Brianna Laugher wrote:
Does anyone feel that the community in general is
more vibrant and
spirited than it was two years ago? Does anyone feel that there are
more new people coming through the ranks? And this activity dropoff is
actually an anomaly rather than a reflection of reality?
I don't.
Is wiki editing not the cool internet habit that it used to be? Is
Wikipedia too popular, too fossilised now? Why aren't we enrapturing
the college students that we were just a few years ago?
Well, perhaps not a cool internet habit, but I think only to the extent
that it's no longer some underground thing that people are still trying
to work out the usefulness of. I think if anything it's due to Wikipedia
being hugely successful, having gotten over its growing pains to be more
or less a thing that people accept. Some reasonable parameters for how
to go about the projects have already been worked out to a great enough
extent that they're useful and can be accepted as givens (e.g.
verifiability, an increase in referencing, etc.), and so a large number
of Wikipedia editors these days just edit Wikipedia, but don't
participate in meta-discussions *about* Wikipedia. That is, we're done
with the early phase of discussing how to go about building an
encyclopedia, and are now mostly focusing on actually building an
encyclopedia. =]
Sometimes I ask myself whether I am the only one on this list who still
edits articles on a regular basis. I thought everyone who actually writes
content there sees some very much clearly posed problems, like almost full
absence of full-size specialized articles (mostly in science, but also in
humanities). It is interesting of course that people go blogging instead
of writing the actual content, but I am afraid even if we completely solve
this point by integrating blogs / irc / whatever with Wikimedia, it is not
going to improve the above problems.
Cheers
Yaroslav