 | 37,294 | 36,930 | 35,747 | 35,501 | 35,651 | 34,767 | 35,028 | 34,516 |
2010 | 38,991 | 39,286 | 36,270 | 35,856 | 36,429 | 34,874 | 35,443 | 34,764 |
Monthly counts: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm |
On average, people have stopped leaving: the count never drops below 34,000 active editors. That stability gives the WMF resource planners the controlled usage pattern they need to expect 34,000 active editors each month.
Who were those people who left? Well, along with active users who were edit-banned, about 3,000 "average editors" left in June 2010, and do not seem to have returned. I am suspecting that they were some groups of students who left in June 2010, but now the remaining 34,000 editors do not take "summer wikibreak" as others did in past years. The final core of 34,000 editors seem to work each month, regardless of the northern hemisphere summer-break period beginning in June. However, it could be that more students (or others) use home computers to continue editing Wikipedia when school ends (or on vacations).
Meanwhile, because some other-language Wikipedias are growing in active editors, such as
Spanish Wikipedia, the total of all-language active Wikipedians has been growing, slightly, for the past 6 months (October: 80,630 active editors, all-languages). Anyway, the so-called "mass exit" of editors since 2007 has clearly ended. Tell the Foundation not to turn off the lights yet: those 34,000 editors intend to stay all year at the party! -
Wikid77
11:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Editors are leaving for various reasons. Some editors are being driven away. See: User:Timeshifter/Unresolved content disputes
This article has been mentioned: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-26/Opinion essay. It also has a timeline chart of active editors over the years. See it on the right.
See Page Views for Wikimedia, All Projects, All Platforms, Normalizeds. The table has monthly page views for Wikipedia over years. It looks like the total monthly page views for all Wikimedia projects in all languages has almost doubled in around 4 years.
Here are fundraiser stats over the years: Fundraiser statistics - Wikimedia Foundation. Money can not buy editors, nor quality info on Wikipedia pages.
With more articles we need more editors to bring up the quality of the articles. Many articles need to be filled in, and need a higher level of quality info, charts, images, etc.. -- Timeshifter ( talk) 05:49, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
The lack of enough moderators and arbitrators drives away editors and donations. More info. |
For more info and discussion see User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive_93#Declining number of editors and donations. -- Timeshifter ( talk) 01:45, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
I'm someone who started here in March 2010 and am still going quite strong here. It is my firm belief that the people who stay here are usually the people who take the time to make minor edits and read around the project pages to find something they enjoy. I started off by trying to remove the word "perished" from articles, and when I found myself enjoying it I started to branch out, eventually finding NPP. I did it quite voluntarily, but the vast majority of new users don't, and that's when they run into trouble. People who want to immediately do everything, be it trying to gain every possible userright, immediately try to set speed records as vandal fighters/NPPers, or write a brand new article, tend to get smacked down because there's no possible way they can use those tools/complete those tasks as effectively as is necessary, and as much as we want to be nice we can't mess around in those areas. As Sue says in the interview, we can't expect people to immediately become great editors; it'd be helpful to promote, for instance,
WP:GOCE so editors can get a start doing something which won't run them into really severe trouble while simultaneously giving them a glimpse of just how diverse our topics are.
I also think we, the community, do understand our own dynamics better than the WMF does, and it'd be nice if the WMF acted on that premise. A look at the talkpage of New Page Triage (linked in the interview) and, dare I say,
WT:IEP and
WP:ACTRIAL, would indicate they're convinced they know what we need better than we do. New Page Triage will be helpful (at least to those of us who know what we're doing, which is a very small percentage of NPPers), but (the great majority of) the community rather clearly indicated what it wanted and thought was best for itself; alas, we're exactly where we were before that started. Not to say the WMF doesn't do a great deal of good work (indeed, without them I'm not typing this), but saying and doing are two different things; I'd like to see some more of the latter.
The Blade of the Northern Lights (
話して下さい)
04:21, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
As I noted last week, we accidentally spliced the publication of this issue - see last week's Opinion essay for "the other take."he he Cheers, Res Mar 21:57, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
I've been using the word the wrong way all these years...thanks for the grammar lesson I guess. Res Mar 03:35, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
I agree the drastic decline in editors by mid-2007 does not follow patterns of normal population growth. Such drastic changes often indicate a key factor, such as a change in data-collection methods, or a massive societal change, such as a war, natural disaster, or government regulation. What happened in 2007? The closest factor seems to be a trendy movement among colleges and entire local schoolboards to ban use of Wikipedia in schools near the end of the 2007 summer break, and fewer returned for the 2007-2008 school year. To research this school-ban concept, I wrote an essay listing 18 major sources about the growing WP-ban from 2007:
•
WP:Schools and colleges banned WP in 2007-2008
Because U.S. schools voluntarily adopted the WP-bans, the decline would not be as drastic as if a bizarre U.S. Federal law (would be from 2006) had censored WP use after 2007, and the U.S. Govt rarely passes drastic legislation. Instead, however, when the growing support for school-bans is coupled with the yearly pattern of school vacations in May/June, then the rapid decline is worsened by students leaving for vacation, and fewer students returning to use Wikipedia in September for the next school year (2007-2008).
