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

[Fred Bauder]

> On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Alan Liefting <aliefting at ihug.co.nz>
> wrote:
>
>> Is it just me or do others find it difficult to instigate any sort of
>> changes to policies, guidelines, layout, Manual of Style and related
>> matters regardless of how minor they are?
>> Could it be that WP is a reflection of human behaviour and has become a
>> talkfest where nothing changes because of our inherently conservative
>> nature?
>> Or am I trying to satisfy the readers of WP rather than editors and
>> readers? Since readers do not edit they never get to have a say so the
>> editors get what they want (yes I know - editors are readers as well).
>>
>>
>> Alan Liefting
>>
>
> 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. :-)
>
> Steven
>

Sounds like an interesting project which might answer a few perennial
questions such as to what extent Larry Sanger shaped basic Wikipedia
policies. However, please keep in mind that this mailing list and the
Wikipedia-l mailing lists were much more active in those days, contained
significant discussions of substantive issues, and that policy was
sometimes made on those lists, and only memorialized in policy pages.

Fred