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

[Felipe Ortega]

--- El jue, 26/11/09, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> escribió:

> De: Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>
> Asunto: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not bureaucracy, said bureaucrat and deleted article
> Para: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Fecha: jueves, 26 de noviembre, 2009 11:36
> 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:
> 

Hello, Milos, all.

> 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

Please, read the following blog post, which I already supervised in consensus with Erik Moller, explaining the difference between "retaining editors" (the numbers displayed in WSJ original article) and "monthly number of active editors"

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/11/26/wikipedias-volunteer-story/  

> 2. There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules.
> 

"which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. 'There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.'"

This is Andrew Dalby's quote, not mine.

> 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
> 
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