[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[teun spaans]

Hi Keegan,

Thank you for starting with a compliment!
If your intention is to stress the point that we wikipedia is also a
community, and not just a bunch of article writers, I agree. I am not sure
what you mean with "our content is ridiculously misunderstood for the fifth
most popular website in the world."

The study gives a lot of facts. I am glad a lot of trends have been
discovered. I am glad that the problem has not been shoved under the carpet.
It does not go out, however and tell the why. I know why i have diminished
my contributions - I only occasionally write articles nowadays - but what we
need to address these questions is facts and analysis on the whole
"lifecycle" of a wikipedian:
- what made people try to contribute to wp in the first place?
- what barriers did people encounter making them give up after their first,
or even before their first attempt?
- what made people tick?
- why do people stop after they have been active for months or years?
- have their goals been reached?
- are there any typical volunteer patterns, for example the super nova who
explodes with hundreds and thousands of articles and then stop, the slow but
steady contributor who writes one article a week, the bot operator who wrote
about a hundred articles and then decided to use bots instead? The manager
who puts more energy in project coordination then in actual writing? The
bureaucrat?
- What makes people stop after they have been long time volunteers?
- Have their ever been any surveys (we have their email addresses) on why
volunteers left wp after contributing a long time?
There will be 'leakage' over all phases of the aforementioned lifecycle, but
we can probably concentrate on just a few.