[WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl

[wiki]

This is true - but needs some thought.

That the social network enthusiasts and instant updaters have shiny new toys
and have left the wiki-building isn't a bad thing. It will mean for a
smaller, more committed, (somewhat) more cohesive workforce consisting of
people who want to make an encyclopedia, and some others who've become so
addicted to specifically Wikipedia that they'll hang about and do some
useful things sometimes. However, it does change things a bit. 

A lot of the way Wikipedia has developed has been predicated on the benefits
and problems of exponential growth. If those days are now over we may need
to ask some questions.

Maintainability: what are the implications of maintaining a database created
with a larger usebase and with more optimistic future user-growth
expectations? We don't want all our remaining workforce spending all their
time trying to hold up the walls of a house that's too big. That doesn't
necessarily mean we need to reduce the number of articles - but it may mean
we need to change our attitude to things like semi-protection.

Creation vs improvement: we've tended to encourage article creation more
than improvement (our most popular growth metric is "million articles") and
the easiest way to get your article on the main-page for your 15min of fame
is to create a start article for DYK, rather than fix an article to GA or FA
status (GA are not on the mainpage, and FA only eventually get on perhaps
years later). Is it time, without preventing or discouraging new articles,
to say - "we need to encourage people to complete and not start." We need
more transparent encouragement for fixing up articles (particularly core
one)? We need better ways of getting rid of the POV pushers that keep
articles as a constant battle ground?

There are probably other implications as well.

My concern is that when Wikipedia was started, its small size allowed it to
adapt flexibly and pragmatically to the circumstances in which it found
itself - small but increasing quickly. That was a main reason for it finding
the winning formula. It's now in very different circumstances - large but
decreasing slowly. Does it have the mechanisms to analyse and adapt to these
new circumstances as they slowly but surely emerge - or is it stuck with the
formulae developed in its early years? If it's stuck, then we may see slow
but steady decline to irrelevancy over the next 2-10 years.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Charles Matthews
Sent: 11 December 2010 10:49
To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl

On 11/12/2010 04:12, Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Four or five years ago I quite confidently pronounced it unlikely that
> the success of Wikipedia could be sustained beyond 2010. Once the
> novelty wore off, I thought, people would drift away to the next shiny
> new thing.

You weren't wrong about that, in the sense that the twittersphere has 
attracted (at leas some of) those mostly driven by instant updating. 
Leaving an adequate but hardly overmanned reference utility that is 
actually used by tens of millions daily to look things up. We appear to 
have avoided the death spiral, and it is even possible that a somewhat 
smaller workforce that had higher median clue was what the project needed.

Charles



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