[WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Steven Walling
<steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:

> Research on the amount of bytes added to different namespaces suggests it is
> true that the project namespace is stagnant.[1] The largest period of growth
> in the bytes added to the project namespace began roughly in 2003 and
> tapered off to a smaller, steady proportion of all content added by 2006.
>
> One way we might quantify this in a more editor-centric way is to look at
> the top contributors (by edits and/or by net bytes changed) to major
> policies, guidelines etc. and get some data on what cohort those editors
> were from, what they are doing, and when the edits by those top contributors
> were made.
>
> If anyone is interested in this/is not offended by the idea of looking at
> specific editors in public, I'm happy to start some documentation on Meta.
> It's pretty easy to grab some lists, but qualitatively examining edit
> histories takes more time and could always use more help from people who can
> read a diff. :-)

Doesn't this approach assume that people all interact with Wikipedia
in the same way? Many people only participate in a vanishingly small
part of Wikipedia and you can have some areas that are deserted and
others that are very active. This isn't found by looking at global
statistics, but by looking at the actual editing and histories out
there "on the ground".

Carcharoth