[Foundation-l] Differences between projects with common versus highly diverse cultural backgrounds (was Re: Pending Changes)

[Delphine Ménard]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 6:49 AM, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 September 2010 23:32, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> > Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com>
>> > wrote:
>> > > German Wikipedia has had pending changes implemented
>> > *globally*, in all articles, for several years now. Unlike
>> > en:WP, where numbers of active editors have dropped
>> > significantly since 2007, numbers of active editors in de:WP
>> > have remained stable:
>> > >
>> > > http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm
>> > > http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
>> >
>> > The stats on that page are pretty confusing, Andreas. Could
>> > you say
>> > here what the relative figures are?
>>
>> According to the tables, the number of en:WP editors with >100 edits/month
>> stood at 5,151 in April 2007, and was down to 3,868 in August 2010.
>>
>> de:WP had 1,027 in April 2007, and 1,075 in August 2010.
>>
>>
>
> You raise an interesting point, Andreas.  I am not persuaded that pending
> changes/flagged revisions have anything to do with the editor retention rate
> at the de:WP. However, I think you may be right that the considerably more
> homogeneous editor population, as well as the commonality in cultural
> background, was instrumental in the ability of the project to jointly make
> such a cultural shift. Indeed, the number of de:WP editors with >100
> edits/month has remained very stable since January 2006. (The number of
> en:WP editors was essentially the same in January 2006 as at present, but
> hit its peak in April 2007. Let's not cherry pick the data too much, okay?)
>
> As an aside for those interested in the historical perspective, the massive
> increase in the number of editors on en:WP coincides with a massive influx
> of vandalism, and over a thousand editors did almost nothing *but* revert or
> otherwise address vandalism. As better and more effective tools have been
> developed to address that problem - Huggle, Twinkle, Friendly, the edit
> filters, reverting bots, semi-protection, etc - the number of editors needed
> to manage vandalism has diminished dramatically. In other words, that
> 1300-editor difference may largely be accounted for because those whose only
> skill was vandal-fighting have moved on. That's not to say there is no
> vandalism on en:WP today; there's still plenty of it.
>
> Observing from afar, it has often struck me that when almost all members of
> an editorial community come from a common cultural background and geographic
> area, there is a synergy that isn't found on projects where the community is
> much more diverse.  This is best illustrated in the large scale on German
> Wikipedia, and some other European projects, where the community is visibly
> more cohesive. In the smaller scale, certain projects with shared
> cultural/geographic background on English Wikipedia, such as Wikiproject
> Australia, are more accomplished at developing and meeting shared
> objectives.  These groups, whether large projects or small pockets within a
> larger project, seem to operate in accordance with their local cultural
> norms; in other words, they don't have to find common cultural ground before
> they can move on to a discussion of a proposal.
>
> It's my belief that the common cultural background of the de:WP editorial
> community has been one of the keystones of its success in being able to
> implement large-scale and project-wide changes, flagged revisions being the
> most obvious.  That common cultural background or focal geographic area
> simply does not exist for the English Wikipedia; we're probably one of the
> few projects where the same expression can be viewed as friendly, somewhat
> rude and downright offensive at the same time, depending on whether the
> reader is Australian, British or American (not to mention those who have
> learned English as a second language, which also makes up a significant part
> of our editorship).
>
> Each project also has its own culture, but I confess that most of my
> knowledge of the culture of other projects is anecdotal rather than
> observational, so I won't venture to try to compare them.
>
> When faced with dramatic increases in vandalism, en:WP created tools that
> are largely developed by individuals and utilized by other individuals (with
> the exception of semi-protection); de:WP developed a single unified
> community response.  The remarkably high quality of the tools used on en:WP
> means that any new systemic tool has to meet a very high threshold for it to
> be considered acceptable for wide-scale use.  Perhaps that is the key
> difference between these two community types: one places more emphasis on
> making cohesive group decisions, while the other more strongly encourages a
> range of solutions. I don't have any answers, just observations.

I find your analyse extremely interesting, I do believe indeed that
culture plays a role in how people approach their wikipedia-editing
and how harmoniously this actually works. However, I would not
discount the sheer numbers. The number of active editors is about 3,5
times higher in the English Wikipedia than in the German, for example.
This probably also accounts for a higher difficulty of achieving any
kind of consensus.


Delphine


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