Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: >First, let's make one thing clear: the reader doesn't exist; it's just a >rhetorical trick, and a very dangerous one. For more: >https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_of_the_reader
This essay looks fascinating. I hope to read it soon. >Page views, however brute a concept, exist; and I think they're telling >us we do have a readership problem. For it.wiki, in the last year I see >a suspiciously similar decrease in desktop pageviews and editing >activity (possibly around –20 %). It would *seem* that every user >converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki. >Long story: ><https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/9380388> > The page above is just a collection of pointers that I probably won't >be able to pursue in the coming months, to study an unprecedented >collapse of editing activity and active editors on it.wiki. However, >there /are/ several things worth looking into and we do have a huge >problem (or several). I don't know enough about the Italian Wikipedia to comment on it specifically. But generally I think it's important to re-emphasize that correlation and causation are distinct, as are readership and editorship rates. The two items of each set can be interrelated or connected sometimes, of course, but we need to make sure we're drawing accurate and appropriate conclusions. At <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62811#c10> Jared Zimmerman writes, "We have a reader decline, its backed by hard numbers, any creative solution for bringing more readers and contributors into the project should be seriously discussed without being dismissed out of hand." There's substantial discussion in the subsequent comments. Let's temporarily accept the premise that pageviews suddenly drop from 20 billion per month to 1 billion per month. The easy argument is that we'd save a lot of money on hosting. But unlike most of the Internet, Wikipedia doesn't rely on advertising. Why does it matter how popular we are? Does it affect donation rates? Does it affect editorship rates? I'm not sure how much of this we know. It's increasingly clear that much of the rest of the Internet _is_ different: it doesn't require much thought of participants, it's user-focused, and it's built on the idea of selling (to) people. This difference in how we want to treat users, as collaborators and colleagues, rather than as clients or customers, will permeate the site design and user experience and that's okay. If the number of pageviews suddenly drops, for whatever reason, what happens next? The most likely "worst case" scenario seems to be a reduction in annual donations, which results in a smaller staff size (sometimes referred to as "trimming the fat" or "optimizing"). There's a lot of talk lately about the imperiled future, but we could end up with a smaller, more decentralized Wikimedia Foundation staff in what some would consider one of the least desirable outcomes. Eh. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
