At the page [1] you may see complete data for a number of lists (of bigger projects). Below this email is my analysis of data.
In brief, you may read inside of the analysis: * Almost all lists are in decrease. * Decrease varies between rare significant, but not high decreases and rare dead lists. In other words, the most of the lists are in significant decrease: Some of them since 2005, more of since 2007-2008.
Positive and "positive" trends: * Technical lists show the smallest amount of decrease. * Two [of analyzed] lists -- textbook-l and wikija-l -- show *increase* of traffic! It would be good to analyze why it is so. Maybe they have the answer to our problem: increasing of list traffic usually means that community is increasing. (Or they are just in the earlier phase, which means that they will show decrease of traffic during the next year or two.)
"Trivia": * Russian Wikipedians don't use WMF based lists for their communication. (Or they don't use mailing lists at all, which seems to me less possible.) * Portuguese list doesn't have extension "-l" in the name.
So, some numbers are analyzed. Unlike simple claims like "foundation-l traffic decreased", we have now significant enough data: decrease is systematic, not only at one list and in amount of emails, but on almost all of [analyzed, bigger] lists and in amount of new and active participants. This shows very well that our community and our communities are not so alive like they had been in the past.
And to be more clear. If we take a look at traffic at this list for Octobers 2006-2008, we may see that the approximation of decline is 20% for the first year and 50% for the second. If this trend continues, we will have ~175 emails during the next October, ~50 during October 2010, ~10 during October 2011. According to the statistics of other lists -- 10 emails during October means no emails between June and September. This means that foundation-l will be in 2012 at the position where wikiquote-l is no (de facto dead list).
And some good news: * We have enough time to change things. * If content projects would become history, MediaWiki would be alive for some more time.
The question is: Do we have ideas how to make things better?
[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Problems/List/Low_activity_on_mailing_lists
* * *
== Analysis: Data interpretation ==
=== General lists ===
* Communication on all general lists are decreasing. Technical lists (wikitech-l and mediawiki-l) are significantly better than general non-technical list foundation-l. Out of other particular cases, technical lists stays the best.
=== Project lists ===
* commons-l has very high decrease in traffic, while decreases in number of new and active participants are significant, while not so high. * textbook-l (Wikibooks list) is one of the rare examples which is not in decreasing! * wikimediameta-l increases, while it is a very young list, which should take community part of discussion from foundation-l list. However, increase on this list is not significant enough to cover (at least, partially) decrease at foundation-l. * wikinews-l: Similarly to foundation-l -- significant decrease. * wikipedia-l: It shows very high decrease in all aspects. During the first years it was used as the main list, including for Wikipedia in English. Decrease 2002-2003 shows moving Wikipedia in English issues to the language specific list -- wikien-l. Decrease 2005-2006 probably shows moving general issues to foundation-l. However, 2006-2008 doesn't have any obvious reason and it follows the similar decrease on the foundation-l list. * wikiquote-l: While it was not a very active list ever, this list is de facto dead from June 2008. * wikisource-l: While it was not a very active list ever, it shows ''not'' significant decrease during 2008. * wikispecies-l: This list was not significantly active ever and conclusions about time line of its activity can't be made. * wiktionary-l: The list was in decrease during 2006 and again between mid-2007 and present (October 2008).
=== Per language Wikipedias ===
* wikide-l: In constant decrease since the first half of 2005. * wikien-l: In decrease since the beginning of 2008. * wikies-l: In increase from the second part of 2006 and during 2007, but in decrease during 2008; the second part 2008 has less traffic than the second part of 2006. * wikifr-l: In constant decrease since the end of 2005. * wikiit-l: In constant decrease since the beginning of 2007. * wikija-l: The only analyzed Wikipedia list which shows increase of traffic -- since the beginning of 2006. * wikipl-l: In constant decrease since the second half of 2005. * wikipt: While it was never a very active list, it is almost dead (3 emails for October 2008, no emails between June and September). * wikiru-l: Data shows that the community around Wikipedia in Russian doesn't use wikiru-l as their mailing list. * wikizh-l: In constant decrease since the second half of 2006.
Good work Milos. I like the breadth and depth of your stats.
On the more general point though, I don't think this is mailing list problem. As Wikipedia matures, the community at the largest scales has been contracting. Hopefully we will stabilize at some reasonably productive level, but in many ways the peak level of activity already appears to be behind us.
-Robert Rohde
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 10:27 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
At the page [1] you may see complete data for a number of lists (of bigger projects). Below this email is my analysis of data.
In brief, you may read inside of the analysis:
- Almost all lists are in decrease.
- Decrease varies between rare significant, but not high decreases and
rare dead lists. In other words, the most of the lists are in significant decrease: Some of them since 2005, more of since 2007-2008.
Positive and "positive" trends:
- Technical lists show the smallest amount of decrease.
- Two [of analyzed] lists -- textbook-l and wikija-l -- show
*increase* of traffic! It would be good to analyze why it is so. Maybe they have the answer to our problem: increasing of list traffic usually means that community is increasing. (Or they are just in the earlier phase, which means that they will show decrease of traffic during the next year or two.)
"Trivia":
- Russian Wikipedians don't use WMF based lists for their
communication. (Or they don't use mailing lists at all, which seems to me less possible.)
- Portuguese list doesn't have extension "-l" in the name.
So, some numbers are analyzed. Unlike simple claims like "foundation-l traffic decreased", we have now significant enough data: decrease is systematic, not only at one list and in amount of emails, but on almost all of [analyzed, bigger] lists and in amount of new and active participants. This shows very well that our community and our communities are not so alive like they had been in the past.
And to be more clear. If we take a look at traffic at this list for Octobers 2006-2008, we may see that the approximation of decline is 20% for the first year and 50% for the second. If this trend continues, we will have ~175 emails during the next October, ~50 during October 2010, ~10 during October 2011. According to the statistics of other lists -- 10 emails during October means no emails between June and September. This means that foundation-l will be in 2012 at the position where wikiquote-l is no (de facto dead list).
And some good news:
- We have enough time to change things.
- If content projects would become history, MediaWiki would be alive
for some more time.
The question is: Do we have ideas how to make things better?
[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Problems/List/Low_activity_on_mailing_lists
== Analysis: Data interpretation ==
=== General lists ===
- Communication on all general lists are decreasing. Technical lists
(wikitech-l and mediawiki-l) are significantly better than general non-technical list foundation-l. Out of other particular cases, technical lists stays the best.
=== Project lists ===
- commons-l has very high decrease in traffic, while decreases in
number of new and active participants are significant, while not so high.
- textbook-l (Wikibooks list) is one of the rare examples which is not
in decreasing!
- wikimediameta-l increases, while it is a very young list, which
should take community part of discussion from foundation-l list. However, increase on this list is not significant enough to cover (at least, partially) decrease at foundation-l.
- wikinews-l: Similarly to foundation-l -- significant decrease.
- wikipedia-l: It shows very high decrease in all aspects. During the
first years it was used as the main list, including for Wikipedia in English. Decrease 2002-2003 shows moving Wikipedia in English issues to the language specific list -- wikien-l. Decrease 2005-2006 probably shows moving general issues to foundation-l. However, 2006-2008 doesn't have any obvious reason and it follows the similar decrease on the foundation-l list.
- wikiquote-l: While it was not a very active list ever, this list is
de facto dead from June 2008.
- wikisource-l: While it was not a very active list ever, it shows
''not'' significant decrease during 2008.
- wikispecies-l: This list was not significantly active ever and
conclusions about time line of its activity can't be made.
- wiktionary-l: The list was in decrease during 2006 and again between
mid-2007 and present (October 2008).
=== Per language Wikipedias ===
- wikide-l: In constant decrease since the first half of 2005.
- wikien-l: In decrease since the beginning of 2008.
- wikies-l: In increase from the second part of 2006 and during 2007,
but in decrease during 2008; the second part 2008 has less traffic than the second part of 2006.
- wikifr-l: In constant decrease since the end of 2005.
- wikiit-l: In constant decrease since the beginning of 2007.
- wikija-l: The only analyzed Wikipedia list which shows increase of
traffic -- since the beginning of 2006.
- wikipl-l: In constant decrease since the second half of 2005.
- wikipt: While it was never a very active list, it is almost dead (3
emails for October 2008, no emails between June and September).
- wikiru-l: Data shows that the community around Wikipedia in Russian
doesn't use wikiru-l as their mailing list.
- wikizh-l: In constant decrease since the second half of 2006.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Good work Milos. I like the breadth and depth of your stats.
On the more general point though, I don't think this is mailing list problem. As Wikipedia matures, the community at the largest scales has been contracting. Hopefully we will stabilize at some reasonably productive level, but in many ways the peak level of activity already appears to be behind us.
Yes, it is not a mailing list problem. Mailing lists activities just show other trends.
At the other side, I think that Wikimedian community and culture are too precious for the world to be left far below its peak.
A very interesting analysis of the situation. It might now be interesting to correlate this to other communication methods in community use, to see if actual discussion has decreased or if it has shifted to other channels.
Ian
On 10/30/08, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
At the page [1] you may see complete data for a number of lists (of bigger projects). Below this email is my analysis of data.
In brief, you may read inside of the analysis:
- Almost all lists are in decrease.
- Decrease varies between rare significant, but not high decreases and
rare dead lists. In other words, the most of the lists are in significant decrease: Some of them since 2005, more of since 2007-2008.
Positive and "positive" trends:
- Technical lists show the smallest amount of decrease.
- Two [of analyzed] lists -- textbook-l and wikija-l -- show
*increase* of traffic! It would be good to analyze why it is so. Maybe they have the answer to our problem: increasing of list traffic usually means that community is increasing. (Or they are just in the earlier phase, which means that they will show decrease of traffic during the next year or two.)
"Trivia":
- Russian Wikipedians don't use WMF based lists for their
communication. (Or they don't use mailing lists at all, which seems to me less possible.)
- Portuguese list doesn't have extension "-l" in the name.
So, some numbers are analyzed. Unlike simple claims like "foundation-l traffic decreased", we have now significant enough data: decrease is systematic, not only at one list and in amount of emails, but on almost all of [analyzed, bigger] lists and in amount of new and active participants. This shows very well that our community and our communities are not so alive like they had been in the past.
And to be more clear. If we take a look at traffic at this list for Octobers 2006-2008, we may see that the approximation of decline is 20% for the first year and 50% for the second. If this trend continues, we will have ~175 emails during the next October, ~50 during October 2010, ~10 during October 2011. According to the statistics of other lists -- 10 emails during October means no emails between June and September. This means that foundation-l will be in 2012 at the position where wikiquote-l is no (de facto dead list).
And some good news:
- We have enough time to change things.
- If content projects would become history, MediaWiki would be alive
for some more time.
The question is: Do we have ideas how to make things better?
[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Problems/List/Low_activity_on_mailing_lists
== Analysis: Data interpretation ==
=== General lists ===
- Communication on all general lists are decreasing. Technical lists
(wikitech-l and mediawiki-l) are significantly better than general non-technical list foundation-l. Out of other particular cases, technical lists stays the best.
=== Project lists ===
- commons-l has very high decrease in traffic, while decreases in
number of new and active participants are significant, while not so high.
- textbook-l (Wikibooks list) is one of the rare examples which is not
in decreasing!
- wikimediameta-l increases, while it is a very young list, which
should take community part of discussion from foundation-l list. However, increase on this list is not significant enough to cover (at least, partially) decrease at foundation-l.
- wikinews-l: Similarly to foundation-l -- significant decrease.
- wikipedia-l: It shows very high decrease in all aspects. During the
first years it was used as the main list, including for Wikipedia in English. Decrease 2002-2003 shows moving Wikipedia in English issues to the language specific list -- wikien-l. Decrease 2005-2006 probably shows moving general issues to foundation-l. However, 2006-2008 doesn't have any obvious reason and it follows the similar decrease on the foundation-l list.
- wikiquote-l: While it was not a very active list ever, this list is
de facto dead from June 2008.
- wikisource-l: While it was not a very active list ever, it shows
''not'' significant decrease during 2008.
- wikispecies-l: This list was not significantly active ever and
conclusions about time line of its activity can't be made.
- wiktionary-l: The list was in decrease during 2006 and again between
mid-2007 and present (October 2008).
=== Per language Wikipedias ===
- wikide-l: In constant decrease since the first half of 2005.
- wikien-l: In decrease since the beginning of 2008.
- wikies-l: In increase from the second part of 2006 and during 2007,
but in decrease during 2008; the second part 2008 has less traffic than the second part of 2006.
- wikifr-l: In constant decrease since the end of 2005.
- wikiit-l: In constant decrease since the beginning of 2007.
- wikija-l: The only analyzed Wikipedia list which shows increase of
traffic -- since the beginning of 2006.
- wikipl-l: In constant decrease since the second half of 2005.
- wikipt: While it was never a very active list, it is almost dead (3
emails for October 2008, no emails between June and September).
- wikiru-l: Data shows that the community around Wikipedia in Russian
doesn't use wikiru-l as their mailing list.
- wikizh-l: In constant decrease since the second half of 2006.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
"Trivia":
- Russian Wikipedians don't use WMF based lists for their
communication. (Or they don't use mailing lists at all, which seems to me less possible.)
They do not use any mailing lists at all as far as I know. At least I am not aware of existence of any mailing lists for ru.wp
Cheers Yaroslav
Ian's and Yaroslav's comments are related:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Ian A. Holton poeloq@gmail.com wrote:
A very interesting analysis of the situation. It might now be interesting to correlate this to other communication methods in community use, to see if actual discussion has decreased or if it has shifted to other channels.
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 9:17 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
"Trivia":
- Russian Wikipedians don't use WMF based lists for their
communication. (Or they don't use mailing lists at all, which seems to me less possible.)
They do not use any mailing lists at all as far as I know. At least I am not aware of existence of any mailing lists for ru.wp
First, as you (Yaroslav) is active here, I would like to know what Russian Wikipedians are using for communication. Just wiki? Some other ways of communication? Wikipedia in Russian is not a small project, as well as it is growing -- which demands some level of systematic coordination. I think that the answer on this question may be very significant at least in understanding some part of lists traffic decrease.
Also, Japanese Wikipedians (anyone reading this?) may give to us a relevant answer. At least during the last decades, whenever I was getting informations about technology development, Japan was at the top. From computers usage, via mobile phone usage, up to very distinctive high-tech culture. If the general trends are toward decreasing of email communications, then, for sure, wikija-l would show more decrease than other lists. However, their activity is increasing! Also, Japanese Wikipedia is one of the biggest for a long time, so it can't be explained with less activity in the past and increasing of activity in the present (like the Russian case is). Are they one step forward (culturally), so we may expect similar development in the future? Or it is because of some specific reason? In both cases, this answer may be very significant!
At last, if email-like communication is moved to social networks, like Facebook is, then we have to go there, too. (Or, as I was talking in the past: to make a social networking site from Wikimedia projects.)
They do not use any mailing lists at all as far as I know. At least I am not aware of existence of any mailing lists for ru.wp
First, as you (Yaroslav) is active here, I would like to know what Russian Wikipedians are using for communication. Just wiki? Some other ways of communication? Wikipedia in Russian is not a small project, as well as it is growing -- which demands some level of systematic coordination. I think that the answer on this question may be very significant at least in understanding some part of lists traffic decrease.
The main channel of communication is wiki: basically, the village pump which is structured as a number of pages, for instance for instance, general, news, rules, technical issues and such. So far it worked. Important issues are branched out as separate rfc's.
Some of the Wikipedians (not me) are full-time present on irc channel.
A creation of a mailing list for sysops only was recently proposed but was eventually rejected.
There is of course personal communication, and there are even some Wikipedians (not me again) who insist that most of the issues should be discussed privately.
The Russian chapter is in the creation stage and does not have its own communication channel as far as I know.
I am not aware of any other signifgicant communication channels (I recollect there is a collective blog which is half-dead and there is a decision of arbitration committee that this blog is not a part of the community), may be there are some more I do not know of, but it is unlikely. There are information channels of course, for instance, similar to wikizine. but they do not involve any discussions and are not widespread (at least now).
Some of the prominent ru.wp editors are subscribed to this list, I assume they will correct me if they have a different perspective.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
They do not use any mailing lists at all as far as I know. At least I am not aware of existence of any mailing lists for ru.wp
First, as you (Yaroslav) is active here, I would like to know what Russian Wikipedians are using for communication. Just wiki? Some other ways of communication? Wikipedia in Russian is not a small project, as well as it is growing -- which demands some level of systematic coordination. I think that the answer on this question may be very significant at least in understanding some part of lists traffic decrease.
The main channel of communication is wiki: basically, the village pump which is structured as a number of pages, for instance for instance, general, news, rules, technical issues and such. So far it worked. Important issues are branched out as separate rfc's.
Some of the Wikipedians (not me) are full-time present on irc channel.
A creation of a mailing list for sysops only was recently proposed but was eventually rejected.
There is of course personal communication, and there are even some Wikipedians (not me again) who insist that most of the issues should be discussed privately.
The Russian chapter is in the creation stage and does not have its own communication channel as far as I know.
I am not aware of any other signifgicant communication channels (I recollect there is a collective blog which is half-dead and there is a decision of arbitration committee that this blog is not a part of the community), may be there are some more I do not know of, but it is unlikely. There are information channels of course, for instance, similar to wikizine. but they do not involve any discussions and are not widespread (at least now).
Some of the prominent ru.wp editors are subscribed to this list, I assume they will correct me if they have a different perspective.
Hm. At the first sight, I haven't found anything interesting. But, I took a look to statistics (stats.wikimedia.org) and I realized that one of the possible answers is laying in ru.wp community.
First, I didn't see anything special; just different communication channels. But, it may be the part of the answer, too. Using wiki as a communication channel is more productive.
Then I went to stats (statistics are from May 2008) and compared the data for the next Wikipedias: - (English and German are not so relevant because statistics are old.) - I took French and Italian as "the ordinary cases" -- as their lists show decline. - Russian and Japanese are "not so ordinary cases". - I took Serbian, too, to compare data with my knowledge.
So, before I started, I had supposed the next: - French [1] and Italian [2] should show signs of stagnation and decline (according to the data from the lists). - Serbian [3] should show signs of stagnation and decline (according to my knowledge: it is in the similar situation as other "ordinary cases"). - Russian [4] should show signs of stagnation: it started to raise, but it should be around the peak. So, if not decline, stagnation is expected. - Japanese [5] should show signs of low raising (according to the data from the list).
I was just partially right: - I was right for French, Italian and Serbian Wikipedias. - Russian doesn't show signs of stagnation, but signs of linear raise (not exponential, like it was during the first years of Wikipedia, of course). - Japanese is in stronger decline than French, Italian and Serbian.
Before the particular analysis, just to explain what which behavior means to us in the case of new users: - Linear growth: (a) in the sense of project growth: exponential growth (n^m); (b) in the sense of long term sustainability: linear growth. - Stagnation: (a) in the sense of project growth: linear growth (n*m); (b) in the sense of long term sustainability: stagnation (which is just fine at the position where Wikimedia is globally now). - Decreasing: (a) in the sense of project growth: logarithmic growth (n*1/m); (b) in the sense of long term sustainability: decline.
Here is the explanation of importance of charts: - Contributors: This is not the best chart to look in. Number of contributors can't fall and it is reasonable to expect some raise every month -- if it is not about really small projects nor very big problems at some project. Also, changes are not so visible (analysis by just looking into it assumes measuring of curve angle). - New Wikipedians: This is a very good and visible indicator. Linear raising of the number assumes exponential growth; stagnation in numbers assumes linear growth (the best possible development for us in this situation), while decreasing number of Wikipedians means problems for us. - Active and very active Wikipedians: They are connected to the new Wikipedians. If the number of NW (per month) raises, the number of AW raises, if number of NW stagnates, number of AW stagnates; if number of NW decreases, number of AW will decrease. The connection is simple: some Wikipedians are leaving; if there is a number of others to replace them, the number will stagnate; if there are more new Wikipedians, the number will decrease; if there are more than enough newcomers, number of active Wikipedians raises. - Edits per month. This indicator has one more important value than just signaling the number of active and very active contributors. A lot of house keeping tasks may be done automatically, so this number has to be in more or less constant correlation with the number of articles. - Other charts are relatively straight-forward. One more created article means growing of database size and growing of number of articles; and similar.
So, conclusion related to analyzed Wikipedias (and according to the data up to May 2008) is: - There are problems with French, Italian and Serbian Wikipedias. If such trends continues, we would loose sustainability there. - Japanese Wikipedia has serious problems; even data from the list (from January to May) shows different situation. Again, it should be good to hear, this time because the opposite reason, what is going on there. - Russian Wikipedia (up to May 2008, of course) is going fine (linear growth at the project level, stagnation at the long term sustainability). Why is it so -- it should be analyzed.
The only reasons which I may detect is a very strong ArbCom. If ArbCom is able to say "that something is not a part of the community", then, AFAIK, it is stronger than (still strong) en.wp ArbCom.
[1] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm [2] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaIT.htm [3] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaSR.htm [4] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaRU.htm [5] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaJA.htm
The problem we have is well measuring the community and the activities. I am looking forward that the UNU-MERIT survey will be a huge step to knowing "us" better.
Activity on malinglists and Wikimedia Statistics can only give hints, but not tell us about the quality of mails and edits. This is again trying to read something from Statistics that cannot be read from them.
A decrease of the total number of edits in a WP language edition can mean, for example, a decrease of vandalism. Or: WP rules have been discussed largely, now Wikipedians do less discussions. Or: Wikipedians have learned to do more within one single edit when writing an article etc. Or: The Poplar Bluff syndrome (bot generated geographical stubs / pseudo articles) with its aftermath has settled.
A "New Wikipedian" can be simply a vandal, having made 5 edits in a month (en.WP will not ban him so fast). Maybe the potential vandals have lost the fun, or are all blocked, that's why we have less new Wikipedians etc. It is also natural that people create less articles or edit less because many articles already exist and are well written.
It may be true that "there is a stagnation or decline", but I cannot see substantial evidence for ... well, what is it exactly we mean that shows "stagnation" or "decline"?
Ziko van Dijk
2008/10/30 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
They do not use any mailing lists at all as far as I know. At least I
am
not aware of existence of any mailing lists for ru.wp
First, as you (Yaroslav) is active here, I would like to know what Russian Wikipedians are using for communication. Just wiki? Some other ways of communication? Wikipedia in Russian is not a small project, as well as it is growing -- which demands some level of systematic coordination. I think that the answer on this question may be very significant at least in understanding some part of lists traffic decrease.
The main channel of communication is wiki: basically, the village pump which is structured as a number of pages, for instance for instance, general, news, rules, technical issues and such. So far it worked. Important issues are branched out as separate rfc's.
Some of the Wikipedians (not me) are full-time present on irc channel.
A creation of a mailing list for sysops only was recently proposed but
was
eventually rejected.
There is of course personal communication, and there are even some Wikipedians (not me again) who insist that most of the issues should be discussed privately.
The Russian chapter is in the creation stage and does not have its own communication channel as far as I know.
