Anne,
Thanks for the extra perspective. The post-2007 decline in 100+ editors on en:WP may
indeed reflect a decline in vandalism reverts.
The most interesting point to me was that de:WP introduced flagged revisions in spring
2008, across the board, and that editor numbers appear to have remained completely
unaffected. In de:WP, at least, overall participation levels did not *drop* as a result of
flagged revisions.
Andreas
You raise an interesting point, Andreas. I am not
persuaded that pending
changes/flagged revisions have anything to do with the
editor retention rate
at the de:WP. However, I think you may be right that the
considerably more
homogeneous editor population, as well as the commonality
in cultural
background, was instrumental in the ability of the project
to jointly make
such a cultural shift. Indeed, the number of de:WP editors
with >100
edits/month has remained very stable since January 2006.
(The number of
en:WP editors was essentially the same in January 2006 as
at present, but
hit its peak in April 2007. Let's not cherry pick the data
too much, okay?)
As an aside for those interested in the historical
perspective, the massive
increase in the number of editors on en:WP coincides with a
massive influx
of vandalism, and over a thousand editors did almost
nothing *but* revert or
otherwise address vandalism. As better and more effective
tools have been
developed to address that problem - Huggle, Twinkle,
Friendly, the edit
filters, reverting bots, semi-protection, etc - the number
of editors needed
to manage vandalism has diminished dramatically. In other
words, that
1300-editor difference may largely be accounted for because
those whose only
skill was vandal-fighting have moved on. That's not to say
there is no
vandalism on en:WP today; there's still plenty of it.
Observing from afar, it has often struck me that when
almost all members of
an editorial community come from a common cultural
background and geographic
area, there is a synergy that isn't found on projects where
the community is
much more diverse. This is best illustrated in the
large scale on German
Wikipedia, and some other European projects, where the
community is visibly
more cohesive. In the smaller scale, certain projects with
shared
cultural/geographic background on English Wikipedia, such
as Wikiproject
Australia, are more accomplished at developing and meeting
shared
objectives. These groups, whether large projects or
small pockets within a
larger project, seem to operate in accordance with their
local cultural
norms; in other words, they don't have to find common
cultural ground before
they can move on to a discussion of a proposal.
It's my belief that the common cultural background of the
de:WP editorial
community has been one of the keystones of its success in
being able to
implement large-scale and project-wide changes, flagged
revisions being the
most obvious. That common cultural background or
focal geographic area
simply does not exist for the English Wikipedia; we're
probably one of the
few projects where the same expression can be viewed as
friendly, somewhat
rude and downright offensive at the same time, depending on
whether the
reader is Australian, British or American (not to mention
those who have
learned English as a second language, which also makes up a
significant part
of our editorship).
Each project also has its own culture, but I confess that
most of my
knowledge of the culture of other projects is anecdotal
rather than
observational, so I won't venture to try to compare them.
When faced with dramatic increases in vandalism, en:WP
created tools that
are largely developed by individuals and utilized by other
individuals (with
the exception of semi-protection); de:WP developed a single
unified
community response. The remarkably high quality of
the tools used on en:WP
means that any new systemic tool has to meet a very high
threshold for it to
be considered acceptable for wide-scale use. Perhaps
that is the key
difference between these two community types: one places
more emphasis on
making cohesive group decisions, while the other more
strongly encourages a
range of solutions. I don't have any answers, just
observations.
Risker/Anne
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