Tim Starling wrote: > OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to > be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to > Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. > Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing > statistics, it won't address the trend. > > We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing > interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get > past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and > bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing.
Is there any evidence to support these claims? From what I understand, a lot of Wikipedia's best new content is added by anonymous users.[1] Thousands more editors are capable of registering and editing without much interaction with the broader Wikimedia community at all. If there's evidence that mean admins are a credible threat to long-term viability, I'd be interested to see it. Given that there are about 770 active administrators[2] on the English Wikipedia and I think you could reasonably say that a good portion are not mean, is it really quite a few people who are having this far-reaching impact that you're suggesting exists? That seems unlikely. > Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let > more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our > social problems, then we could burn out the majority of the Internet > population before we figure out what's going on. Increasing the number > of new editors by a large factor will increase the anxiety level of > admins, and thus accelerate this process. I think the growth should be organic. With a better interface in place, a project has a much higher likelihood of successful, healthy growth. > One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further > deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do > this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their > own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment. Endless backlogs are going to draw people in? Delayed gratification is going to keep people contributing? This proposal seems anti-wiki in a literal and philosophical sense. MZMcBride [1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/abstracts/TR2007-606/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrators _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
