Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com escreveu no dia domingo, 30/12/2018 à(s) 13:55:
Re milennials: this is clearly not a red herring. Just ask Facebook what their demographics is and why the 18- generation is not using it.
Stats show that Galinha Pintadinha was one of the most viewed articles in 2018 at the Portuguese Wikipedia: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=pt.wikipedia.org&platform=a...
I seem to recall it got the 3rd place, but was undoubtedly among the 10 first. Galinha Pintadinha is a very sucessful Brazilian project that produces songs for children. Apparently those hits are being caused by children looking for the songs, who click on the Wikipedia article because it was among the first hits on Google (apparently it's not anymore, and the hits went down dramatically, accordingly). What this tells is that apparently an incredible number of very young children already have an easy access to Wikipedia, and from direct experience at wiki.pt, many of them stay there editing on the things they like, primarily animation series like Naruto. We get a lot of new editors who have about 9-12 years old, confirmed. While this brings a lot of new issues, because our old, "plastered" Wikipedia project is not really prepared to deal with children as editors, it's also very refreshing to observe that the community is continuously renewing itself.
At least in the Portuguese Wikipedia, a large, large fraction of our readers are children and teens, and a large fraction of our editors are teens - and this is not limited to Brazil, it's a phenomena I've been observing at the Portuguese speaking African countries, where our editors are in general very young, and even in Portugal. The only common trend here with what is generally publicly stated about Wikipedia is that it's mostly boys and young men, which should bring about some meditation about what could be the true causes of the Wikipedia gender gap. Girls and young women are indeed very rare as editors (though apparently they read and externally use us a lot).
This is not inline with that idea that we are losing the young generations, at least in the Portuguese speaking world. Surely they complain a lot about the usability of the project, and the outdated looks of it (that kind of 1990s flashback), but that is a common complaint that seem to cross all generations.
While we are at it, some anecdotic evidence of another curious phenomena I've observed at a recent Wikidata workshop we've organized at our National Library. We were expecting a participation mostly by young people, since it was mostly technical stuff. Instead, most of the participants were archivists and librarians with more than 40 years old, many above 50, 60, and up. And it was a success, they appeared to be kind of native to Wikidata, even if it was the first time they were touching it. A large number of them were women, too, I seem to recall the majority. I've been observing 10 years old featuring articles and getting to the rank of sysop at Wiki.pt (nobody knew how old they were at the time :P ), and now I'm seeing senior people at retirement age engaging with Wikidata - reality often is very different from what we imagine a priori.
I believe the potential is all there, we just need to understand who our targets are, and the proper way to get to them. And be creative on the ways to approach, not getting stuck to the old edithatons (of which efficiency I have many doubts, apart from some specific situations such as art+feminism which are also about activism, and so have a potential to result).
Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well,
at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done about it).
Mobile editing really is a problem. I've been trying for months to engage new editors in Guinea-Bissau and Angola, and mobile editing really has shown to be a very powerful barrier for the participation on those places where everybody has a cell phone (sometimes even 3 of them, as I've been told is the case in Guinea-Bissau), but desktop computers are extremely rare.
We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks.
We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
i don't believe it is correct to mix those things. The people that edit-war about trifles are often not the same that can propose, discuss and develop those higher scale improvements and evolutions; or at least they are in a very different mindset when they are doing that. And that kind of "trifle war" is useful, too, and sometimes lead to significative improvements in the quality of the articles. It's not always a Byzantine thing. I recall a conflict at wiki.pt between "Bombaim" and "Mumbai" as the proper name for the Indian city, when it was officially changed, which led to significative improvements on the etymology section, and the history of the region in the article.
Cheers,
Paulo (DarwIn)