On 12/29/2010 10:26 PM, Tim Starling wrote: > On 29/12/10 18:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: >> I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber >> kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. >> >> But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. >> >> Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you >> are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be >> paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: >> >> 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on >> your content. >> >> 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But >> make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. > > This has been done before: Wikinfo, Citizendium, etc. > >> 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of >> super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. > > This is basically Wikia's business model. I think you need to think > outside the box. > > I would make it more like World of Warcraft. We should incentivise > people to set up wiki sweatshops in Indonesia, paying local people to > "grind" all day, cleaning up articles, in order to build up a level 10 > admin character that can then be sold for thousands of dollars on the > open market. Also it should have cool graphics. > > 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. > > Once you burn someone out, they don't come back for a long time, maybe > not ever. So you introduce a downwards trend which extends over > decades, until the rate at which we burn people out meets the rate at > which new editors are born. > > Active, established editors have a battlefront mentality. They feel as > if they are fighting for the survival of Wikipedia against a constant > stream of newbies who don't understand or don't care about our > policies. As the stream of newbies increases, they become more > desperate, and resort to more desperate (and less civil) measures for > controlling the flood. > > 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.
One thing that I think could help, at least on the English Wikipedia, would be to further restrict new article creation. Right now, any registered user can create a new article, and according to some statistics I gathered a few months ago[1], almost 25% of new users make their first edit creating an article. 81% of those users had their article deleted and <0.1% of them were still editing a few (6-7) months later, compared to 4% for the 19% whose articles were kept, giving a total retention rate of 1.3%. However, for the 75% of users who started by editing an existing article, the overall retention rate was 2.5%. Still a small number, but almost double the rate for the article creation route. The English Wikipedia, with 3.5 million articles, has been scraping the bottom of the notability barrel for a while. Creating a proper new article is not an especially easy task in terms of editing, yet the project practically encourages new users to do it. We're dropping new users into the deep end of the pool, then getting angry at them when they start to drown. What we should be doing instead is suggesting that users add their information to an existing article somewhere (with various tools to help them find it). And if they can't find anything remotely related in 3.5 million articles, ask themselves whether they still think its an appropriate topic. This is an area where the foundation potentially could step in to change things. Its never going to happen through the community, since there's too many people (or at least too many loud people) with a "more is better" mentality. (Part of the reason I gathered the stats was to prove that most new users don't start by creating an article). They'll scream and moan for a while about how we're being anti-wiki, but in the end, most probably won't really care that much. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
