[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[WereSpielChequers]

Typo correction and vandalism reversion are certainly both entries to
editing, and it isn't just anti-vandalism where the opportunities have
declined in recent years. Typos are getting harder to find, especially in
stable widely read articles. Yes you can find plenty of typos by checking
new pages and recent changes, but I doubt our  5 edits a month editors are
going to internal maintenance pages like that. I suspect they are readers
who fix things they come across. It would be interesting to survey a sample
of them I suspect we'd find many who are reading Wikipedia just as much as
they used to, but if they only edit when they spot a mistake then of course
they will now be editing less frequently. And of course none of that is
actually bad, any more than is the loss of large numbers of vandals who
used to get into the 5 edits a month band for at least the month in which
they did their spree and were blocked..

The difficulty of getting precise measurements of "community health" makes
it a fascinating topic, and with many known factors altering edit levels in
sometimes poorly understood ways we need to be wary of oversimplifications.
No-one really knows what would have happened if the many edit filters
installed in the last four years had instead been coded as anti vandalism
bots, clearly our edit count would now be much higher, but whether it would
currently be higher or lower than in 2009 when the edit filters were
introduced is unknown. Nor should we fret that we shifted so much of our
anti-vandalism work from very quick reversion to not accepting edits.
However it isn't sensible to  benchmark community health against past edit
levels, we should really be comparing community activity against readership
levels. If we do that there is a disconnect between our readership which
for years has grown faster than the internet and our community which is
broadly stable. To some extent this can be considered a success for Vector
and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one
optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels we
always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of
Vector. My suspicion is also that the rise of the mobile device, especially
amongst the young, is turning us from an interactive medium into more of a
broadcast one. It is also likely to be contributing to the greying of the
pedia.

I am trying to list the major known and probable causes of changes of the
fall in the raw editing levels in a page on
wiki<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F>,
feedback welcome.


Jonathan


> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 13:45:17 -0500
> From: "Marc A. Pelletier" <marc at uberbox.org>
> To: wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant
>         in the room
> Message-ID: <528D033D.6060000 at uberbox.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 11/20/2013 01:06 PM, Richard Symonds wrote:
> > Not quite: I would argue that anti-vandalism work is a "gateway drug" to
> > the rest of the project. Just a hunch, though.
>
> I'm pretty sure that typo correction fills pretty much the same niche,
> though.
>
> -- Marc
>
>
>
> End of Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 116, Issue 32
> ********************************************
>