[WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia

[Sage Ross]

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/09/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "Who Writes Wikipedia?" ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
> )
>
> > "This fact does have enormous
> > policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional
> > contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more
> > rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze
> > more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to
> > broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
> > Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional
> > contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia
> > process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to
> > meetups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that
> > might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they're even
> > proposed."
>
>
> This means that if we want the content to grow and be *good*, we need
> to be more newbie-friendly.
>
> This is also a BIG stick to use on Byzantine overengineered processes
> and policy. Excessive process is actively newbie-hostile.
>
> Look at Debian, bogged down in process, to the point where Richard
> Stallman failed to make it in as a Debian maintainer for his own
> software because of excessive process. Look how it took Ubuntu to give
> it a much-needed rocket up the arse. Without Ubuntu, we'd still be
> waiting on Etch. Will it take someone doing a successful fork to
> decalcify Wikipedia policy?


Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is,
no doubt, better than using edit counts.  But it is also may not be the best
approach for the future, if we are really switching to a "quality over
quantity" mentality.  At the least, there should be careful choices about
what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results
like these.  My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a
significantly larger portion of established editors as the main
contributors, even by the word count metric.

-Ragesoss