I am not aware of any other signifgicant communication channels (I recollect there is a collective blog which is half-dead and there is a decision of arbitration committee that this blog is not a part of the community), may be there are some more I do not know of, but it is unlikely. There are information channels of course, for instance, similar to wikizine. but they do not involve any discussions and are not widespread (at least now).
Some of the prominent ru.wp editors are subscribed to this list, I assume they will correct me if they have a different perspective.
Hm. At the first sight, I haven't found anything interesting. But, I took a look to statistics (stats.wikimedia.org) and I realized that one of the possible answers is laying in ru.wp community.
First, I didn't see anything special; just different communication channels. But, it may be the part of the answer, too. Using wiki as a communication channel is more productive.
Then I went to stats (statistics are from May 2008) and compared the data for the next Wikipedias:
- (English and German are not so relevant because statistics are old.)
- I took French and Italian as "the ordinary cases" -- as their lists
show decline.
- Russian and Japanese are "not so ordinary cases".
- I took Serbian, too, to compare data with my knowledge.
So, before I started, I had supposed the next:
- French [1] and Italian [2] should show signs of stagnation and
decline (according to the data from the lists).
- Serbian [3] should show signs of stagnation and decline (according
to my knowledge: it is in the similar situation as other "ordinary cases").
- Russian [4] should show signs of stagnation: it started to raise,
but it should be around the peak. So, if not decline, stagnation is expected.
- Japanese [5] should show signs of low raising (according to the data
from the list).
I was just partially right:
- I was right for French, Italian and Serbian Wikipedias.
- Russian doesn't show signs of stagnation, but signs of linear raise
(not exponential, like it was during the first years of Wikipedia, of course).
- Japanese is in stronger decline than French, Italian and Serbian.
Before the particular analysis, just to explain what which behavior means to us in the case of new users:
- Linear growth: (a) in the sense of project growth: exponential
growth (n^m); (b) in the sense of long term sustainability: linear growth.
- Stagnation: (a) in the sense of project growth: linear growth (n*m);
(b) in the sense of long term sustainability: stagnation (which is just fine at the position where Wikimedia is globally now).
- Decreasing: (a) in the sense of project growth: logarithmic growth
(n*1/m); (b) in the sense of long term sustainability: decline.
Here is the explanation of importance of charts:
- Contributors: This is not the best chart to look in. Number of
contributors can't fall and it is reasonable to expect some raise every month -- if it is not about really small projects nor very big problems at some project. Also, changes are not so visible (analysis by just looking into it assumes measuring of curve angle).
- New Wikipedians: This is a very good and visible indicator. Linear
raising of the number assumes exponential growth; stagnation in numbers assumes linear growth (the best possible development for us in this situation), while decreasing number of Wikipedians means problems for us.
- Active and very active Wikipedians: They are connected to the new
Wikipedians. If the number of NW (per month) raises, the number of AW raises, if number of NW stagnates, number of AW stagnates; if number of NW decreases, number of AW will decrease. The connection is simple: some Wikipedians are leaving; if there is a number of others to replace them, the number will stagnate; if there are more new Wikipedians, the number will decrease; if there are more than enough newcomers, number of active Wikipedians raises.
- Edits per month. This indicator has one more important value than
just signaling the number of active and very active contributors. A lot of house keeping tasks may be done automatically, so this number has to be in more or less constant correlation with the number of articles.
- Other charts are relatively straight-forward. One more created
article means growing of database size and growing of number of articles; and similar.
So, conclusion related to analyzed Wikipedias (and according to the data up to May 2008) is:
- There are problems with French, Italian and Serbian Wikipedias. If
such trends continues, we would loose sustainability there.
- Japanese Wikipedia has serious problems; even data from the list
(from January to May) shows different situation. Again, it should be good to hear, this time because the opposite reason, what is going on there.
- Russian Wikipedia (up to May 2008, of course) is going fine (linear
growth at the project level, stagnation at the long term sustainability). Why is it so -- it should be analyzed.
The only reasons which I may detect is a very strong ArbCom. If ArbCom is able to say "that something is not a part of the community", then, AFAIK, it is stronger than (still strong) en.wp ArbCom.
[1] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaFR.htm [2] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaIT.htm [3] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaSR.htm [4] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaRU.htm [5] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaJA.htm
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On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
The problem we have is well measuring the community and the activities. I am looking forward that the UNU-MERIT survey will be a huge step to knowing "us" better.
Activity on malinglists and Wikimedia Statistics can only give hints, but not tell us about the quality of mails and edits. This is again trying to read something from Statistics that cannot be read from them.
A decrease of the total number of edits in a WP language edition can mean, for example, a decrease of vandalism. Or: WP rules have been discussed largely, now Wikipedians do less discussions. Or: Wikipedians have learned to do more within one single edit when writing an article etc. Or: The Poplar Bluff syndrome (bot generated geographical stubs / pseudo articles) with its aftermath has settled.
A "New Wikipedian" can be simply a vandal, having made 5 edits in a month (en.WP will not ban him so fast). Maybe the potential vandals have lost the fun, or are all blocked, that's why we have less new Wikipedians etc. It is also natural that people create less articles or edit less because many articles already exist and are well written.
It may be true that "there is a stagnation or decline", but I cannot see substantial evidence for ... well, what is it exactly we mean that shows "stagnation" or "decline"?
So, you are saying that: - Mailing lists have less traffic because we are more mature and we learned the most important things about each other, which means that we are talking now less, about more important things. - New participants of Wikimedia projects are not interested in joining the lists (note: lists, not just this one) because they are introduced enough in Wikimedia projects by using other communication channels. - Decrease of new Wikipedians are product of less vandals. - Decrease of number of edits (from, let's say, Malay Wikipedia with 31,000+ articles to French with 720,000+ articles) is a product of the fact that there is not a lot of things to be written anymore.
I would say that: - We have some problem or set of problems (not necessarily in house) which made us less attractive. - Because of that, number of new Wikipedians is decreasing. - Because of decreased number of new Wikipedians, we have less edits and less active people on mailing lists. - Because of less active people on mailing lists, we have smaller amount of emails on the lists.
While I don't say that your explanation (or something similar) is not possible, I think that my explanation is more possible.
This is perhaps simplistic and applies mostly to this particular list, but volume has been actively discouraged in various ways over the last year or more by complaints and discussions on ways to decrease volume. Most often cited reason for complaining about posts was the quality of posts made by high volume posters - many who complained about that phenomena also mentioned that they were unsubscribing, or no longer actively reading the list as a result.
The point is that not all declines result from decreased interest or reflect a general decline in participation. As others have pointed out, traffic moves between lists - and more and more often, from public to private lists and other private forms of communication. One other interesting tidbit, though, is that conversation on IRC channels in English seems to have declined significantly as well. No idea how you could find or parse statistics for that.
Nathan
Just as a thought: quantity of posts on the two private lists I subscribe to are down. Both used to average 10+ posts a day. Both now average half or less of that.
Quantity of posts to unblock-en-L is down significantly. It's down to 3 or 4 posts a day with some exceptions but rarely exceeding 10. I remember some days in the past it was upwards of 20 or 30.
Interestingly enough, my posting level on this list is also quite a bit down, though I still read every email, it's mainly due to the topic matter of the past 2 months or so not being my cup of tea the way it has been in prior months.
-Dan On Oct 30, 2008, at 8:49 AM, Nathan wrote:
This is perhaps simplistic and applies mostly to this particular list, but volume has been actively discouraged in various ways over the last year or more by complaints and discussions on ways to decrease volume. Most often cited reason for complaining about posts was the quality of posts made by high volume posters - many who complained about that phenomena also mentioned that they were unsubscribing, or no longer actively reading the list as a result.
The point is that not all declines result from decreased interest or reflect a general decline in participation. As others have pointed out, traffic moves between lists - and more and more often, from public to private lists and other private forms of communication. One other interesting tidbit, though, is that conversation on IRC channels in English seems to have declined significantly as well. No idea how you could find or parse statistics for that.
