[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Yann Forget <yannfo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> 2011/3/29 ???? <wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk>:
> > On 28/03/2011 18:35, Nathan wrote:
> >> The bar for contributing is higher. Whether because editing is more
> >> technically challenging, or because the rules and standards are more
> >> complex, or simply because more of what people know is documented than
> >> it was 4 years ago... it's harder in a variety of ways for people to
> >> contribute significantly on a regular basis (i.e. become regular
> >> editors, as opposed to making several contributions and not
> >> returning).
> >>
> >
> > Ah there is the reason, the sum of all human knowledge is approaching
> > completion. Well done to all.
>
> We are very far from that.
> All the issue is that of notability.
>
> If we apply the current criteria, which is mainly applied on Western
> subjects, to other parts of the world, we could have 10 times more
> articles (villages and towns, local customs and food, etc.).
>
> Regards,
>
> Yann
>
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I see two different points here, I believe what we need to focus more on is
editor-retention rather than editor-recruitment. We seem to be looking at
the situation with only cold, hard numbers.

The fact that the majority of editors are white male geeks as Kaldari said,
is because they have the easiest access and time available to edit. There
are far too many reasons the other groups are not at the same level of
participation- technological, cultural, social, busy schedules, so on. We
can not address most of them, we can inform a reader that they can edit what
they read, but we can't force them to edit. It is beyond our reach to
consider recruiting people who are not passionate about contributing.

The second issue as I see it, we might not be approaching the sum of all
human knowledge but we're running out of what the core non/semi-professional
community can contribute. We are at over 3.5 million articles (go Pokemon)
on English wikipedia, we surpassed all other encyclopedias a long time ago.
We just can't keep adding articles at the same speed as we use to, we have
to accept that and actively focus on improving what we already have. New
editors might not be the magic pill that we need here, there
is definitely a learning curve when it comes to editing, and they might just
leave like some experienced editors.


Theo