This is slightly more complex. Some projects have a very large and steady decline, especially in new contributors,[1] while some projects have an increase, especially in the established users group.[2] Why it is so is not clear at all, but some editors favor an idea that other sites like Facebook have drained the pool of available editors. What is pretty clear is that users have limited time and Wikipedia is not what they favor the most. To little social and cultural credit for the work, perhaps even a hostile environment, can be attributed to the decline.
The referenced graphs are made by averaging over a one year window, and taking a diff over one year to make the trend visible. It looks backward in time to avoid the artificial drop-off that became so much discussed some years ago!
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowiki-stats-new-users-2017-01-15.pn... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nowiki-stats-100-users-2017-01-15.pn...
On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 11:16 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Zubin and welcome.
The discussions about declining editor levels started to go quiet in mid 2015 after we noticed that numbers had started to rally at the end of 2014.
Here is the signpost article that covered part of this in 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/ 2015-08-26/In_focus That focussed on the very active, but the raw edit count shows the same pattern on English wikipedia, a decline from 2007 to 2014, then a rally and the last couple of years being broadly stable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits
"Wikipedia in terminal decline" was an interesting story for journalists and others, "maturing organisation is broadly stable on several measures" sounds just a tad boring.
As for your concern about bureaucracy and philosophical rants. Many of the policies are complex, and there are even examples of things that contradict each other. But it is a very very complex system, and some of the complexity comes from hard won compromises between people with very different views. A commercial organisation could have done some things more simply, but a volunteer organisation can't simply tell people to do what they are paid to do. I suspect that many reforms are possible and may even be necessary, but it really helps when you are changing something to understand the different perspectives that lead to that compromise.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 5 Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 21:42:32 +0800 From: Zubin JAIN jain16276@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Time to simplify the Bureaucracy ? Message-ID: <CABRVQKPs3YDucchXt7VHshrdrvrz=PMVD5u3pNeVFM+fjC2=sQ@mail. gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Hello, As a rare newcomer to the Wikimedia project, I've been thinking of some
of
the factors that seem to discourage me from contributing and one of the primary ones seem to be the fact that the way the administration is organized and rules enforced is often vague and unclear. The definition
and
the method of collection of the vague idea of "Consensus" aren't easily found and take a lot of digging to get out.
A lot of the guideline is often mixed with philosophical rants that often seem to contradict each other and has grown in size to the point that
it's
unreasonable for any newcomer to have read through it all. The project designed to work on consensus and community often seems unresponsive and automated as anarchic communication structure impedes effective communication by forcing users to learn an obscure markup language just
to
communicate.
I'm wondering if there have been any whitepapers on addressing these problems especialy the ones about bureaucracy, reading through the news I remember a lot of hay being made about a decline in Wikipedia editor
from a
few years back but that seems ot have faded. Is there any hard data on
the
future trajectory of the project?
-- Sincerely, Zubin Jain
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