On 25 February 2011 03:01, John Vandenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > English Wikipedia is now sufficiently well known and culturally > important, that 'we' no longer need to care about new contributors. > Even if only 1% of new contributors work their way past the rejections > and through our maze of rules, we will still have significant growth.
For content growth (which is broadly "ever bigger, ever better"), yes, but not for community growth. The absolute number of "active" community members on enwp peaked in early 2007 and has been in a slow decline more or less steadily since then; it's currently about two thirds what it was. If we don't increase the rate at which we attract and retain new contributors while we can, there's a real danger we could end up by 2020 or 2025 with a virtually moribund community - a small handful of devoted vandal-fighters spending their days trying to keep millions of pages clean and stable, and no influx of new users worth mentioning because no-one has the time to cultivate it. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but there's certainly no end of examples of once-flourishing internet communities that have died that sort of death by neglect, a spiral of spambots, vandals, and passing once-off contributors leaving plaintive notes but with no real way to restart a critical mass. (Interestingly, the decline of editors is more or less proportional to the overall editing rate - since the beginning of 2008, the ratio of overall edits per month to highly active users has been about 10,000:1 - so in relative terms, the recent-changes "firehose" has been stable for three years) > We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end > up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about > the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in. There already is a relatively rough-and-ready system in place for identifying and categorising new pages by project areas, using keyword analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot producing daily reports like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot/IslamSearchResult Building something which sends targeted invitation messages off the back of that to new users is certainly plausible: "Hi! You recently created [[Freedom and Justice Party (Egypt)]]. You might be interested in the following projects working on these topics..." with appropriate links and specific messages to, in this case, the projects for Egypt/Africa/Politics/Law/Islam. For people who don't create articles, you could have a bot look at the first (say) ten or so article/talk edits of a new user, and then send a list of suitable projects based on the way those pages were categorised or project-tagged. (I have no idea how easy this would be to implement...) -- - Andrew Gray [email protected] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
