[Foundation-l] A brief, high level analysis of the total number of contributors and the anatomy of a decision

[Brian]

These are some excellent mailing list and Wikipedia stats that Erik has
cooked up/refreshed, although kind of a pain to do meta-analysis on. You can
however paste the html tables into OpenOffice Calc which is nice (after some
serious complaints from your cpu!). The csv format was not very fun.

http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

I notice that the 364 power posters (posters with more than 200 emails
across all lists) account for 312569 / 458349 ~= 70% of all mailing list
posts. Also, 164 of these power posters account for 46579 / 52201 ~= 90% of
all posts to foundation-l. I denote this subclass of power posters uber
posters. Combined with the project statistics we have (I realize this is
somewhat arbitrary, but still quite interesting in my view):

1 benevolent dictator, 7 board members, 27 foundation employees, 164 uber
posters, 364 power posters, 635 wikimania attendees, 12927 very active
wikipedians, 91067 active wikipedians, 744752 monthly wikipedians and 928022
total wikipedians.

There are many other interesting numbers you could include. I couldn't find
the total number of mailing list contributors and only an admin with access
to all lists could give us the total number of subscribers. We could also
compare the number of sysops etc.. across all wikis in addition to the total
number of visitors and especially donors.

The most interesting part of this data to me is the power posters and uber
posters. It would take a careful analysis of the anatomy of a decision to
draw any conclusions from it. For example, you would need to draw links
between conversations on the lists, conversations on the wiki and
conversations in person to know how many people actually contribute to a
decision, and it would be interesting to see the average number of
contributors to decisions weighted by the importance of that decision,
further scaled by other factors. My feeling though is that a relatively
small number of uber posters act as voices that are representative (in the
eyes of the foundation) of the much larger number of contributors across the
projects (these data are largely specific to Wikipedia), and that foundation
staff then make an assessment of consensus based largely on the opinions of
foundation staff which has been informed by whatever conversations happened
to occur on list.

It is hard for someone to be everywhere all at once given the astronomically
large number of places that one can hold a conversation across all WMF
hosted media and I know that some foundation staff are excellent at
patrolling and knowing absolutely everything about places such as meta and
the english wikipedia and that many important conversations happen in person
that most of us never hear about. </endrunon> All that said, I continue to
worry that our benevolent dictator, board members, foundation employees,
power posters, uber posters and wikimania attendees are not very
representative of the the community at large. Part of the problem is that we
have almost no way of measuring that. Even if the community only included
everyone up to wikimania attendees it would appear that only a tiny fraction
of contributors account for all of the decision making. When we include all
contributors we see an awesome consolidation of power.

To put it simply, I am not very happy with this consolidation. I would like
to see the foundation use technology to bring more of these contributors
into its fold and involve them in the decision making process. We can use
technology to increase the signal to noise ratio while simultaneously
improving the quality of decisions and finding alternate and optimal
solutions that would only occur to less than 1 person in a thousand. As it
stands, those solutions are not being found. As the foundation continues to
bring in employees it gains more and more power and takes it away from the
community. That's my view at least. I would like to drastically reverse that
trend so that there is no consolidation - so that it is easy (and indeed,
beneficial for us all) for anyone who wants to be involved in whatever
decision to get involved and make a difference. Starting mailing list
threads just doesn't seem like it. I also note that the mailing lists have
been on the decline since June of 2006.

/Brian