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