Post from elsewhere, forwarded with author's permission.

From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case dancase@frontiernet.net Date: 3 April 2011 14:44

[quote snipped]

Just a little contrarianism on this ...

Should we be worried about the trendline in newer editors (and more on this below) or the trendline in total edits, which IIRC doesn't seem to have dipped so much as more established editors are editing more (this seems to fit with my personal experience)?

As for the "lack of editors that stick", I decided to do some mild research on this one day. I looked at the English Wikipedia's user creation logs for a day last summer (always the last day of a month, for reasons that will become clear below), and then roughly the same day several years in the past for several years, going all the way back to 2003 when, by the tone of our current discussions, we "weren't" having this problem.

I discovered that on those days at least, which I have no reason to assume were atypical, thousands of accounts were created. And almost all of them never edited even once. Not last summer. Not years before. Not in 2003.

Certainly someone else can do more formal research and come up with actual numbers. But as for me I think it's ridiculous at worst and premature at best to say that new users are becoming less sticky when, it seems to me, they have in fact never been particularly sticky.

[quote snipped]

I do think that would help, especially as a generation of users grows up that's used to a more parallel, less serial online environment as is found at Facebook and elsewhere. We ought to have:

A live-chat/IM function within MediaWiki, to allow for more efficient collaboration between users. I see some younger users at meetups and such editing with a small IRC window open in the corner, interacting with another editor while they edit. There's no reason it should be so cumbersome as to require two different programs on two different servers. (Perhaps at some point in the future this could include video). In that vein, with privacy settings that allow for this, an editor could set things up to allow other users to see what they're editing as they're editing it. Going further, I remember the now-abandoned Google Wave being demonstrated at a conference. When the demonstrator showed how it could be used so that two people editing the same page at once could see what the other editor was doing, very loud spontaneous applause broke out. We need something like that. We could have other Facebook-inspired social features: in addition to the current userpage widget which allows you to let others know if you're logged-in or not, why not some sort of userpage "wall" that could, when activated, be updated without having to edit the page and allow some sort of summary of what the editor's working on now, or at the least a live feed of edits with summaries. (For all I know, maybe something like this already exists).

Social networking has allowed the online work environment to more closely mirror the real-world environment of an office, where most people know at least generally what their coworkers are doing and can look away from the monitor briefly and talk to them while still working. While I have no problem with the level of interaction and collaboration currently available, I'm only speaking for myself, and I think younger editors weaned on the social-network experience may be wanting something we can't readily give them. Yet.

Daniel Case