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 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 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 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 


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
I  agree when it is the only thing I said. 

Yes, I asked you personally and Toby ... and Erik (both of them and several times) and I always hear "good idea, should be easy, we ill look into it and we get back to you". But as I said, your reply is relevant when it is the only thing I said and it is not.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On 28 October 2014 13:43, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
Gerard.  Did you file the feature request?  If not, you are ranting at the wrong mailing list.  

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Despair is a personal emotion. What makes you think that despair is an attack on a person? It is not. Oliver, I despair about what the Research list has become and, I will explain why.

What I despair about is the overwhelming amount of Wikipedia related noise. Noise because it feels to me like the same subjects are covered in endless similar ways. I despair because when something new happens OUTSIDE of this, the English Wikipedia it is completely ignored.

Much of what I hear feels like noise because it lacks practical relevance. Research, statistics could show "What are people looking for most in Wikipedia but cannot find". We do not have that because of no reason I can think of and, it has been promised often enough for years now. The Swedish Wikipedia finds that their bot generated articles has rejuvenated their Wikipedia but the research community is quiet about it.. Ignores it ? Wikidata has statistics [1] its data has a real meaning about Wikipedia, about Wikidata and about the sum of all information AVAILABLE to us. 

The consequence of all this self promotion is that there is no attention for anything else.. Yes, we know there is a gender disparity but what about people with a mental health problem.. We have way more people editing who are "enriched" with a diagnosis than is average. What do our projects mean for them, does it help them with their self awareness, does it help them recover, is our community aware of it and how does it cope or fail to cope. What practical steps can we take to make these valuable contributors more secure, less anxious?

Researching the same things over and over does not help us understand WIkipedia, our "other projects", our communities. It does not help us achieve our aim; it is "share in the sum of all knowledge", we do not even share all the knowledge that is available to us. Why not? How can we do this?

Jane knows the tool that provides a selection of Wikipedias with search results from Wikidata. It works, Ori looked at it from a performance point of view. NOTHING NEEDS TO BE DONE TO IMPLEMENT IT. It does not happen. A research question would be "Why".

The statistics for Wikidata are not up to date because the dumps are faulty. It is not clear, obvious that it is of real concern to the people responisble. However this data IS used to run specific bots based on what the numbers show. The numbers matter, the statistics matter they have a real demonstrable impact.

What I am looking for is relevance and I find only research for more fine grained explanations not for solutions. It is why I despair, it is because it feels so much like a colossal waste of time when you consider that researching subjects with a different objective would help us forward so much. 

Maybe my expectations are unrealistic and people doing research are just another incrowd doing their own thing.
Thanks,
       GerardM




On 28 October 2014 00:15, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:
If it's that trivial to implement, implement it.

That's a very compressed way of saying; I think it's fine for us to disagree on this list. But, really? Pine's email made you "despair"? It, by inference, made you conclude he doesn't accept new things? You find the absence of a feature actively irrational?

It's okay for Pine's vision to be different from yours, or mine, or Aaron's, or anyone else's. Wikimedia's ethos is not built on any one person's vision: it is built on the sum of all of our hopes (in an ideal universe). It's not a one-in, one-out system where ideas must be harshly and actively countered so that yours can take primacy.

So let's try and stay non-hyperbolic and civil on this list, please. As a heuristic; if even /you/ feel a need to write an apology for your email into an email, don't hit send.

On 27 October 2014 17:14, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
I read your mail again. It makes me despair.

Wikimedia research is NOT about Wikipedia, not exclusively. When I read what is an inspiration to you I find all the reasons why Wikipedians do not accept anything new. Why we still do not have a search that also returns information on what is NOT in that particular Wikipedia. It is only one example out of many. It is however so easy to implement, it defies logic that it has not happened on all Wikipedias. It is just one example that demonstrates that we do not even share the sum of all information that is available to us.

...

Sorry,
      GerardM

On 20 October 2014 08:23, 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?'"


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Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

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