[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 11:10, Jan-Bart de Vreede <janbart at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> It seems that our natural reaction is to immediately question the numbers and the underlying studies. We are Wikimedians and will not rest until we are sure that we are looking at 100% accurate numbers.
>>
>> We could also look at this another way. Looking around me and talking to people about Wikipedia (and sometimes the other projects) I hear a lot of stories which demonstrate our inability to welcome everyone and motivate them to become regular contributors. The data strongly suggests the same thing. Instead of doubting the numbers, lets just assume that we are not doing well enough in this department.
>
> Similarly, regular editors will tell you there's a serious problem of
> established editors leaving, because the quality of editing is still
> too low. The problem with the survey is that it highlights the need to
> attract new editors, based on some doubtful figures, without
> addressing that experienced editors are becoming disillusioned.
>
> Sarah

The survey does highlight the need to retain current editors, as well
as new editors who do join; if you look at the graphs that are posted,
they highlight issues of retention (if someone joins, do they stick
around over the long term? is the number of active editors growing or
shrinking?) and retention was certainly a part of our board
discussions. I don't think that we can or should focus just on
recruiting new editors or just on helping out the ones we've got: it
should be both. As Sue said in her letter, "I believe we need to make
editing fun again for everybody: both new editors and experienced
editors." Things like making MediaWiki easier to use, or making our
social processes less of a pain in the neck, will arguably help
everyone -- it's not an either/or issue, or a zero-sum game. And if
there are things you can think of that would specifically help support
our most active and core editors and project leaders, then please post
those ideas too. (You might find the graphs from other languages
interesting -- what is it about Russian?![1]).

Like everyone else I want perfect data, and like everyone else I tend
to be skeptical, and especially skeptical about research (I help
people differentiate between good and bad scientific research for a
living, and I've read a ton of good, bad, and mediocre Wikipedia
research). Like everyone, I want answers about who we're really
measuring (and where they come from, and why they came, and why they
stuck around). I want to know what the indicators are of a healthy
community, how we might measure that, and what things we might do to
encourage it. I suspect there is a grain of truth in many theories
(yes, the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the big languages, yes
people do take wikibreaks) and I want to see good ideas for accounting
for such things, and also for figuring out what else is going on as
well. But I also strongly agree with Jan-Bart: it's important to
remember that we simply have a lot of work to do. These lines are
pretty stark -- and even if imperfectly, they plot a trend which is
clear: "non-vandal newbies are the ones leaving," as the study authors
wrote.

And as for recruiting new participants, remember also that these
trends are occurring while simultaneously Wikipedia's *readership* has
skyrocketed -- we have millions more readers of the English Wikipedia
today than we did in early 2007, yet fewer active editors in absolute
numbers[2]. Why aren't people clicking the edit button? And if they
do, why aren't they becoming Wikipedians? These and many other
questions need to be answered.

The Wikimedia projects have set a model for the encyclopedia industry,
the internet, and the world. We, the members of these project
communities, have done something utterly revolutionary in ten short
years, and we are not just market leaders but also thought leaders.
But we don't actually know what the rest of the story looks like. Are
the projects self-sustaining? If so, for how long? Do we need to do
different things than we have been to maintain big language editions,
or get small language editions up to speed? Do we really have a
successful collaborative project -- is our quality good enough, do
processes work, do our current governance structures serve the mission
well enough? Should we be worried that everywhere you turn there are
people who use Wikipedia but don't edit it, or don't know that it's
editable, or tried to edit but felt they couldn't continue for one
reason or another? These are the questions that keep me up at night,
and I think the answers are at least in part tied to the numbers that
you see in the editing trends study.

I know these aren't by any means new questions, and many, many people
have done amazing work. The Foundation can hopefully help matters by
having the money & resources to do things like researching trends and
collecting the best ideas for making our projects better, and then
acting on them. But we cannot, and should not, do it alone.

-- phoebe (wmf board of trustees)

1.  http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results/Retention_Rates
2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia.org_audience_trend.jpg,
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm