I think you're talking about a paper that I just finished editing American Behavioral Scientist: The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration Community: How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline

Summary of findings (and free to download pre-print): http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/

Official listing: http://abs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/12/26/0002764212469365

For quick reference, here's my TL;DR: 

To deal with the massive influx of new editors between 2004 and 2007, Wikipedians built automated quality control tools and solidified their rules of governance. These reasonable and effective strategies for maintaining the quality of the encyclopedia have come at the cost of decreased retention of desirable newcomers.

  1. The decline represents a change in the rate of retention of desirable, good-faith newcomers.
    • The proportion of newcomers that edit in good-faith has not changed since 2006.
    • These desirable newcomers are more likely to have their work rejected since 2007.
    • This increased rejection predicts the observed decline in retention.
  2. Semi-autonomous vandal fighting tools (like Huggle) are partially at fault.
    • An increasing proportion of desirable newcomers are having their work rejected by automated tools.
    • These automated reverts exacerbate the predicted negative effects of rejection on retention.
    • Users of Huggle tend to not engage in the best practices for discussing the reverts they perform.
  3. New users are being pushed out of policy articulation.
    • The formalized process for vetting new policies and changes to policies ensures that newcomers' edits do not survive.
    • Both newcomers and experienced editors are moving increasingly toward less formal spaces.

-Aaron


On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi,

I don't know the article, but check if searching here helps

http://www.mail-archive.com/wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org/

http://wikimedia.7.n6.nabble.com/WikiMedia-Research-f1477409.html

I don't know why I cannot use google.com with the parameter "site:"
for this mailing list archive
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l>.

Tom


On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 10:48 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com> wrote:
> In the past few months, I read a paper (or a draft paper?) that I think was
> shared on this mailing list. Unfortunately I seem to have lost both the
> paper and the email (job change), so I would be grateful if anyone could
> send me the paper or a link or whatever.
>
>
>
> IIRC, the paper was looking at editor retention, particularly the retention
> of new editors. I think there were about 8 hypotheses given and some
> experiments conducted to test these. The one I remember most clearly was the
> finding that new good-faith editors were highly likely to see their
> contributions deleted, by either bots or more experienced editors, and this
> was likely to be de-motivating for them.
>
>
>
> If anyone can help with this, it would be much appreciated.
>
>
>
> Kerry
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>



--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
useful than a life spent doing nothing."

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