[Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted article

[Milos Rancic]

Read http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers

Article is based on Felipe Ortega's research. There are two claims
from this article:

1. English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net loss of 49,000
contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same
period in 2008
2. There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules.

I would like to hear from Felipe clarification of the claim that
49,000 contributors left Wikipedia. If it is so, then en.wp has around
ten times more fluctuation of contributors. (According to statistics
[1], there are no significant changes between the first months of 2008
and 2009.) If it is so, we should try to understand why is it so.

The second claim produced a lot of *relevant* testimonies from
Wikipedian work. Please, read them. For the first time I see highly
relevant discussion on Slashdot about Wikipedia structure. All of them
are talking about current problems of Wikipedia.

Problems are now visible at such level, that main stream media are
talking about them [2]. I would say that we need some radical moves to
stop current negative trends inside of the projects. Which? I don't
know. We should think about them. (Actually, I have a couple of
possible changes in my mind, which are not radical. However, their
implementation would need radical changes. Because of bureaucracy.)

[1] - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
[2] - http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6930546.ece