Re: [Wiki-research-l] looking for paper on the "new editor experience"

I think you're talking about a paper that I just finished editing American Behavioral Scientist: *The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration Community: **How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline** * Summary of findings (and free to download pre-print): http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/ Official listing: http://abs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/12/26/0002764212469365 For quick reference, here's my *TL;DR: * To deal with the massive influx of new editors between 2004 and 2007, Wikipedians built automated quality control tools and solidified their rules of governance. These reasonable and effective strategies for maintaining the quality of the encyclopedia have come at the cost of decreased retention of desirable newcomers. 1. The decline represents a change in the rate of retention of desirable, *good-faith* newcomers. - The proportion of newcomers that edit in good-faith has not changed since 2006. - These desirable newcomers are more likely to have their work rejected since 2007. - This increased rejection predicts the observed decline in retention. 2. Semi-autonomous vandal fighting tools (like Huggle<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Huggle>) are partially at fault. - An increasing proportion of desirable newcomers are having their work rejected by automated tools. - These automated reverts exacerbate the predicted negative effects of rejection on retention. - Users of Huggle tend to not engage in the best practices<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BRD> for discussing the reverts they perform. 3. New users are being pushed out of policy articulation. - The formalized process for vetting new policies and changes to policies ensures that newcomers' edits do not survive. - Both newcomers and experienced editors are moving increasingly toward less formal spaces <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ESSAYS>. -Aaron On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga < ezalvarenga(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: