Tim Starling wrote:
OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend.
We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing.
Is there any evidence to support these claims? From what I understand, a lot of Wikipedia's best new content is added by anonymous users.[1] Thousands more editors are capable of registering and editing without much interaction with the broader Wikimedia community at all. If there's evidence that mean admins are a credible threat to long-term viability, I'd be interested to see it.
Given that there are about 770 active administrators[2] on the English Wikipedia and I think you could reasonably say that a good portion are not mean, is it really quite a few people who are having this far-reaching impact that you're suggesting exists? That seems unlikely.
Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, then we could burn out the majority of the Internet population before we figure out what's going on. Increasing the number of new editors by a large factor will increase the anxiety level of admins, and thus accelerate this process.
I think the growth should be organic. With a better interface in place, a project has a much higher likelihood of successful, healthy growth.
One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment.
Endless backlogs are going to draw people in? Delayed gratification is going to keep people contributing? This proposal seems anti-wiki in a literal and philosophical sense.
MZMcBride
[1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/abstracts/TR2007-606/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_administrators