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Nathan wrote:
This is perhaps simplistic and applies mostly to this particular list, but volume has been actively discouraged in various ways over the last year or more by complaints and discussions on ways to decrease volume. Most often cited reason for complaining about posts was the quality of posts made by high volume posters - many who complained about that phenomena also mentioned that they were unsubscribing, or no longer actively reading the list as a result.
Indeed, volume alone isn't inherently a positive thing. A reduction in volume may signal a loss of interest in participation, or a change in signal-to-noise ratio, or a shift in participation to other forums, or a combination of all of these things.
The common wisdom is that mailing lists in general have been falling out of favor on the net for a while. Outside the wiki itself I see lots of Wikimedia-related activity on blogs, chat, and microblogging services like identi.ca, communication channels which some may find easier to mentally filter than a high-traffic mailing list.
A danger with these sorts of shifts is fragmentation of the discourse -- it used to be that everybody who was anybody had their Serious Discussions on wikipedia-l (later split into wikipedia-l, wikitech-l, wikien-l, intlwiki-l, foundation-l, .....) Bloggy-chatty things at least tend to link around among themselves, so perhaps splitting isn't too dangerous there, but I don't have a good feel for how much *actual productive planning* gets done on these channels.
Of course, many people seem to feel that *actual productive planning* doesn't tend to happen on the lists anymore -- conversations just go 'round and 'round and never end.
Let's not forget this is a wiki world -- be bold! Actions speak louder than posts... ;)
- -- brion
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
...but I don't have a good feel for how much *actual productive planning* gets done on these channels.
Of course, many people seem to feel that *actual productive planning* doesn't tend to happen on the lists anymore -- conversations just go 'round and 'round and never end.
Let's not forget this is a wiki world -- be bold! Actions speak louder than posts... ;)
- -- brion
I can't speak for all of the lists (I'm on a select few these days), but I know for a fact wikitech-l is alive and kicking :)
-Chad
If the lists were diverged because volume was high and effective communication was difficult, then it may make sense to recombine previously diverged lists now that volume is decreasing. There is a communication trade off in both high volume lists and a complex list hierarchy - we went to a complex hierarchy seemingly to mitigate high volume, but with lower volume we've retained the complex system. Simplifying it may bring people back together. Something to consider, anyway.
Nathan
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
A danger with these sorts of shifts is fragmentation of the discourse -- it used to be that everybody who was anybody had their Serious Discussions on wikipedia-l (later split into wikipedia-l, wikitech-l, wikien-l, intlwiki-l, foundation-l, .....) Bloggy-chatty things at least tend to link around among themselves, so perhaps splitting isn't too dangerous there, but I don't have a good feel for how much *actual productive planning* gets done on these channels.
Hi,
Milos, thanks so much for this analysis and your opinions about it.
2008/10/31 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
Indeed, volume alone isn't inherently a positive thing. A reduction in volume may signal a loss of interest in participation, or a change in signal-to-noise ratio, or a shift in participation to other forums, or a combination of all of these things.
It's true, but Milos' initial thesis was that the reduction in mailing list traffic reflected the reduction in new community members.
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?
Is it a genuine concern or are we looking too locally? Does everything still look cool on the 20 year scale?
The common wisdom is that mailing lists in general have been falling out of favor on the net for a while. Outside the wiki itself I see lots of Wikimedia-related activity on blogs, chat, and microblogging services like identi.ca, communication channels which some may find easier to mentally filter than a high-traffic mailing list.
Yeah, blogs in particular weren't so significant two years ago (although I probably have an inflated sense of their importance now as I keep one, and as with Gerard I have often been guilty of writing to it instead of a mailing list).
Shifting is not so bad in itself, but the responses have not shifted with the initial conversations. It is my observation that WMF Board and staff respond much less to blogs than they ever do to mailing lists.
Here is a funny thing. Wiki editing is a time expensive habit. I have not done serious intensive editing for quite a number of months now. There is a direct correlation between my starting a fulltime job and my decrease in editing. :)
But I am still on many (many) mailing lists and I still join many more. Because Gmail is far better at allowing me to ignore things I'm not interested in, than my wiki watchlist, and it comes to me rather than me to it. In theory I could add my watchlist RSS feed to my feed reader, but it is far far far too fine grained. I don't know how it could strike the right balance. You know those services that send you like a daily/weekly summary email of activity on their service? e.g. Groups you're a member of had these new discussions/additions, x people left you a message/invitation, x people added y new friends, etc. Some kind of summary service like that for Wikimedia wikis would be freaking awesome. It would be nice to have some more points between uber-committed and not-involved. The only point in between I know is to read blogs and mailing lists, so that is what I do.
Gosh, it would suck if Wikimedia slowly died in the arse because of a lack of decent communication tools. That would be tragic, but that does seem to be what we are missing. The right tool is like a bullet. I don't even have an easy way to, say, contact all the Wikimedians in my home city. Sure I can edit a city wikiproject page, and a meetup page, but relying on the right people to be watching them is a bloody long shot. And that's just people I would probably be familiar with. Or I could somehow construct a list of users and then contact a bot operator to leave them all a message?... ugh. What if I wanted to reach a X-language speaking admin in two different projects? Probably impossible. Too much effort in the face of very likely defeat to even be worth trying. Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
Speaking for myself again. I suspect another reason for my own shift from project editing to blogging & chapter work, aside from the inherent value in those things, is that they give me some value that mostly anonymous wiki editing does not. (I don't mean anonymous as in editing-as-IP. I mean anonymous as in whoever looks at that page can't easily tell who wrote it.) I think we as a community as not very good at audibly appreciating one another. I think we are bad at saying thankyou. It's not surprising; wikis are about the success of the group rather than the individual after all. At a certain level of editing the inherent joy of it was reward enough. But after tackling protracted disputes, unpopular or tedious deletion requests, invisible patrolling etc etc out of a feeling of admin's or oldtimer's duty, I found it hard to convince myself that I was making any kind of difference. Burnout. Barnstars are good if used sparingly but there is no consistent recognition. (I felt special on receiving on once until I checked the giver's contribs and noticed he bestowed the same one on a couple of dozen people in half an hour.) So why the shift to blogging. The appreciation is not any better, but it is a reputation-building tool in a way that a contributions page with thousands of entries (without context or summary) is not. Or maybe all that wiki editing created a reflexive desire to be The Author. :) As for chapter work, it stands for something in the Real World and is not washed away next month. And people say thankyou more often when you are face to face or even just when you have met them before and they are thus more than a username. Also, chapter people made like 80-90% of the awesome people that I met at Wikimanias. They are very inspiring for me.
The increase in tech also doesn't surprise me (aside from MediaWiki's own development momentum). Building useful tools that can stand for a long time is definitely better for the ego than, as I say, anonymous changes washed away next month. And much less pesky (wiki-)politics, hm? (Although then there are bug reports and feature requests...)
Brianna
Hi Brianna,
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Gosh, it would suck if Wikimedia slowly died in the arse because of a lack of decent communication tools. That would be tragic, but that does seem to be what we are missing. The right tool is like a bullet. I don't even have an easy way to, say, contact all the Wikimedians in my home city. Sure I can edit a city wikiproject page, and a meetup page, but relying on the right people to be watching them is a bloody long shot. And that's just people I would probably be familiar with. Or I could somehow construct a list of users and then contact a bot operator to leave them all a message?... ugh. What if I wanted to reach a X-language speaking admin in two different projects? Probably impossible. Too much effort in the face of very likely defeat to even be worth trying. Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
We've actually been using some tools like this for not-yet-official Wikimedia New York City on the English Wikipedia.
Here's a fantastic tool for contacting local folks by IP address called "Geonotice":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice
It's currently not operational, but we have plans to revive it soon.
We've also been putting messages on talk pages by bot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BrownBot
thanks to Cbrown's help.
