[Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

[Andrew Lih]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:28 PM, David Moran <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think a lot of attention is paid to the way the technical interface is
> hostile to newbies, and making that more user-friendly and democratic is
> certainly a concern that needs to be addressed.  But I think the tendency of
> older users, or certain editorially minded users, to squat on the project
> and bludgeon newer users with policy pages rolled up into sticks is just as
> much if not more responsible for driving away the new users we need to
> replenish our ranks.

At Wikimania 2009 it was noted there were declines across different
language editions, which started happening at the same time. This
suggest that it's not simply the "completeness" of a particular
edition at play here, as the development cycle of each different
language edition should be fairly distinct. Rather, the sharp declines
across languages indicates it could be a platform feature (ie.
software, policy, et al) or that there is an interdependency across
the language groups or some other outlying variable.

The session at Wikimania about this:
http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:221

I'll be doing a talk at SXSW 2010 about this next year, and I welcome
any/all theories and what areas of research to pursue.
http://bit.ly/8Hh52


-Andrew Lih