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)