Hello,

to follow up on that troll, I invite you to (re-)discover the work by Marwell and Oliver
"The Critical Mass in Collective Action" (1993)
http://books.google.fr/books/about/The_Critical_Mass_in_Collective_Action.html?id=14nA7_k05NsC&redir_esc=y

which points that fact that after some times, project are "mature" and need less people to participate. Maybe Wikipedia has entered in adulthood (which is, sometime, boring)

Nicolas

Le 28/10/2014 16:14, Pierre-Carl Langlais a écrit :

Hi everyone,

I cannot resist the temptation to troll a bit on this thread:
*"we need 10K or even 100K new active editors": would it not result in
even higher levels of bureaucracy?  Internet technologies have certainly
allowed to keeps large community running with fuzzy rules. Yet, I'm not
so sure it has completely relieved us of bureaucracy: there's probably
still a maximal ratio of participants/fuzziness. With about 30,000
active contributors during the past month, the English Wikipedia is by
far one of the largest autonomous web community. By experience (I do not
have any statistics at hand, sorry), I know that smaller communities
like the Italian Wikipedia, Wikidata or OpenStreetMap (all around
2,000-5,000 contributors) manage to avoid the same level of bureaucracy
sophistication. A lot of agreements can be done on a case per case
basis, while with 10 times more contributors regular rules become
necessary to avoid repeating the same discussions constantly. If you
want to keep a community of 130,000 users consistent, I guess you would
have to set up some kind of kafkaïan nightmare that would make the
current english wikipedia looks like a libertarian paradise…
*"English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility". I
would rather point a lack of communication between the community and the
WMF. I have made some wiki archeology to document my last paper
<http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=NEG_021_0021> on Wikipedia
politics, and what strikes me in the 2001-2007 period is the high level
of interaction between programmers and contributors. A lot of important
features (like footnotes) were first suggested by users who do not have
any kind of programming knowledge. We clearly need to reestablish this
link (perhaps launching a wishlist would be a first step…).
*Is Wikipedia decline an exception? It seems to me that all communities
tends to attain a maxima, after which they slowly regress and stagnate.
The growth of OpenStreetMap has for instance slowed down
<http://scoms.hypotheses.org/241> after 2012. This is not because these
communities cease to be cool (a case could be made that OpenStreetMap is
way cooler than Wikipedia), but mainly, because having free time (in
addition of motivation and ability to contribute on the web) is still a
rare resource. Beginning a demanding job, having a child: all these
current events of life strongly limits the level of implication within
the population that would likely participate. Free time would certainly
not account of the whole gender gap, but is still a bigger issue for
women than for men: in a society that has not completely given up
patriarchal cultural schemes, women are still required to do a lot of
home-related tasks. On the French Wikipedia, we have long focused on
enhancing contribution from the inside (through a very active project
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Aide_et_accueil> to greet
newcomers) with little results (at most, we have only slowed down an
inevitable decline). Apparently, the most efficient (but hardest) way to
enhance participation would be to make some global change on society
(reforming evaluation rules for researchers, reducing working time,
creating a basic income, you name it…).

That's all, folks

PCL

Le 28/10/14 14:27, Aaron Halfaker a écrit :

Hey folks,

I'm breaking this thread of discussion out since it's not really
relevant to the thread it appeared in.

Personally, I'm not studying Wikipedia.  I'm studying the nature of
socio-technical communities with Wikipedia as an interesting case
study. Wikidata might be an interesting case study for something, but
personally, I'm mostly interested in how mature communities/systems
work & break down.  When it reaches maturity, I hope that Wikidata
will benefit from what I have learned.

-Aaron