Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-01-02/Interview

  • Exactly so:
    1. "So if we say that becoming an editor should be easy, really, that's a little delusional"
    2. "People get embarrassed when they make mistakes"
    I believe both the points are at the heart of the matter. I do not think there are easy remedies.
  • One area to focus on, in my opinion, is to address the most likely notifiers and talkbackers who do actually do interact with the newbies the most.
    My long observations from the past years, tell me the experience, that the most likely people to have the energy to speak an-mass to the newbies, and at the same time the people who are the strictest, are actually former newbies just recently grown in to self-confident Wikipedians - about the (half year or) 1 year or 2 years of experience in Wikipedia. They tend to extrapolate the behavior they witnessed on themselves (and themselves they survived it, so why not take it as role-model of interaction...) while they were newbies themselves.
  • They are the strictest and the mutest (mute, except placing the template and sign to talkpage).
    Its like, if they are testing themselves, whether they do already know all the related rules, actually.
    They are very important for the community, for there is non, with so much energy to work hard, nevertheless they should be schooled a bit more - on regular basis about the importance of new editors to the project. Reo + 16:57, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Could Gardner explain what was meant by "quality was doing fine"? As Doc James says, the quality of Wikipedia articles unsatisfactory. The only meaning of "doing fine" that I'd be comfortable with was one showing the chart going up. We need to be careful that efforts to attract new editors do not make the quality chart go down. That's not just speculation: one recent large-scale student recruitment had precisely that effect on our articles. Colin°Talk 17:58, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • First of all quality is not "fine". Yes it is okay but our combined number of FAs andd GAs is still less that half a percent of total articles. We do not need new articles we need to improve the quality of what we have.
  • The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.orgview_html.php?sq=Google&lang=en&q=Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works.
Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:09, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • In my experience I have found that (within WikiProject Gastropods), identifying new contributors using NewArtBot listings, then welcoming them personally, inviting them to join the project, and then (assuming they express some interest) mentoring them carefully and enthusiastically, has been the best way to retain good new people and turn them into long-term editors. It certainly is a lot of work, and takes up a lot of time. Sometimes it prevents me from working as much as I would like on other aspects of Wikipedia, but when you take the long-term view, it is definitely extremely worthwhile. I would suggest that encouraging and even organizing this kind of activity from the most active projects may be one good solution to help reverse the curve on editor loss. Invertzoo (talk) 18:23, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the electronics / engineering topic could really use a few people doing that. Somewhere between 95% and 99% of new contributors really want to work collaboratively to make Wikipedia better. Alas, a small percentage of the existing editors are arrogant and somewhat abusive with an attitude that they are always the smartest person in the room, and I really think that this drives away newbies. It's hard to figure out how to address this problem. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:42, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • The presentation Sue gave to WMUK included an analysis of the "new editor story" - discouragement on opening the edit tab, discouragement on feedback being the first two hurdles. Things we can do now to improve this are:
    1. Make page text simpler, especially minimising, unifying and clarifying mark-up.
    2. Don't delete good stuff. We speedy and prod rather wilfully, without proper checks for notability.
    3. Be kind. Be personal. Be friendly.
    Rich Farmbrough, 20:32, 2 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]
  • The lack of enough arbitrators was not discussed in the interview:
The lack of enough moderators and arbitrators drives away editors and donations. More info.

