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(a)gmail.com> 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 Cheers Yaroslav

Ian's and Yaroslav's comments are related: On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 8:20 AM, Ian A. Holton <poeloq(a)gmail.com> wrote: On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 9:17 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru> wrote: 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.)

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.

The chinese community doesn't use the mailing list. They mostly use village pump or skype. Ting

Ting Chen wrote: 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

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 10:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru> wrote: 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

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: 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. 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.

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

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 5:00 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: 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

Hi, Milos, thanks so much for this analysis and your opinions about it. 2008/10/31 Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: 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? 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 -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 8:06 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

Brianna Laugher wrote: 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". 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

2008/11/3 Pharos &lt;pharosofalexandria(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: 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 -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

Moving statistics issues in this thread... On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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.