[Foundation-l] A brief, high level analysis of the total number of contributors and the anatomy of a decision

[Marc Riddell]

on 7/26/09 9:47 PM, Brian at Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu wrote:

> These are some excellent mailing list and Wikipedia stats that Erik has
> cooked up/refreshed, although kind of a pain to do meta-analysis on. You can
> however paste the html tables into OpenOffice Calc which is nice (after some
> serious complaints from your cpu!). The csv format was not very fun.
> 
> http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm
> 
> I notice that the 364 power posters (posters with more than 200 emails
> across all lists) account for 312569 / 458349 ~= 70% of all mailing list
> posts. Also, 164 of these power posters account for 46579 / 52201 ~= 90% of
> all posts to foundation-l. I denote this subclass of power posters uber
> posters. Combined with the project statistics we have (I realize this is
> somewhat arbitrary, but still quite interesting in my view):
> 
> 1 benevolent dictator, 7 board members, 27 foundation employees, 164 uber
> posters, 364 power posters, 635 wikimania attendees, 12927 very active
> wikipedians, 91067 active wikipedians, 744752 monthly wikipedians and 928022
> total wikipedians.
> 
> There are many other interesting numbers you could include. I couldn't find
> the total number of mailing list contributors and only an admin with access
> to all lists could give us the total number of subscribers. We could also
> compare the number of sysops etc.. across all wikis in addition to the total
> number of visitors and especially donors.
> 
> The most interesting part of this data to me is the power posters and uber
> posters. It would take a careful analysis of the anatomy of a decision to
> draw any conclusions from it. For example, you would need to draw links
> between conversations on the lists, conversations on the wiki and
> conversations in person to know how many people actually contribute to a
> decision, and it would be interesting to see the average number of
> contributors to decisions weighted by the importance of that decision,
> further scaled by other factors. My feeling though is that a relatively
> small number of uber posters act as voices that are representative (in the
> eyes of the foundation) of the much larger number of contributors across the
> projects (these data are largely specific to Wikipedia), and that foundation
> staff then make an assessment of consensus based largely on the opinions of
> foundation staff which has been informed by whatever conversations happened
> to occur on list.
> 
> It is hard for someone to be everywhere all at once given the astronomically
> large number of places that one can hold a conversation across all WMF
> hosted media and I know that some foundation staff are excellent at
> patrolling and knowing absolutely everything about places such as meta and
> the english wikipedia and that many important conversations happen in person
> that most of us never hear about. </endrunon> All that said, I continue to
> worry that our benevolent dictator, board members, foundation employees,
> power posters, uber posters and wikimania attendees are not very
> representative of the the community at large. Part of the problem is that we
> have almost no way of measuring that. Even if the community only included
> everyone up to wikimania attendees it would appear that only a tiny fraction
> of contributors account for all of the decision making. When we include all
> contributors we see an awesome consolidation of power.
> 
> To put it simply, I am not very happy with this consolidation. I would like
> to see the foundation use technology to bring more of these contributors
> into its fold and involve them in the decision making process. We can use
> technology to increase the signal to noise ratio while simultaneously
> improving the quality of decisions and finding alternate and optimal
> solutions that would only occur to less than 1 person in a thousand. As it
> stands, those solutions are not being found. As the foundation continues to
> bring in employees it gains more and more power and takes it away from the
> community. That's my view at least. I would like to drastically reverse that
> trend so that there is no consolidation - so that it is easy (and indeed,
> beneficial for us all) for anyone who wants to be involved in whatever
> decision to get involved and make a difference. Starting mailing list
> threads just doesn't seem like it. I also note that the mailing lists have
> been on the decline since June of 2006.
> 
> /Brian


Thank you for this excellent work and analysis, Brian. I, too, am concerned
about the consolidation of power; because it is power groups such as this
that set the values, direction, and very tone of a project community's
culture.

Marc Riddell