--- El jue, 26/11/09, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> escribió:
De: Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>
Asunto: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted article
Para: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Fecha: jueves, 26 de noviembre, 2009 11:36
Read
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikiped…
Article is based on Felipe Ortega's research. There are two
claims
from this article:
Hello, Milos, all.
1. 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/
2. 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/article69…
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