On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 04/09/06, maru dubshinki
<marudubshinki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
)
"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