[Foundation-l] Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline

[Delirium]

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