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

[ScottL]

Sage Ross wrote:
> 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

   FA's and to some extent Good Articles are not the reason that we are 
#17 on the most visited sites.  If those were the only articles we had I 
doubt we would have 1% of the readership that we currently enjoy.  I 
think articles past a specific size or maybe size and age woudl be a 
better metric, though a random sampling of 10k non-stub articles woudl 
probbly give us what we want.

SKL