On 10/12/2010 05:02, Steve Bennett wrote: Hmm. I've just thought of a generalisation about WP, which I haven't immediately discarded (a freakish circumstance). WP has problems - hoo boy - but they are the problems of success. When they bring out the cake with the ten candles, let's all make a wish: that we continue to have that sort of problem, not the ones the competition has. Charles

Four or five years ago I quite confidently pronounced it unlikely that the success of Wikipedia could be sustained beyond 2010. Once the novelty wore off, I thought, people would drift away to the next shiny new thing. By now it seems clear that Wikipedia could last at least another six months or so, to my surprise and delight. I too will toast the problems of success in our January celebrations.

This is true - but needs some thought. That the social network enthusiasts and instant updaters have shiny new toys and have left the wiki-building isn't a bad thing. It will mean for a smaller, more committed, (somewhat) more cohesive workforce consisting of people who want to make an encyclopedia, and some others who've become so addicted to specifically Wikipedia that they'll hang about and do some useful things sometimes. However, it does change things a bit. A lot of the way Wikipedia has developed has been predicated on the benefits and problems of exponential growth. If those days are now over we may need to ask some questions. Maintainability: what are the implications of maintaining a database created with a larger usebase and with more optimistic future user-growth expectations? We don't want all our remaining workforce spending all their time trying to hold up the walls of a house that's too big. That doesn't necessarily mean we need to reduce the number of articles - but it may mean we need to change our attitude to things like semi-protection. Creation vs improvement: we've tended to encourage article creation more than improvement (our most popular growth metric is "million articles") and the easiest way to get your article on the main-page for your 15min of fame is to create a start article for DYK, rather than fix an article to GA or FA status (GA are not on the mainpage, and FA only eventually get on perhaps years later). Is it time, without preventing or discouraging new articles, to say - "we need to encourage people to complete and not start." We need more transparent encouragement for fixing up articles (particularly core one)? We need better ways of getting rid of the POV pushers that keep articles as a constant battle ground? There are probably other implications as well. My concern is that when Wikipedia was started, its small size allowed it to adapt flexibly and pragmatically to the circumstances in which it found itself - small but increasing quickly. That was a main reason for it finding the winning formula. It's now in very different circumstances - large but decreasing slowly. Does it have the mechanisms to analyse and adapt to these new circumstances as they slowly but surely emerge - or is it stuck with the formulae developed in its early years? If it's stuck, then we may see slow but steady decline to irrelevancy over the next 2-10 years. Scott -----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Charles Matthews Sent: 11 December 2010 10:49 To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] CZ fork: Tendrl On 11/12/2010 04:12, Tony Sidaway wrote: You weren't wrong about that, in the sense that the twittersphere has attracted (at leas some of) those mostly driven by instant updating. Leaving an adequate but hardly overmanned reference utility that is actually used by tens of millions daily to look things up. We appear to have avoided the death spiral, and it is even possible that a somewhat smaller workforce that had higher median clue was what the project needed. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yup, I reckon Wikipedia got really lucky. It was created at a time when there weren't many other collaborative projects that the average schmoe could get involved in. Then it managed to hit this critical size where there was a massive passive user community. Whenever you have a large number of people who *need* something, sustainability gets a lot easier. Also, I credit the WMF with some amazingly good governance in the last couple of years. I'm incredibly impressed with how they've taken Wikipedia to "the next level", in terms of outreach, fundraising, user interface improvements, etc etc. They're doing all the things a foundation should. Steve