We already have hundreds of millions of users. A large proportion of people
who use the internet will use Wikipedia in a given month, they use it by
reading bits of it. Finding out what the barriers are for the thousands of
millions who don't use Wikipdia would be useful. No doubt there are some
who are aware of Wikipedia but didn't feel a need to consult an
encyclopaedia in the last month, and some who are not currently in the
market for an encyclopaedia because they are too young, too senile, or
locked up. But research into why people don't use Wikipedia would be
useful. Our mission is to make the sum of all knowledge available to all,
finding out how we get to the next 400 million people, and indeed what
proportion of humanity would use an encyclopaedia if it was available to
them would be a great use of research.
Of those hundreds of millions only a tiny proportion, perhaps 0.02% are
"active editors", and that on an absurdly generous definition of active (5
edits in one month).
Theory tells us that as quality continues to improve so those readers who
fix a typo or some vandalism when they see it have been editing less and
less frequently. We know that the edit filters have lost us many of the
vandals who used to be such an important part of the raw editing figures of
the site (it never ceases to amuse me that the threshold to count as an
active editor was exactly the same as the typical vandal needed to get
through four levels of warnings and then get blocked). We also know that
the rise of the Smartphone and to a lesser extent the tablet has lost us
editors, to most tablet users and almost all smartphone users Wikipedia is
a read only website not an interactive one. But it would be good to test
that as even the most obvious explanation is only a hypothesis until
someone has tested it, better still some sort of quantification of those
various issues would be very helpful.
How we replace typo fixing and vandalism reversion as entry level
activities to editing is one of the challenges of the community, any
research on that would be very useful.
On 27 August 2016 at 08:13, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thinking big here: popular internationalized computer
games can have 10+
million unit sales. Some of the most popular online games have millions of
monthly active users. I'm wondering if the research community, including
Design Research, can envision a way for Wikimedia to scale up from 80,000
active monthly users to 8,000,000 active monthly users.
What would we need in order to stimulate and nourish this kind of growth?
What can we learn from popular internationalized games about design that
could benefit Wikimedia on a large scale?
Pine
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