These may seem like awkward or unusual channels for communication, but I think we really have to be creative in building broad communities for local chapter work.
Thanks, Pharos
2008/11/3 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
Here's a fantastic tool for contacting local folks by IP address called "Geonotice":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice
It's currently not operational, but we have plans to revive it soon.
Oh yeah... that is useful (well it was when it was operational). But I am not sure it would scale very happily if every meetup used it. And it only works for location-related notifications. And it doesn't work cross-project. But, still useful.
We've also been putting messages on talk pages by bot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BrownBot
thanks to Cbrown's help.
These may seem like awkward or unusual channels for communication, but I think we really have to be creative in building broad communities for local chapter work.
But how many wikiproject/meetup organisers would know that? It's not an *insurmountable* task but we sure don't make it easy or obvious.
As with Milos and Robert I think it would work best if communication tools were built directly into MediaWiki, for best uptake and effectiveness. But gosh, I'm sure not counting on that happening within my wiki lifespan. We don't even have a central watchlist. We don't even have global prefs. The functionality wishlist is so long that if we are waiting for that to be fulfilled we are definitely doomed. That is part of why tools built on top of MW (toolserver tools, javascript gadgets etc) are so important.
Brianna
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
I've done some a little research on this issue, and this appears to be the most promising option:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)
It's open source, relatively popular, and is used in academic communities.
Thanks, Pharos
Brianna
-- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/
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On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
I've done some a little research on this issue, and this appears to be the most promising option:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)
It's open source, relatively popular, and is used in academic communities.
I think that it should be solved differently. Wikia already has some kind of extended profile which includes some basic social networking abilities.
It is expensive (in the sense of contributors' attention) to run two different models. Even keeping blogs at Planet Wikimedia (officially) and at Open Wiki Blog Planet (unofficially), as well as at some other places (unofficially in different languages; I know, at least, for French version) -- is expensive.
At the other hand, MediaWiki is able to be extended in that direction (which Wikia used extension shows). Also, contributors would be able to ask for new features more dynamically, as well as it would be a significant development path for MediaWiki itself.
In other words, I would like to see a very rudimentary extension (like Wikia's) with solved inter-project issues for the beginning. When we have that, we would be able to think about improvements.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 8:06 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
I've done some a little research on this issue, and this appears to be the most promising option:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)
It's open source, relatively popular, and is used in academic communities.
I think that it should be solved differently. Wikia already has some kind of extended profile which includes some basic social networking abilities.
It is expensive (in the sense of contributors' attention) to run two different models. Even keeping blogs at Planet Wikimedia (officially) and at Open Wiki Blog Planet (unofficially), as well as at some other places (unofficially in different languages; I know, at least, for French version) -- is expensive.
At the other hand, MediaWiki is able to be extended in that direction (which Wikia used extension shows). Also, contributors would be able to ask for new features more dynamically, as well as it would be a significant development path for MediaWiki itself.
In other words, I would like to see a very rudimentary extension (like Wikia's) with solved inter-project issues for the beginning. When we have that, we would be able to think about improvements.
Personally, I'd like to see more social interaction/networking tools built into Mediawiki. However, after seeing the incredible pushback on enwiki surrounding things like Esperanza [1] and to a lesser degree Userboxes [2], I am somewhat skeptical about whether the community would actually embrace social networking tools.
There are many who seem to feel that using Wikipedia for socializing and fun is contrary to our mission, especially if it attracts people who aren't contributors to the encyclopedia. Personally, I think that's nonsense, and the community benefits from increased cohesion when there is fun and socializing to be had, but I realize that many people don't see it that way.
-Robert Rohde
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Userboxes
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:19 AM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 8:06 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
I've done some a little research on this issue, and this appears to be the most promising option:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)
It's open source, relatively popular, and is used in academic communities.
I think that it should be solved differently. Wikia already has some kind of extended profile which includes some basic social networking abilities.
It is expensive (in the sense of contributors' attention) to run two different models. Even keeping blogs at Planet Wikimedia (officially) and at Open Wiki Blog Planet (unofficially), as well as at some other places (unofficially in different languages; I know, at least, for French version) -- is expensive.
At the other hand, MediaWiki is able to be extended in that direction (which Wikia used extension shows). Also, contributors would be able to ask for new features more dynamically, as well as it would be a significant development path for MediaWiki itself.
In other words, I would like to see a very rudimentary extension (like Wikia's) with solved inter-project issues for the beginning. When we have that, we would be able to think about improvements.
Personally, I'd like to see more social interaction/networking tools built into Mediawiki. However, after seeing the incredible pushback on enwiki surrounding things like Esperanza [1] and to a lesser degree Userboxes [2], I am somewhat skeptical about whether the community would actually embrace social networking tools.
There are many who seem to feel that using Wikipedia for socializing and fun is contrary to our mission, especially if it attracts people who aren't contributors to the encyclopedia. Personally, I think that's nonsense, and the community benefits from increased cohesion when there is fun and socializing to be had, but I realize that many people don't see it that way.
We should keep in mind that there is a much broader community out there beyond Wikimedians, who are interested in cooperative efforts in promoting priojects.
Personally, we've had great success working with the 2 Students For Free Culture chapters in New York City, who have supported Wikimedia projects as ardently as any Wikimedians.
On a level of real-life organization, there should be no sharp line between people with Wikimedia user accounts and those without. The basic skills in organizing real-life events and projects are orthogonal to particular technical skills or specializations.
What we really need is a social networking site for the whole Free Culture/Open Source community, so that we can build a thousand coalitions in a thousand different cities.
In researching this idea, I happened upon this proposal last year from the Free Software Foundation for a "Planet Libre":
http://www.libervis.com/article/july_2007_letter_to_free_software_foundation...
That particular initiative appears to have foundered over recent months. I suggest we should revive it, and in cooperation with Free Software Foundation, develop a "Planet Libre" social networking site based on Elgg.
Thanks, Pharos
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2008/11/3 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Is it too much to say we need our own Facebook? If only Ning was open source.
I've done some a little research on this issue, and this appears to be the most promising option:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)
It's open source, relatively popular, and is used in academic communities.
Looks neat. I also note http://openacademic.org/ which is apparently trying to achieve some integration of Elgg, Moodle, Drupal and MediaWiki. MediaWiki-related posts: http://openacademic.org/taxonomy/term/4. I think they are just talking about using OpenID + Special:Export/Special:Import to share data, which to my mind is not particularly integrated, but I guess it's something.
Brianna
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. =]
There are still plenty of communities and meta-discussions, but they tend to be more decentralized--- I participate in discussions all the time about various content areas on the English Wikipedia, often organized around Wikiprojects. These tend to focus on more specific versions of general issues like verifiability, e.g. the role of ancient sources versus modern scholarship in referencing articles about classical antiquity (general consensus: citing Herodotus directly is not best practice).
I guess I don't see all this as a bad thing. I know a fairly large number of people who don't consider themselves Wikipedians who nonetheless do good work on Wikipedia. In fact I'd say they continue to edit Wikipedia only *because* they can just edit articles in peace-- if they had to know what an Arbitration Committee was, needed to be aware of what a Board of Directors did, or deal with a million acronymed policy pages, they would probably not bother. But fortunately if you're working in some area like medieval history, it doesn't come up that often-- you really don't need to know about any policy or meta-activity except "write a neutral and referenced article that accurately summarizes scholarly consensus on the subject".
Speaking for myself again. I suspect another reason for my own shift from project editing to blogging & chapter work, aside from the inherent value in those things, is that they give me some value that mostly anonymous wiki editing does not. (I don't mean anonymous as in editing-as-IP. I mean anonymous as in whoever looks at that page can't easily tell who wrote it.)
I've gone the opposite direction, which is interesting. :) I participated in a lot of meta discussions early on partly because it was a smallish group where I knew everyone that seemed to be doing something unique and useful, and partly because it felt like I could actually influence its direction. These days I don't see that much scope for that in meta-type activity, at least when it comes to the things I care about--- it feels like I would put in a lot of time for no particular outcome.
