*"We don’t want our best contributors feeling like the most important contribution they can make is to find stuff to get rid of - and more importantly, we want to avoid deterring people from joining the community and participating by being over-protective of what we want the site to look like. Narrow interpretation of the scope with rigid enforcement hasn’t slowed the volume of poor quality questions, but it has given Server Fault a rather hostile and insular reputation and a tendency to give a poor first impression."* The parallels to English Wikipedia are startling. But the data shared here don't say much to support the Facebook Ate My Online Community argument. Shane Madden's thesis is that community dynamics, not social media overload, are the primary culprit. Recommended reading for the whole research-l list. Thanks for sharing this, Nemo. - Jonathan On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 3:21 AM, Ed Summers &lt;ehs(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: -- Jonathan T. Morgan Community Research Lead Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org

I don't think this is anything new. There are loads of parallels in UseNet groups and other online forums. I think it's Tragedy of the Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons I think the birth of the Internet/web suddenly enabled people with niche interests to have a viable means of forming groups that was not viable in an offline context. When such groups start, everyone is sharing their personal knowledge of the niche topic to everyone's mutual benefit. But over time, two things happen. The group has now shared so much that the needs of the original members are somewhat sated and also the group is now attracting newbie members asking "the same old questions" usually having made no effort to search the archives or read the FAQ. Over time, the traditional big contributors start to burn out on either answering the newbie questions or snapping at the newbies for asking those questions. The conversations arising from the newbie questions tend not to be interesting to the original contributors, who now feel they are constantly giving but getting nothing back, leading to their drop-out. Eventually the group dies because there is nobody left to answer the questions competently. You see it in offline groups too. Someone was telling me about the local Boy Scout shortage of volunteers recently. Traditionally fathers of the boys were the main source of volunteers to operate the group and its activities. However, in this age of videogames, which boys go to scouts? Well, it's mostly the boys from single mother households who send their sons because they think it will be good for the son to do boy-stuff with father figures. So, there are very few fathers now available as volunteers. Again, the "taking without giving" problem but here the resource is "father figures". That's not the only factor in play in the shortage of volunteers. The other problem is in increasing demands on the volunteers to have and to maintain currency in first aid certificates, life saving, fire fighting, etc, which creeps up and up following any adverse incident. Kid with peanut allergy is not handled right somewhere in the country, solution, all volunteers must complete the allergy training course with refreshers every two years, etc. The barrier to entry as a volunteer is now very high and the annual commitment to maintaining the currency of all those certificates is also demanding (time not spent running scouting activities) and acts as a significant deterrent to people who would have been willing to "help out from time to time". Wikipedia shares this barrier-to-entry problem which arises from the same "high quality" expectations. Many volunteer/social arrangements depend on reciprocity. When you get too many people wanting to "take" but not to "give", it ultimately kills the thing. Interestingly, Wikipedia is not in that particular pattern, perhaps because the very purpose of Wikipedia was to "give information" in the first place. It is not the huge readership that harms Wikipedia contributors, but other contributors whose behaviour "squanders" the efforts of others. The perception is that there are plenty of new contributors out there so there is no need to cherish the ones we have. I often wonder if some of our more aggressive contributors are aware of the declining editor numbers and whether they see it as a problem and whether they can see their own behaviour contributes to that problem. I suspect some of our more aggressive editors may genuinely think "great, less fools for me to have to deal with" and "just as well I'm here to weed them out". As to the "Facebook ate my online community" theory, there is a strong culture of "liking" your friends' posts in Facebook, so there is positive reinforcement to posting on Facebook. Whereas I don't think there is any culture on Wikipedia of readers to "thank" the writers (perhaps because there isn't a mechanism?). It is the writers of Wikipedia who occasionally thank one another and extremely occasionally give WikiLove/Barnstar etc. There's a lot less "stroking" on Wikipedia compared to Facebook and it's a whole lot easier to "not like" (aka revert) on Wikipedia while Facebook took away the "thumbs down" button a long time ago. Of course, there are other things that Facebook does that may promote user retention (and thus eat other online communities), e.g. the ability to control who are your friends, and the ability to control the privacy of postings even with respect to your friends. I think Facebook understand social dynamics a lot better than Wikipedia and designs their interface accordingly. Kerry _____ From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Friday, 12 December 2014 5:55 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] StackExchange editor decline (serverfault) "We don't want our best contributors feeling like the most important contribution they can make is to find stuff to get rid of - and more importantly, we want to avoid deterring people from joining the community and participating by being over-protective of what we want the site to look like. Narrow interpretation of the scope with rigid enforcement hasn't slowed the volume of poor quality questions, but it has given Server Fault a rather hostile and insular reputation and a tendency to give a poor first impression." The parallels to English Wikipedia are startling. But the data shared here don't say much to support the Facebook Ate My Online Community argument. Shane Madden's thesis is that community dynamics, not social media overload, are the primary culprit. Recommended reading for the whole research-l list. Thanks for sharing this, Nemo. - Jonathan On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 3:21 AM, Ed Summers &lt;ehs(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: That's really interesting. One could speculate that there is a general fall off in interactivity on other sites as social media behemoth's like Facebook soak up user attention. I know Matt Haughey has written about the fall off in site visits to Metafilter [1], which he has attributed to changes in Google's relevancy ranking. I wonder if folks at Metafilter would be willing to look at user engagement over time in relation to Wikipedia's stats? //Ed [1] https://medium.com/technology-musings/on-the-future-of-metafilter-941d15ec96 f0 wrote: http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/6701/server-fault-needs-professional-q uality-questions-not-just-questions-from-profe visits, editors focusing on rollback, sadness spreading, less work getting done. going through the same issues and errors? Someone please give them pointers to useful research, or something. :) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Community Research Lead Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org