Hi Keegan, Thank you for starting with a compliment! If your intention is to stress the point that we wikipedia is also a community, and not just a bunch of article writers, I agree. I am not sure what you mean with "our content is ridiculously misunderstood for the fifth most popular website in the world."
The study gives a lot of facts. I am glad a lot of trends have been discovered. I am glad that the problem has not been shoved under the carpet. It does not go out, however and tell the why. I know why i have diminished my contributions - I only occasionally write articles nowadays - but what we need to address these questions is facts and analysis on the whole "lifecycle" of a wikipedian: - what made people try to contribute to wp in the first place? - what barriers did people encounter making them give up after their first, or even before their first attempt? - what made people tick? - why do people stop after they have been active for months or years? - have their goals been reached? - are there any typical volunteer patterns, for example the super nova who explodes with hundreds and thousands of articles and then stop, the slow but steady contributor who writes one article a week, the bot operator who wrote about a hundred articles and then decided to use bots instead? The manager who puts more energy in project coordination then in actual writing? The bureaucrat? - What makes people stop after they have been long time volunteers? - Have their ever been any surveys (we have their email addresses) on why volunteers left wp after contributing a long time? There will be 'leakage' over all phases of the aforementioned lifecycle, but we can probably concentrate on just a few. >From the reactions here (p.e. Milos: my topic was exhausted, Kirill: lots of frustration) we have an idea. It would be nice to have some more statistical data. (and apologies if these questions are just another prove of the old saying that one fool can ask more questions than a thousand wise men can answer) On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Keegan Peterzell <keegan.w...@gmail.com>wrote: > On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 2:14 AM, teun spaans <teun.spa...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Quote:Many volunteers don't have a lot to write. > > This sounds like an opinion, not like a fact. Even on English wikipedia, > we > > still have about two hundred thousand plant species to describe, and > > millions of animal species. And then I'm not talking about fungi and > other > > kingdoms > > > That is a good point, Teun, and work between Wikispecies and Wikipedia has > done more to fill taxonomy than would anywhere near exist. However, > participation and growth is not purely content creation and expansion. The > content is most important, but it is impossible to do so forever on the > English Wikipedia in isolation. If we want to focus on how to "get a > Wikipedian", it is my firm belief that we cannot. The focus, in my meager > opinion, is not on instructions, wizards, or templates. The solution is > what we want to acheive: knowledge. This comes from helping new users and > appreciating that our content is ridiculously misunderstood for the fifth > most popular website in the world. > > > -- > ~Keegan > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
