[Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:55, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikimedia Foundation wants to increase the participation and readers numbers
> just because the capitalist mind of forcing steady growing. They don't know
> how to reach that, just want to do it, and the participation growing is flat
> since 2007. They tried to improve usability, and nothing happened. Now, they
> are working in the gender issue. Tomorrow in the Global South. All them are
> great news headlines for the politically correct western world, but, as the
> Internet meme, they are doing it wrong.
>
> Wikipedia grew exponentially in the first years, and no Wikimedia Foundation
> was needed. Why? Because people easily saw which pages were needed. The
> encyclopedia was a blank page. Today, Wikipedia is showed as the most
> complete encyclopedia ever written. That is possible true, but that doesn't
> mean it is complete. We don't have to ask for new users, we have to show
> which stuff need to be written, and people will come. Really, users are
> coming, in hordes, visiting numbers are growing but they don't know where
> their help is needed.

After the revolution we will abandon capitalism and Wikimedia projects
would be able to flourish without rushing anywhere.

Until then, we are living in capitalism and we have to compete for
attention with other internet entities in capitalist world. In such
circumstances, keeping attention at some level is much harder task
than increasing attention. Simply, losing attention is natural. People
come and leave after some moment. So, you have to be able to get new
people and you need a strategy for getting that in wild. Scaling it
not to have growth is much harder task than working simply on getting
attention.

Against us are very large and very professional entities which want to
get more attention for their products. So, every new Facebook, Google,
Twitter or even Zynga feature is going directly against our ability to
keep attention. Fred, say whatever you want about dumbness of forums,
groups and games, but although I have no games in my Facebook stream
-- as I've blocked all of them and just once in a couple of weeks I
see one -- I am there because many people in my surroundings are there
and many of them because of games, forums and similar, for sure. If I
have them on Wikimedia projects, I would probably edit and wouldn't
limit my activity on bureaucratic and strategic tasks. In other words,
thanks to those features, they took my attention from Wikimedia
projects.

In ideal society editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia and other free
knowledge projects would be a part of any scientific and educational
position. But, we are far from such society. We have to fight for
every attention aspect.

And we are doing that badly. Participation is just approximately flat
since 2007 just because our core is consisted of geeks, which are
stubborn by default. Their retention is easier, but influx of new
editors is lowering at that scale from month to month that it is just
a matter of time when active and very active editors would start to
shrink at more obvious rates.

Here are some statistics for English Wikipedia [1]. June 2011 was:
* The worst June since 2005 by very active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~5%.
* The worst June since 2005 by active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~1.5%
* The worst June since 2005 by new editors. Shrink since 2010: ~8%.

And similar for all Wikipedias [2]. June 2011 was:
* The worst June since 2006 by very active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~0.9%.
* The worst June since 2006 by active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~1.2%
* The worst June since 2006 by new editors. Shrink since 2010: ~8%.

Good thing is that changes from 2009 to 2010 were two times worse. In
other words, we are still shrinking, but not so quickly.

> Furthermore, offering trustworthy text and image dumps is not seductive.
> Making forks easy is not seductive. That means re-using content but also
> losing contributors which go to other communities. Don't expect much effort
> in that.

I object, actually, on the line that too little has been done to
seduce people to edit Wikimedia projects. Mobile Wikipedia is
necessary, but it is not possible to edit from that interface. The
only structural thing which would allow more seductive features is
ongoing rewriting of Parser. Everything else is too insignificant.

And while engaging more women and going to developing countries are
noble causes, from the point of general trends, they are just [not so
successful] tries to buy some time.

[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
[2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaZZ.htm