For more info and discussion see User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive_93#Declining number of editors and donations. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:45, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Timeshifter: Looks like a rather diffuse thread-fest: everyone's wishing each other happy new year. OK.
To whoever indented Gardner's direct quotes in the interview above: I don't like it, I was happy with it before; but I can't be bothered to revert it all. Tony (talk) 02:02, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if I should be replying to you Tony, but the indentation indicates you are replying to me. I assume you are not referring to the talk section I linked to. Because it is not as you described: "rather diffuse thread-fest: everyone's wishing each other happy new year." --Timeshifter (talk) 04:47, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • These graphs look strange. As someone whose day job involves time series analysis there are several things that come to mind. First, the "active editors" curve is smooth and well behaved up until about (eyeballing) March 2007. Up to this time we see a rising trend that is beginning to decrease a bit. We might expect it to asymptote like a logistic growth curve, or level off and gradually decline, but instead the trend suddenly screeches to a halt and reverses. If this were a scientific graph I'd immediately begin looking for a change in data collection methods. Then, if we could assure ourselves that the data series is consistent, we would look for a new process or other change that was introduced at this point. So, what happened in March-April 2007? Second, the lack of any relationship between the "active editors" and "retention rate" seems slightly odd. The retention rate began decreasing around the start of 2005, and has been quite smoothly decreasing at a decreasing rate up to the present. It's looks just a little strange for this curve to be totally decoupled from the number of active editors. (Yes, I'm aware that one is a number and the other is a ratio, but it's still a little puzzling that they're totally independent). To summarize my slightly long-winded musings, I think it's worth asking (1) if we're certain that the curves are showing us what we think they're showing us and (2) if so, what happened in March 2007? Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:54, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
See below: #Schools/colleges banned Wikipedia in 2007. -Wikid77 09:53, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • The chart is from a study by Howie Fung and Diederik van Liere. I can't comment on the retention plot. The active editor plot corresponds with the one from wikistats [1], which has completely independent data gathering. This broken trend line has been discussed for years. I don't know of any good explanation for why the change in 2007 was so sudden. More generally speaking I do think the steep growth up to 2007 was partly because more and more people got the news about this Next Big Thing Called Wikipedia. At some point, presumably around 2007, nearly all internet users in many countries with high internet reach were aware of Wikipedia's existence, saturation near 100%, S-curve flattened out. Then as novelty effect wore off, some people who were marginally interested, but wanted to experience the newest hype, left for the Next Big Thing. Therefore comparing our current metrics with the peak in 2007 feels somewhat artificial to me. It would have been different if we had had a longer history, say with a steady state for 10 years, and only recently numbers started to drop. Of course the often mentioned aspects like less welcoming attitude towards newbies, and progressively difficult syntax, emerging social sites, etc all played their part. But my personal hunch is that Wikipedia's fast rise to fame, and the resulting the hype factor, is often underrepresented in explaining our modest decline in editors since 2007. Erik Zachte (talk) 07:13, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
See below: #Schools/colleges banned Wikipedia in 2007. -Wikid77 09:53, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
What happened was the start of deletionism as a major force and crackdown on the very open culture. The first larges cale example was the Userbox wars in 2006, and crackdowns on wheel warring in 2007. Those crackdowns changed the culture from the laid back culture wikipedia had when it started. CD-Host (talk) 22:15, 30 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]


To my knowledge, the sudden plateau of active editors in March 2007 is not the result of a change in data collection. I haven't seen any evidence that suggesting a change in either the way we capture the data, or the way "active editors" is defined. This plateau has actually been pretty well documented (see Ed Chi's paper). I actually spoke with him a while back and he was telling me that when his team started analyzing the data, they were also surprised at the sudden plateau and thought it might have been due to a glitch in the data. They conducted their own investigation and concluded that the plateau was in fact a real effect.
I actually agree with Erik's Zachte's comment on the "hype factor." I do think part (though not all) of the rise and subsequent plateau may be explained by more and more people finding out about Wikipedia and becoming interested in the project.
I'm not sure what you mean by the lack of any relationship between "Active editors" and "retention rate". If anything, the two seem to be inversely related. Can you clarify? Howief (talk) 16:55, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm someone who started here in March 2010 and am still going quite strong here. It is my firm belief that the people who stay here are usually the people who take the time to make minor edits and read around the project pages to find something they enjoy. I started off by trying to remove the word "perished" from articles, and when I found myself enjoying it I started to branch out, eventually finding NPP. I did it quite voluntarily, but the vast majority of new users don't, and that's when they run into trouble. People who want to immediately do everything, be it trying to gain every possible userright, immediately try to set speed records as vandal fighters/NPPers, or write a brand new article, tend to get smacked down because there's no possible way they can use those tools/complete those tasks as effectively as is necessary, and as much as we want to be nice we can't mess around in those areas. As Sue says in the interview, we can't expect people to immediately become great editors; it'd be helpful to promote, for instance, WP:GOCE so editors can get a start doing something which won't run them into really severe trouble while simultaneously giving them a glimpse of just how diverse our topics are.
I also think we, the community, do understand our own dynamics better than the WMF does, and it'd be nice if the WMF acted on that premise. A look at the talkpage of New Page Triage (linked in the interview) and, dare I say, WT:IEP and WP:ACTRIAL, would indicate they're convinced they know what we need better than we do. New Page Triage will be helpful (at least to those of us who know what we're doing, which is a very small percentage of NPPers), but (the great majority of) the community rather clearly indicated what it wanted and thought was best for itself; alas, we're exactly where we were before that started. Not to say the WMF doesn't do a great deal of good work (indeed, without them I'm not typing this), but saying and doing are two different things; I'd like to see some more of the latter. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:21, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The current month-by-month data is maintained on page:
  • http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
That is the same data file I analyzed to conclude the editor-decline has ended. See below:
     • "#Editor base stabilized at 34,000 active editors".
The related graph could be updated from the new data of 2009-2011. -Wikid77 11:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]