Hoi, This thread was split from one that deals about statistics and puts forward the notion that we are in decline. This thread is about a need felt by several people that social networking functionality centred around WMF projects and communities.
The statistics that make sense in the first thread do not give a clue if social networking will provide a benefit. The indicators that we have is that many social networks have groups or causes that deal with WMF projects. The current social networks are islands, they do not allow people to interconnect between these networks and consequently the benefits for causes like our own is not what it could be.
A case in point, pfctdayelise shares with me membership of several social networks. Yesterday she told me about slideshare,net. It is a great environment to share slides. It is exactly what is useful for the presentations that I gave in the past. I have uploaded some presentations, and I added them to the WikiMedia Group where only 6 members share their presentations. Brianna did a great job on some of her presentations by adding a sound file to the presentation. My point is that this is exactly the kind of functionality that we ALL need, it is exactly the kind of functionality that we should embrace.
The statistics that have been considered are clearly irrelevant to me. Thanks, Gerard
http://www.slideshare.net/GerardMe http://www.slideshare.net/group/wikimedia
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:46 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 12:13 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com
wrote:
I don't see any reason for alarm in the data that we do have.
According to statistics which you gave (btw, thanks for pointing to them, I didn't know where to find them):
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/ChartsWikipediaCOMMONS.htm
Commons is in a constant and significant decrease since May 2007.
Most people have "found" Commons by now. "Binaries" continues to climb.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/ChartsWikipediaINCUBATOR.htm
In not so strong decrease since January 2008 (but we don't have data after May 2008)
Edits per month continues to climb.
Incubator fluctuates as projects migrate, and groups of people will arrive and leave together; as a result we would need to understand how this affect those stats in order to make good deductions from them.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/ChartsWikipediaSOURCES.htm
Old Wikisource is not so big project and it is not possible to make precise conclusions.
We'll come back and look at this one in a year! ;-)
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/EN/ChartsWikipediaZZ.htm
All Wiktionaries together stay well, this is true.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/ChartsWikipediaZZ.htm http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics
It seems that all Wikisources together had begun decrease at the beginning of 2008. However, according to the second link, it seem that they stays well.
The only stat going down is "new wikilibrarians". The number of Contributors continues to climb. The RC feed is increasingly becoming impossible to monitor; I'm not imagining things!.
(BTW, I would like to see a short explanation of the significance of ProofreadPage extension and pages which used them.)
A "page" in those stats indicates a page that has an accompanying image of the *original printed page* , which means that
- anyone can transcribe the text (even without understanding the language)
- the rest of the world can know with 100% certainty that our edition
is perfect, and has accurate bibliographic and provenance information.
BTW, again, number articles *will* raise except there are big problems. One new page per month means that there is one article more and somewhat bigger database. I explained in one of the previous emails [1] why some data are more relevant than others. (If you have objections to this approach, please let me know what are the errors of the method.)
Your focus on stats on "users" leads to bad results. All languages have a finite number of people that understand them, and the graph of new contributors is indicative of the gradual growth of the wiki into that population. When a wiki is small, the population doesnt know about it. When the wiki is large, the majority of the population knows about it, and most will have already decided whether they wish to participate or not. So, I dont put much weight on stats of new contributors. Also, most newcomers dont get the "wiki" bug. They deposit one or two pages, and then go away happy.
The number of active contributors is more important, but is still indicative of the stage the wiki is at, in relation to public awareness.
I understand that you were using stats about users to learn something about the health of the "community", and can see some value in it, however I much prefer to look at the content related stats : the growth of the wiki. The content. And all indicators there are looking OK on the projects.
I fail to see what is the problem when all of the indicators show the content namespaces are growing, even if it is a linear growth. We know that contributors often leave, but new people are filling their places, or the old people are being more productive.
The more difficult aspect to measure is the quality. For example, the German Wikisource stats look like they are having a hard time... their stats fluctuate a lot.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/ChartsWikipediaDE.htm
The reality is that they have been actively turning away contributors, because they have decided that they will not accept any text that isnt accompanied with page scans. Most people are not so dedicated that they will go to such lengths. I think it is a bad decision, but the result is that they have very good quality throughout their wiki, and the project members are more proud of their work, because they are working in a very orderly environment.
Quality attracts a different class of new contributor -- a rarer breed, but more likely to make highly valuable edits. But quality is _hard_, and enforcing quality results in less new contributors.
And, again, I would be really happy to see that I am wrong. I didn't spend significant time in analysis just because I like to spread defeatism; but to point to the problem.
The most important problem is that the statistics are stale. If you want to make big decisions, you need good data, and analyse it from many angles.
-- John Vandenberg
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