On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 9:38 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Pine wrote:
...
The data you show in that table indicates that
there is a negative correlation between active
editors and mobile pageviews....
No, it does not. The rate of editor attrition has been constant since
2007, while mobile views have increased from zero to billions. Mobile
pageviews have has absolutely no correlation with editor engagement
whatsoever.
If there is a quantification of civility issues per editor somewhere,
please bring it to my attention. I suggest that editors who think
incivility has increased since 2006 are not familiar with incivility issues
prior to 2006.
James, that's a good argument, but if that's the argument that you want to
make then please show data back to 2007, not to 2009. Also, I stand by my
statement that there is a negative correlation between active editors and
mobile pageviews in the data that you showed. Correlation and causation are
different.
If you watch Jonathan Morgan's presentation, you'll see that he says that
his favorite theory about the decline in active editors after 2007 is the
rise of the popularity of Facebook. I think everyone would agree that there
are other issues at play as well. I believe that Jonathan says that new
editors were welcomed more readily in Wikipedia's older days, and now they
are more likely to receive template warnings on their talk pages.
Other possible factors include
* The length of the review time at Articles for Creation, at least on
English Wikipedia, which means that contributors may lose patience before
their drafts receive reviews
* The trend of preferred Internet devices switching from desktop to mobile,
combined with the difficulty of contributing text from mobile, as some of
us have mentioned in this discussion
* Shorter human attention spans (is there any data about this?)
* Preferred modes of social expression switching from lengthy blog prose to
short strings
* The number and complexity of policies and laws that govern Wikimedia
content
* Increased surveillance, censorship, and criminalization of Internet
activity, which may deter potential contributors
* The reputation in social media and technical communities that Wikipedia
is a hostile environment; I have heard this personally from other tech open
source enthusiasts
Other people on this list may be able to contribute additional ideas.
I agree with Stuart that Wikipedia may be part of an Internet-wide trend of
trolling becoming more common, and that making communication and editing
easier on Wikipedia is likely to make trolling and vandalizing easier. My
bigger concern is that lots of resources are being poured into VE and Flow
but that VE and Flow address problems that are of less significance than
others that we've mentioned in this thread, particularly the difficulty of
mobile editing and the increase in hostility. AfC and the Draft namespace
would be other good territories for investigation of their impact on editor
retention and content creation.
I hope that VE and Flow will be net positives (I am generally supportive of
the VE concept, and cautious about Flow) but I feel that Wikipedia's
biggest problems may lie elsewhere, and I would like to see resources that
are proportional to those spent on VE and Flow get spent on some of the
other areas like AfC and the on-wiki culture. These would need to be
addressed in collaboration with the content communities, and the WMF
Strategic Plan update would be a good time to elevate Wikimedia's cultural
issues as a priority, with a continuing emphasis on mobile and new modes of
consumption and creation.
Pine