There is still a drop in WP editors for May/June each year, but the number returning in September has steadied over the past 2 years. The feared "free-fall decline" has ended, and globally, there are more active editors now, but slight drops in enwiki or dewiki, while Swedish WP has been unchanged as a steady number in 2011. -
Wikid77 (
talk)
09:53, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
As one of the two journalists involved in this story, I probably shouldn't comment; but please indulge me a little. What I say is just my personal take—not The Signpost's views or those of my co-author, Skomorokh, or anything Ms Gardner said aside from what we printed.
I think there's some truth in Erik Zachte's observation that there was always going to be flattening of the curve after the hype and after the project reached a certain level of maturity. Back in the early days, article quality and comprehensiveness were queasy, but we didn't care that much: a frontier mentality prevailed and we didn't have to compete quite so keenly for our reputation on the internet. Things started getting more serious from about 2005 onwards, and in the process, some articles that university lecturers might have once scoffed at gradually became better written than they themselves are capable of producing. We became more rule-bound (like all quality publications) and more demanding of all editors. In effect, we pulled away from "anyone can edit", and we should accept as inevitable that quality enforcement has made WP less "welcoming" to newcomers, many of whom lack the skills and patience to learn the patterns demanded of this cultural product. Openness and quality are thus pitted against each other in key respects, and although Ms Gardner points to causal connections between these phenomena, in other parts of the interview she acknowledges them as competing forces ("if we say that becoming an editor should be easy, really, that's a little delusional").
I find Ms Gardner's professionalism and dedication impressive. But the Foundation's great challenge is to engage more deeply with the editors of the Wikipedias; and by that I don't mean that their now massively increased numbers of employees should sit around passively browsing en.WP (which does happen a bit), but that a culture of actively communicating and empathising with the volunteers needs to run more deeply. One disappointing event last year was the WMF's vetoing of our community's decision to stop anon drive-by article creation; this would have required that newbies show that they're prepared to edit existing articles for just a little while before creating their first article. The WMF appears to see increases in article numbers as a highly significant metric of success, whereas a groundswell of en.WP editors know that committed long-term members come from newbies who are keen to improve articles, and are painfully aware that every stub-article created imposes large overheads on existing editors to reach a minimum level of utility for readers. Ms Gardner is aware of this "scut-work" problem, but I felt she didn't place it in this practical context.
We have reached a stage in our evolution in which we need a multi-pronged strategy to keep the labour-force growing, upskilling, and increasingly diverse. It's one thing for the Foundation to develop technical functionalities (although the visual editor does sound excellent); but we need from the WMF a commitment to partner with us in the following strategies:
Tony (talk) 14:38, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
The drop in editors has ended: The October and November usage stats have confirmed, along with 3rd quarter editor counts, that the count of active editors has stabilized at nearly 34,000 active editors (>10 edits per month), since June 2011 (October: 35,028 editors). We had discussed this likely outcome, several months ago, that the "free fall" or "hemorrhaging" of editors was obviously ending, at a bottom-out count of 34,000 people who will always edit English Wikipedia each month. The usage data, for the past 6 months (June-Nov.) has confirmed this same pattern of editors staying: each month in 2011 is nearly 99% of the 2010 active-editor counts. See table:
Year | April | May | June | July | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov |
2011 | 37,294 | 36,930 | 35,747 | 35,501 | 35,651 | 34,767 | 35,028 | 34,516 |
2010 | 38,991 | 39,286 | 36,270 | 35,856 | 36,429 | 34,874 | 35,443 | 34,764 |
Monthly counts: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm |
On average, people have stopped leaving: the count never drops below 34,000 active editors. That stability gives the WMF resource planners the controlled usage pattern they need to expect 34,000 active editors each month.
Who were those people who left? Well, along with active users who were edit-banned, about 3,000 "average editors" left in June 2010, and do not seem to have returned. I am suspecting that they were some groups of students who left in June 2010, but now the remaining 34,000 editors do not take "summer wikibreak" as others did in past years. The final core of 34,000 editors seem to work each month, regardless of the northern hemisphere summer-break period beginning in June. However, it could be that more students (or others) use home computers to continue editing Wikipedia when school ends (or on vacations).
Meanwhile, because some other-language Wikipedias are growing in active editors, such as
Spanish Wikipedia, the total of all-language active Wikipedians has been growing, slightly, for the past 6 months (October: 80,630 active editors, all-languages). Anyway, the so-called "mass exit" of editors since 2007 has clearly ended. Tell the Foundation not to turn off the lights yet: those 34,000 editors intend to stay all year at the party! -
Wikid77
11:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)
Editors are leaving for various reasons. Some editors are being driven away. See: User:Timeshifter/Unresolved content disputes
This article has been mentioned: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-26/Opinion essay. It also has a timeline chart of active editors over the years. See it on the right.
See Page Views for Wikimedia, All Projects, All Platforms, Normalizeds. The table has monthly page views for Wikipedia over years. It looks like the total monthly page views for all Wikimedia projects in all languages has almost doubled in around 4 years.
Here are fundraiser stats over the years: Fundraiser statistics - Wikimedia Foundation. Money can not buy editors, nor quality info on Wikipedia pages.
With more articles we need more editors to bring up the quality of the articles. Many articles need to be filled in, and need a higher level of quality info, charts, images, etc.. -- Timeshifter ( talk) 05:49, 10 January 2012 (UTC)