On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 12:45 AM, Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers@gmail.com
wrote:
More broadly it would be good to know if wikiprojects are good for editor recruitment and retention. My hypothesis is that if someone if someone tries out editing Wikipedia and is steered to an active and relevant wikiproject then they will be more likely to continue after that first trial edit. I simply don't know whether introducing people to inactive wikiprojects is worthwhile or what the cutoff is on activity.
That's probably right. I think a nice cutoff on activity would be: ask all wikiprojects to come up with a banner to show to a subset of newbies, to indicate how many newbies or impressions they want (what they think they can handle), and to create a page/section with an intro and projects for newbies, if they don't already have one. Any project that can manage this is welcome to get a few newbies to work with if they want, in my book.
we could have a phenomenon here that will over time exacerbate wikipedia's problem of patchy coverage with the better covered topics improving faster than the gaps. Conversely if each topic has a founder effect then over time Wikipedia will become less uneven as more and more topics go through the phase of having an active editor or editors making their mark on the topic by radically improving articles.
Isn't that how the projects have worked so far? the above happens, but also when a topic is fully covered it becomes boring to all but the completionists, so they look for other things to do. So patchwork hyperfocus flutters across fields and topics and ends up covering quite a lot. That type of individual focus is probably less biased towards 'the popular stuff' than the diffuse tidbit updates that add recent links and current events: the unevenness of the latter is more noticeable, since it is steady over time.
Cheers, Sam