Writing articles, meanwhile, has a pretty tangible outcome, especially as Wikipedia has become the first-line go-to source for information: If I write the Wikipedia article on a subject, this influences how a pretty large number of people will get their first introduction to that subject. In some cases it influences whether that information will be available easily on the internet at all. In academia anyway, I also get a bit of credit for it; it depends on who you're talking to, but many people are impressed by "I wrote the Wikipedia articles on [x, y, z], check them out"; you can even consider it something like "service to the community" in a CV sense.
-Mark
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
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 6:27 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- wikiit-l: In constant decrease since the beginning of 2007.
As regards wikiit-l, a major reason for the decrease is that most of the traffic has been absorbed by the Italian chapter mailing list + we created a ml for sysops. I'm not sure about the trend of these lists, I'll have a look and will report soon.
Thanks for the insight, it's really a good work. Cruccone
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com wrote:
As regards wikiit-l, a major reason for the decrease is that most of the traffic has been absorbed by the Italian chapter mailing list + we created a ml for sysops. I'm not sure about the trend of these lists, I'll have a look and will report soon.
Yes, it may be a possible reason for decrease. For example, Serbian Wikimedians were never really using any other list out of the internal one. However, like in correlation between wikipedia-l - wikien-l - foundation-l - metawikimedia-l -- it may be just a wrong impression. For example, wikipedia-l in its peak in October 2002 had more emails than all four lists have together now.
I'll prepare software to be used by others in the next couple of days, so you would be able to analyze your private lists.
Marco Chiesa wrote:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 6:27 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- wikiit-l: In constant decrease since the beginning of 2007.
As regards wikiit-l, a major reason for the decrease is that most of the traffic has been absorbed by the Italian chapter mailing list + we created a ml for sysops. I'm not sure about the trend of these lists, I'll have a look and will report soon.
Thanks for the insight, it's really a good work. Cruccone
To second this point...
The french wp list is still a little bit alive. Not much. 39 emails in october (which is quite high compared to previous months).
However, the french chapter lists are overall very active. We have three of them.
One is private, but anyone can join it (it is meant to avoid public archives of our discussions). I can count 23 emails in october. This one is hosted by WMF.
The membership one is private and restricted to members. It is quite nicely active. 87 emails in october This one is hosted by the French chapter, so does not enter into your stats. I did not check, but I think numbers are quite stable or rising.
The last one is the board one. Its members are current board members, plus previous still active board members. Say a dozen people. 207 emails in october. This one is hosted by the French chapter, so does not enter into your stats. I did not check, but I am sure numbers are rising.
This suggests three things to me.
First, when you argue that only a couple of chapters are active and doing things, you actually miss all the discussions happening on chapters hosted lists. The overal wikimedia mouvement is not limited to lists hosted by WMF, nor to wikis hosted by WMF btw (the French Chapter wiki is very active). So, I guess your figures are slightly biaised because you lack some information to make it truely complete. There has obviously been a transfer of discussions from public WMF lists to chapter lists. I'm not saying that's good or bad. That's just a fact. Transfer. And a consequence of it is balkanization.
Second, your stats include only emails sent on public lists hosted by WMF. For having been a long time on the board, I know for a fact a lot of activity goes on on private lists (such as the board list). This activity might balance part of the decrease of activity of public lists. What we used to discuss here, on public lists, moved there.
However, I completely agree (without any need to check figures) that most internal lists are in decrease as well (that's the case of the comcom list and of internal list quite obviously). And I share your concern on this.
The original move to the private lists (both WMF and chapter related) is due to the increase of public interest for any of our discussions. A lot of what used to be freely discussed publicly moved to private lists to avoid being published within hours in the press. Probably an escape from trolls as well :-)
However, the public and internal lists suffers three damages.
First damage: because of leaks, everything slightly confidential or even controversial is no more discussed. Neither on public, nor on private lists. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Second damage: the staff of WMF grew larger and does not discuss much on lists. So, many topics which used to be discussed on lists are now discussed in office. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Third damage: internal lists are quite cabalistic :-) Just consider internal-l and see how many new members joined in 2006 ? in 2007 ? in 2008 ? I think by and large, most people who joined in 2008 are staff members. Or previous members who were at risk of being removed because they stopped being staff or board members. Proposition of new names is looked with serious suspicion. New blood is now extremely rare, and does not replace those who become inactive. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Last, I agree with Michael. High discussion does not necessarily mean "lot's done". And lot's can be done without much discussion. The main problem as I see it is not decrease of emails sent on lists (I am slightly happy with this :-)), but decrease of communication between members or groups. We are growing. We are so numerous we can not discuss things easily on lists anymore. To scale, we need to break down in smaller groups. But we need to work on making sure communication between groups is still happening. I am not convinced lists do that best.
Ant
However, the public and internal lists suffers three damages.
First damage: because of leaks, everything slightly confidential or even controversial is no more discussed. Neither on public, nor on private lists. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Second damage: the staff of WMF grew larger and does not discuss much on lists. So, many topics which used to be discussed on lists are now discussed in office. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Third damage: internal lists are quite cabalistic :-) Just consider internal-l and see how many new members joined in 2006 ? in 2007 ? in 2008 ? I think by and large, most people who joined in 2008 are staff members. Or previous members who were at risk of being removed because they stopped being staff or board members. Proposition of new names is looked with serious suspicion. New blood is now extremely rare, and does not replace those who become inactive. Consequence: decrease of list volume
I do not really understand your third reason, but may be it is not that important. But the first two seem to me to touch a very important issue - what should be actually the content of the mailing lists. I do not think it is a good idea to discuss confidential issues in any public communication channel, including mailing lists (but also including other channels like blogs or whatever). On the other hand, in the example of the board members discussing more things in the office - well, if these things are not intended for non-members, they should not be discussed in public anyway, and whether the Board members or staff choose to discuss it in the office, by phone, in the closed mailing list or secure intrernet forum is entirely their business. On the other hand, if they start discussing in private things which should be discussed by the community, I do not find this a good idea. I realize of course that certain (in fact, most of) initiatives can be only prepared as a part of private communication, since the signal to noise ration of any public cnahhel is too low, and public discussion may be not so efficient at the brainstorming phase. But these initiatives should be discussed in public after they get prepared, and I am afraid this is what now slowly retreats from the mailing lists.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
First, when you argue that only a couple of chapters are active and doing things, you actually miss all the discussions happening on chapters hosted lists. The overal wikimedia mouvement is not limited to lists hosted by WMF, nor to wikis hosted by WMF btw (the French Chapter wiki is very active). So, I guess your figures are slightly biaised because you lack some information to make it truely complete. There has obviously been a transfer of discussions from public WMF lists to chapter lists. I'm not saying that's good or bad. That's just a fact. Transfer. And a consequence of it is balkanization.
There was some problem in communication :) (and related to the other thread). I didn't say that just a couple of chapters are active, I don't think that the only activity of chapters are related to PR and gathering money. What I did say is something else: A lot of things may be done without chapters, even a cooperation at high enough levels, like cooperation with universities is. Chapters are needed for making fulfilling some "real needs": a place for Wikimedians, funds, infrastructure.
While I am not sure that any chapter has a PR strategy (if it has, it would be very good to share with other chapters), I think that just two of chapters are able to fund some projects. If some other chapters are able to fund some projects, they are not showing this. (And, yes, I missed that WM FR has some infrastructure; which would make the initial list of three chapters wider for one more. Which raises the second question: Signals that some chapter has some infrastructure should be sent. WM CH, WM DE and WM PL are sending such signals. For the first time I heard now from you that WM FR hosts some lists; and it is about Wikimedia Taiwan or Wikimedia Israel about whom I don't have any clue. And, yes, again, I used too strong words in the first email.)
