--- El jue, 26/11/09, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com escribió:
De: Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com Asunto: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted article Para: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Fecha: jueves, 26 de noviembre, 2009 11:36 Read http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedi...
Article is based on Felipe Ortega's research. There are two claims from this article:
Hello, Milos, all.
- English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net
loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period in 2008
Please, read the following blog post, which I already supervised in consensus with Erik Moller, explaining the difference between "retaining editors" (the numbers displayed in WSJ original article) and "monthly number of active editors"
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/11/26/wikipedias-volunteer-story/
- There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules.
"which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. 'There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.'"
This is Andrew Dalby's quote, not mine.
I would like to hear from Felipe clarification of the claim that 49,000 contributors left Wikipedia. If it is so, then en.wp has around ten times more fluctuation of contributors. (According to statistics [1], there are no significant changes between the first months of 2008 and 2009.) If it is so, we should try to understand why is it so.
The second claim produced a lot of *relevant* testimonies from Wikipedian work. Please, read them. For the first time I see highly relevant discussion on Slashdot about Wikipedia structure. All of them are talking about current problems of Wikipedia.
Problems are now visible at such level, that main stream media are talking about them [2]. I would say that we need some radical moves to stop current negative trends inside of the projects. Which? I don't know. We should think about them. (Actually, I have a couple of possible changes in my mind, which are not radical. However, their implementation would need radical changes. Because of bureaucracy.)
[1] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm [2] - http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article693...
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