[Foundation-l] Fwd: A lack of newbies that stick

[David Gerard]

Post from elsewhere, forwarded with author's permission.


From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase at frontiernet.net>
Date: 3 April 2011 14:44





   [quote snipped]

Just a little contrarianism on this ...

Should we be worried about the trendline in newer editors (and more on
this below) or the trendline in total edits, which IIRC doesn't seem
to have dipped so much as more established editors are editing more
(this seems to fit with my personal experience)?

As for the "lack of editors that stick", I decided to do some mild
research on this one day. I looked at the English Wikipedia's user
creation logs for a day last summer (always the last day of a month,
for reasons that will become clear below), and then roughly the same
day several years in the past for several years, going all the way
back to 2003 when, by the tone of our current discussions, we
"weren't" having this problem.

I discovered that on those days at least, which I have no reason to
assume were atypical, thousands of accounts were created. And almost
all of them never edited even once. Not last summer. Not years before.
Not in 2003.

Certainly someone else can do more formal research and come up with
actual numbers. But as for me I think it's ridiculous at worst and
premature at best to say that new users are becoming less sticky when,
it seems to me, they have in fact never been particularly sticky.


    [quote snipped]

I do think that would help, especially as a generation of users grows
up that's used to a more parallel, less serial online environment as
is found at Facebook and elsewhere. We ought to have:

A live-chat/IM function within MediaWiki, to allow for more efficient
collaboration between users. I see some younger users at meetups and
such editing with a small IRC window open in the corner, interacting
with another editor while they edit. There's no reason it should be so
cumbersome as to require two different programs on two different
servers. (Perhaps at some point in the future this could include
video).
In that vein, with privacy settings that allow for this, an editor
could set things up to allow other users to see what they're editing
as they're editing it.
Going further, I remember the now-abandoned Google Wave being
demonstrated at a conference. When the demonstrator showed how it
could be used so that two people editing the same page at once could
see what the other editor was doing, very loud spontaneous applause
broke out. We need something like that.
We could have other Facebook-inspired social features: in addition to
the current userpage widget which allows you to let others know if
you're logged-in or not, why not some sort of userpage "wall" that
could, when activated, be updated without having to edit the page and
allow some sort of summary of what the editor's working on now, or at
the least a live feed of edits with summaries. (For all I know, maybe
something like this already exists).

Social networking has allowed the online work environment to more
closely mirror the real-world environment of an office, where most
people know at least generally what their coworkers are doing and can
look away from the monitor briefly and talk to them while still
working. While I have no problem with the level of interaction and
collaboration currently available, I'm only speaking for myself, and I
think younger editors weaned on the social-network experience may be
wanting something we can't readily give them. Yet.

Daniel Case