And both of the issues (PR and funds) are very important. I explained why PR is important in the first email of the other thread: we need more contributors and we are not anymore a miracle. And for funds: I am working in the company which took a lot of funds from EU (note, I am living and working in non-EU country, which has less access to EU funds than any EU country). Bureaucracy needed for that is small part of time of one person (of course, educated in that issue). Any EU chapter with staff has a possibility to take significant funds for projects (significant = a good part of WMF budget). This would make possible a lot of things: it is not related to the amount of money, it is related to the fact that today any Wikimedia-related project proposal which assumes money -- assumes asking limited WMF staff.
And for the end of this issue: I didn't blame anyone for inactivity or whatever. All of us are doing the best which we are able to do in relation to our free (and not so free) time. The problems are of such type that we need to think how to make things differently, to be able to function.
However, the public and internal lists suffers three damages.
First damage: because of leaks, everything slightly confidential or even controversial is no more discussed. Neither on public, nor on private lists. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Second damage: the staff of WMF grew larger and does not discuss much on lists. So, many topics which used to be discussed on lists are now discussed in office. Consequence: decrease of list volume
Third damage: internal lists are quite cabalistic :-) Just consider internal-l and see how many new members joined in 2006 ? in 2007 ? in 2008 ? I think by and large, most people who joined in 2008 are staff members. Or previous members who were at risk of being removed because they stopped being staff or board members. Proposition of new names is looked with serious suspicion. New blood is now extremely rare, and does not replace those who become inactive. Consequence: decrease of list volume
I am trying to say that the most serious problem is significantly less number of new participants. There are a number of reasons why it is so: confidential issues shouldn't be discussed publicly, people feels better if they are talking privately, WMF staff has its own dynamics... If the product of those reasonable tendencies is good -- we have a system which works fine. If the product is not good -- we have systematic problem. I think that we are much closer to the second scenario than to the first. It doesn't mean, of course, that confidential issues should be discussed publicly etc., but it means that we need to think about it and try to solve it.
The chinese community doesn't use the mailing list. They mostly use village pump or skype.
Ting
Ting Chen wrote:
The chinese community doesn't use the mailing list. They mostly use village pump or skype.
Ting
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
To be more specific, we have various chat rooms on Skype, for example one or two for general talks (not Wikipedia specific), one or two for Wikipedia talks, one for Wikinews talks, one for Wikipedia administrators, one for Bureaucrats. These are which I know of. There are also other base on similar interests of individual users.
Ting
- Two [of analyzed] lists -- textbook-l and wikija-l -- show
*increase* of traffic! It would be good to analyze why it is so. Maybe they have the answer to our problem: increasing of list traffic usually means that community is increasing. (Or they are just in the earlier phase, which means that they will show decrease of traffic during the next year or two.)
I would suggest that textbook-l traffic is up because we have had several announcements lately, such as getting the Collection extension enabled last week. In fact, the most voluminous threads over the past 6 months have been on the subject of PDF generation, with one exception (a licensing issue). I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from that additional information, but I think the low level of traffic overall is probably relevant to an accurate determination in that case.
-Mike
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:47 PM, mikelifeguard@fastmail.fm wrote:
- Two [of analyzed] lists -- textbook-l and wikija-l -- show
*increase* of traffic! It would be good to analyze why it is so. Maybe they have the answer to our problem: increasing of list traffic usually means that community is increasing. (Or they are just in the earlier phase, which means that they will show decrease of traffic during the next year or two.)
I would suggest that textbook-l traffic is up because we have had several announcements lately, such as getting the Collection extension enabled last week. In fact, the most voluminous threads over the past 6 months have been on the subject of PDF generation, with one exception (a licensing issue). I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from that additional information, but I think the low level of traffic overall is probably relevant to an accurate determination in that case.
Simply, you are working on specific goals. If this is the answer, it is a very very simple one :)
So, maybe the question should be redefined to others: How many specific goals do have other projects and supporting mailing lists?
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:47 PM, mikelifeguard@fastmail.fm wrote:
- Two [of analyzed] lists -- textbook-l and wikija-l -- show
*increase* of traffic! It would be good to analyze why it is so. Maybe they have the answer to our problem: increasing of list traffic usually means that community is increasing. (Or they are just in the earlier phase, which means that they will show decrease of traffic during the next year or two.)
I would suggest that textbook-l traffic is up because we have had several announcements lately, such as getting the Collection extension enabled last week. In fact, the most voluminous threads over the past 6 months have been on the subject of PDF generation, with one exception (a licensing issue). I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from that additional information, but I think the low level of traffic overall is probably relevant to an accurate determination in that case.
Simply, you are working on specific goals. If this is the answer, it is a very very simple one :)
So, maybe the question should be redefined to others: How many specific goals do have other projects and supporting mailing lists?
Mike, thanks! As more as I am thinking, I am more sure that you gave us the right answer. It is a simple one, but the right one. If we don't know for reasons why it is so at other places, we learned what the cure is.
Moving statistics issues in this thread...
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Commons is in a constant and significant decrease since May 2007.
[snip]
Milos, you are in error.
See "Active authors" is holding steady just fine.
Counting new users registrations is flawed because many registrations are just vandals or the confused public and they never edit. A decrease in new accounts can just mean that less people are confused. For some projects, like enwp, the majority of accounts created are of this type. I'm also not sure how SUL creations are getting counted, I suspect they aren't.
The better metrics are usually the most direct ones. Active contributor counts haven't seen much change, for example, Uploads to commons continue at a nice clip.
Obviously there will be some up and down activity: We should expect seasonal variation, just as is seen in traffic levels on major internet backbones. It's important to be mindful that the absence of explosive growth is not a decline. Nothing can grow explosively forever.
For the moment I really thought that I concluded that based on new authors :)
But, first of all, the field "new authors" is not about new registrations, it is about "new active authors", which means that they made more than 5 edits at the site. (As far as I am introduced, please correct me if I am wrong.)
Do we have someone here who passed some basic course in statistics? (As I think that there are someone), may that person draw the curve based on Commons data [1] for:
* New authors * Active authors * Very active authors * New articles per day * Edits per month
I didn't tell that Commons is in significant decrease since August 2006 because it was just new authors-based. However, the number of new authors per month for the period August 2006 -- May 2008 passed from 170 to 25 (btw, May 2008 is the second worst month at all, after the second month of Commons existence). This is decrease for somewhat more than 85%. But, to count just Mays: 2005: 157, 2006: 156, 2007: 113, 2008: 25. In percentages this is: -<1%, -17%, -77%. This is not seasonal, this is about Mays.
Active authors and very active authors are in decrease, too. For the last few years, the top for active authors was in May 2007 (688), the bottom at December 2007 (472), while in May 2008 there were 537 active authors. This is more than 20% decrease for one year. May 2006 was better than May 2008 with 595 active contributors. So, we had raising for 15% for one year and decreasing for more than 20% for another.
Very active users was on peak in April 2007 (34). So, here are similar statistics for Mays: 2005: 25 (however, April, May and June 2005 were not usual; something was happened then which attracted new contributors and raised activity; surrounding months are giving that conclusion), 2006: 21, 2007: 29, 2008: 21: so, -16%, +17%, -17%
It would be very dramatic if we lost 77% of very active contributors for one year. But, loosing 17% of them for one year is a serious issue.
Also, again, I didn't say that we are close to the bottom, I said that we are in the middle of a serious crisis. We are too high to reach the bottom quickly.
Note that decreasing the number of (very) active contributors is the most conservative indicator. A person who is devoted to some project -- is not willing to abandon it. However, it is natural that someone changed their life, doesn't want to contribute at that place anymore or so. To fill empty places we need much more new contributors. A lot of new ones will finish their work on the project after the first or the second month. Just small amount of them will stay at the project for longer period of time. By loosing new contributors we are loosing sustainability: "retired" contributors are not replaced with new ones.
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