Hey Pine,

Thanks for prod'ing the conversation.  See also the discussion about Wikipedia's decreasing adaptability on the Wikimedia analytics mailing list here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-October/002651.html

IMO, the critical piece of evidence that English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility is the lack of any substantial change to the treatment of newcomers since the massive decline in retention of good-faith newcomers started in 2007[2].  A secondary piece of evidence is the increasing resistance to policy/guideline (formalized norm) changes for all editors, but especially newcomers[3].  

We've seen some follow-up work that suggests that Wikipedia's complexity itself is a barrier for new editors[7] and that these issues extend to spaces specifically designed to support newcomers' work[6].  There have been some interesting efforts to address the symptoms of the problem.  For example, see WP:Teahouse[4], WP:Snuggle[5] and Onboarding Research[8].

Personally, I think that the way forward is to recognize that hard problems are hard because others have tried the easy/intuitive solutions already.  I think it is time to dig in and understand the fundamental, socio-technical nature of Wikipedia.  To that end, I'm working on building data resources of strategic importance (see [9, 10, 11, 12]).  I'm also working towards experimenting with the effects of increased reflexive power by surfacing a value-added measurement service[13].  And of course, I'm advertising our socio-technical problems at research showcase like the one Pine linked and when giving talks (e.g. [14]) so that we can grow our army of wiki researchers.

OMG WALL OF REFERENCES:
1. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2012). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764212469365. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfaker13rise-preprint.pdf
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desirable_newcomer_survival_over_time.png from [1] Figure 4, pg. 12
3. Page 17, table 2 and the two pgs preceeding it. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfaker13rise-preprint.pdf
4. Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013, February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 839-848). ACM. http://jtmorgan.net/jtmorgan/files/morgan_cscw2013_final.pdf
5. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., & Terveen, L. G. (2014, April). Snuggle: designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 311-320). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-preprint.pdf
6. Schneider, J., Gelley, B. S., & Halfaker, A. (2014, August). Accept, decline, postpone: How newcomer productivity is reduced in English Wikipedia by pre-publication review. In Proceedings of The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (p. 26). ACM. http://cse.poly.edu/~gelley/acceptdecline.pdf
7. Ford, H., & Geiger, R. S. (2012, August). Writing up rather than writing down: Becoming wikipedia literate. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (p. 16). ACM. http://www.opensym.org/ws2012/p21wikisym2012.pdf
8. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians
9. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Ideas/MediaWiki_events:_a_generalized_public_event_datasource
10. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Editor_Interaction_Data_Extraction_and_Visualization
11. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection
12. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
13. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiCredit
14. https://www.si.umich.edu/events/201409/icos-lecture-aaron-halfaker

-Aaron

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 1:23 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Both of the presentations at the October Wikimedia Research Showcase were fascinating and I encourage everyone to watch them [1]. I would like to continue to discuss the themes from the showcase about Wikipedia's adaptability, viability, and diversity.

Aaron's discussion about Wikipedia's ongoing internal adaptations, and the slowing of those adaptations, reminded me of this statement from MIT Technology Review in 2013 (and I recommend reading the whole article [2]):

"The main source of those problems (with Wikipedia) is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase partipcipation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage."

I would like to contrast that vision of Wikipedia with the vision presented by User:CatherineMunro (formatting tweaks by me), which I re-read when I need encouragement:

"THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
One gateway
to the wide garden of knowledge,
where lies
The deep rock of our past,
in which we must delve
The well of our future,
The clear water
we must leave untainted
for those who come after us,
The fertile earth,
in which truth may grow
in bright places,
tended by many hands,
And the broad fall of sunshine,
warming our first steps
toward knowing
how much we do not know."

How can we align ouselves less with the former vision and more with the latter? [3]

I hope that we can continue to discuss these themes on the Research mailing list. Please contribute your thoughts and questions there.

Regards,

Pine

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw

[2] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

[3] Lest this at first seem to be impossible, I will borrow and tweak a quote from from George Bernard Shaw and later used by John F. Kennedy: "Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' Let us dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"