[Wikimedia-l] Editor retention (was Re: "Big data" benefits and limitations (relevance: WMF editor engagement, fundraising, and HR practices))

[Nikola Smolenski]

On 04/01/13 16:29, Nathan wrote:
> So any complete statement of the problem, which ought to be the starting
> point for any efforts to solve it, should account for the awkward new
> editor experience, the difficulties facing long-term contributors, *and*
> the natural and inevitably growing attrition rate that we should reasonably
> expect to see.

I don't know if it might help to offer my personal insight.

When I first came to Wikipedia, I was a student. I had a lot of free 
time. I would spend several hours on Wikipedia every day.

My typical day on Wikipedia would involve writing an article, posting it 
to Wikipedia, editing a few articles on various topics that interested 
me, going over every article on my watchlist, overseeing every edit and 
fixing vandalism, if there was any. I would add to my watchlist any 
article I have created, significantly edited, or just found interesting.

Editing an article was easy. All I needed to know was simple and 
intuitive syntax for headings, bold, italic and links. It was easy to 
see article text through this syntax.

I always preferred making a new article to editing an existing ones. 
Making an article was easy - as easy as typing the definition. One 
sentence article was perfectly fine. There were no categories. There 
were no references. There were no infoboxes. There were no stub templates.

Choosing a topic to write about was easy. I wrote on topics that I 
personally found interesting. I got to write articles on important 
historical figures that felt like an honor to write.

I liked it when I got a new message on my talk page and have talked with 
some really interesting people. I believe I have improved my English 
just from watching how people were correcting my articles.

Fast forward ten years.

Today, I am employed. I can devote to Wikipedia several hours every week.

My watchlist has grown to 2722 entries and has became completely 
impossible to watch. I have no time to carefully oversee every edit - I 
often simply revert a sub-par edit that could have been salvaged just 
because I have no time to fix it.

Editing articles became much more difficult. Just seeing reference 
templates throughout the text makes me cringe. Editing around them is a 
pain. (Don't take this as a stab against the templates; it is much 
easier to insert a template than to copy/paste them as we used to; but 
because of this ease they are used much more.)

One sentence articles are deleted on sight. Stubs stand a grand chance 
of being deleted too. Creating an article became bothersome just because 
of the need to fill all the required details properly. Even uploading an 
image to Commons became bothersome for me because of this.

A newbie can't write a new article because all the generally-known 
topics already have articles, and lesser-known topics the newbie might 
know about he doesn't know to reference properly. (References weren't 
necessary when most topics were generally known but are now necessary 
because of the topic's obscurity.)

I still have interesting topics I could write about. But they are all 
very obscure (for example, after the article on Serbian folk astronomy I 
am considering writing one on Serbian folk cosmology), and writing on 
obscure topics is not fun, because no one else edits the articles 
because no one else knows about the topic.

I fear to open my talk page since more often than not it's a deletion 
notice or somesuch.

I guess I could write much more. But at the end, I have no solution. I 
could imagine some partial solutions for some of the problems, but 
nothing that could really bring Wikipedia to days of old.