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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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.