Wikipedia in Portuguese editor here. From our stats, I understand we have been fairly steady for many years, without much disruption apart from a very significant increase in active editors after IP editing was banned from there. However, I have detected a number of possible causes which may be hindering growth:

Trend from PCs to cell phones and similar appliances. Few people nowadays use PCs for their hobbies apart from gamers, and those are usually gaming. Since editing in a cell phone can equate a punishment from hell, it's not surprising that it has been increasingly difficult to reach young targets, though gamers continue being a loyal pool;
Kind of a subpoint of the above, people who newly connect to the Internet usually do it by cell phone. This is a general case in some African countries, like Guinea Bissau - a lot of people are connected and read Wikipedia, but they are using devices that make editing impracticable, especially in their free time;
Google, ChatGPT and whatelse AI now provides well structured and easy to understand answers about most stuff people look for in the Internet, when before they had to read Wikipedia articles and try to understand what is there. This pushes down the number of viewers, and consequently new opportunities for people to hop on on Wikipedia;
The few people that actually join is often received by grumbling disgruntled non welcoming folk, who tells them everything they do is wrong and they should have read instructions before (and there are no tutorials worth of that name... 🙄 ) and stop short of saying the infamous Royston Vasey catch line - "This is a local project for local editors!";
And in cohorts with the above, the staggering lack of decent documentation, tutorials and whatelse, which will never be produced because quite obviously volunteers prefer to do something else.

On the positive side;

Banning IPs forces editors to actually have a relation/community channel with Wikipedia, which have been yielding very positive results;
Sources are mandatory for more than 10 years now, which had a very significant impact on the perceived quality of the encyclopedia, especially in the Brazilian market. This combines with the IP banning mentioned above, as IP editing seem to have been traditionally perceived, particularly in Brazil, as a signal of low content quality (Brazilian IPs even vandalized articles writing just that). Better quality attracts more quality editors;
The very significant outreach & engagement work of the Brazilian affiliate, Wiki Movimento Brazil, which is constantly bringing dozens of new editors, many of them later becoming power editors, not only in Wikipedia but Wikidata, Commons, Wikisource and Wikiversity.
This affiliate has been producing quality tutorials and documentation for years, which greatly help with newbie integration when they come via WMB programmes. However, it is my uinderstanding that this documentation is not well integrated with the projects themselves, so new editors coming from other places have difficulty finding it.

Just sharing my 2 cents. All the above is my opinion based on my own experience and stuff people tell, so as always, YMMV.

Best,

Paulo

The Cunctator <cunctator@gmail.com> escreveu (sábado, 12/10/2024 à(s) 16:32):

My perspective is to treat everyone as a "Wikipedian". Whether you edit a lot, admin, contribute only images, or participate one time in a jam, or simply rely on it was a reliable resource in an increasingly unreliable Internet, you're part of the community.

Being welcoming should absolutely be a bedrock principle.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned raising toddlers is how important it is to not assume bad intent but instead to be in a role of encouragement and safety, seeing experimentation in a positive light and teaching boundaries and rules by demonstration and example.

Experienced and active members of this community should try to set a positive example.

On Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 10:52 AM Delphine Ménard <delphine.menard@gmail.com> wrote:
"Imagine a World in which every single Wikipedia reader makes a good edit"

(And hence is not reverted, not told off and rather praised and encouraged).

It is interesting to think about transitory editors. People who will come for 6 months or a year, or two, when their life allows them the time and the mindset. I have wondered whether retention at all costs is the right way to look at what being part of our ecosystem is.

The investment might be different for someone who stays not too long. It might be less deep, more utilitarian (what are they learning that will be useful outside of Wikimedia?), geared on maximising quality edits and immediate reward rather than deep community integration.

I think we want to make sure that someone is welcome, trained and given tools they can use outside of our ecosystem, and shown quick ways to have fun so as to make them the irresistible ambassadors for the next wave of short-career editors.

This also means a very strong (not necessarily numerous) community backbone from seasoned editors who can teach well, are patient and don't mind teaching the same thing over and over again.

The main question being whether everyone needs to become a Wikimedian or whether it's enough they learn to reach out to a toolbox which includes editing Wikipedia once in a while, to do whatever it is they're doing professionally, or personally, better.

Cheers,

Delphine

Le sam. 5 oct. 2024 à 21:38, waltercolor--- via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> a écrit :

Perhaps what we need is also to add new Key Performance Indicators (Kpis).

Performance on Wikipedia is mainly evaluated by these indicators : number of active editors, number of articles created.

On the other hand, the rights of the contributors inside of the community (for being able to vote, etc...) are unequal and progressive and based on these three factors : seniority, industriousness, recent activity.

These kpis are all based on quantitative factors.

But there is no evaluation of the quality of the contributions.

But how establishing content based criterias and how measuring them ?

One thing that can be assessed is if a given modified or added accurate information is also correctly added or changed in all the other concerned articles to guarantee a coherence in Wikipedia.

Another one could be the evaluation of the impact of addition of new contents on Wikipedia on the display of the results of research tools like Google.

I made some quick and informal tests. I made screenshots of the results of a given research before and after adding some new names or sources in a given article.

It seems that some additions are taken quickly in account in the results of Google, ranking differently Wikipedia where there was previously no such content in the article (I speak from small additions in an existing article, not the creation of a new article).

And also, particularly, specific new sources used to back these additions that were before very hard to find for the same topic on the same research tool (it takes me sometimes hours and days to get Wikipedia compatible good sources about specific topics...) surface now on the research results. Probably they are still specific researches about the impact on Internet of addition of new Wikipedia content (micro-edition), but working on defining content Kpis seems crucial to attract new micro editors. Yes, adding a good information and a good source on Wikipedia, even if it's only a single one, has a direct and significative impact on the quality of the information displayed on Internet. We have to prove it and value it.

I'm convinced that there will never be so many intensive life-time editors in the future, but this can still be compensated by a lot of quality micro-editors, also including more women, who don't want to devote all their time to Wikipedia only, but are able to do quality editing with a significant impact on the information provided on Internet.

So quality must be added in our Kpis.

We can do a lot for getting more "micro-editors", including more creative tools and innnovative training materials (I'll present some objects at the next French Wikiconference).

I'm also sure that a specific Wikipedia app dedicated to a good editing palette would ease a lot the editing on Mobile.

Waltercolor
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