[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Andrew Gray]

On 26 February 2011 13:52, Aaron Adrignola <aaron.adrignola at gmail.com> wrote:

[via MZM]

> "Sure, but there is a more fundamental question about what the goal and
> mission actually is. I see it as about content creation. Wikimedia's focus
> should primarily be creating the best free content it can. Others seem far
> more interested in creating a "movement" (a large social network)."

I think, on the whole, I agree with the primacy of content. That said...

To my mind, we can argue for increasing and broadening participation
without automatically believing that "creating a movement" is
desirable, or even an expected result. Good quality content creation -
and perhaps more critically, a constant and reliable level of content
maintenance and preservation - is at risk if we don't have a healthy
and robust community; there's no need to press further than that, but
we do need to at least be confident we've got that far!

[Aaron]

> That proportion of active administrators to content pages is already the
> case at Wikibooks.  It pains me to say it as a heavy contributor, but the
> number of admins has fallen to a third of what it was in 2007.  [1]  While I
> could hope for content growth instead, that's also stagnated. [2]

The figure I quoted, incidentally, is "highly active users" (users
with >100 edits in a given month) rather than active administrators;
that said, the two figures generally vary in the same way.

I was surprised to see the pagecount figures on en.wikibooks! Is this
no new pages being created, or is it page creation being approximately
equal to the rate of deleting old pages?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk