New edits-by-mail option will "revolutionize" Wikipedia and its editor base
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) will announce later today that it will begin accepting edits by mail for all of the projects under its scope, including Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons. They believe that this move, coming as part of a long-held goal to open up editing to anyone, will "revolutionize" the site by opening up the Wikimedia sites to more potential editors. The initiative will begin on the English Wikipedia, with others to follow soon after.
Details of how this edits by mail initiative will be implemented were not fully revealed as of publishing time, but the WMF's tech ambassador Pennaninn Quell told the Signpost that it will involve post-office boxes posted in many major countries around the world. Letters sent to them will be forwarded to the WMF's San Francisco office by next-day airmail, paid by the organization. "Mail has the disadvantage of taking days rather than seconds," Quell wrote. "We want to limit this competitive disadvantage where possible, and we are easily in a financial position to fully commit to this project." Edits will be processed by a newly created WMF department, which will be given its own C-level head. As a significant demand for this service is expected, a high number of new staff members is expected.
The WMF hopes that this new system will open editing of the world's largest encyclopedia to over 90% of the world's population, and estimated that edits could jump by 10% or more: spokesperson Rowland Hill told the Signpost that "mail has the potential to reshape the 21st century." These numbers are a welcome boost to the quantitative-heavy metrics frequently cited by the WMF, and are in part based in survey results that show that more people have more familiarity with Esperanto than wikimarkup, which is currently the only way to edit the English Wikipedia without knowing how to manipulate user preferences.
Hill noted that using the familiar mail system will allow people to sidestep learning the complicated syntax, a significant portion of which has been in use since the site's inception in 2001—a time when the concept of social media did not exist, Altavista and Lycos were actually popular, and the World Trade Center still adorned the New York skyline. The vision is to reverse Wikipedia's long-declining pool of active editors.
The WMF went on to emphasize that as an intended side-benefit, sending in edits by mail will provide greater security for its users. They believe that this arrangement has the potential to open up a paradigm shift in the WMF's relationship with the US National Security Agency, which the WMF has accused of snooping on its employees and users' communications. "Submitting edits by mail would force the NSA to physically open thousands or millions of letters each day," Hill said. "Analog mail will provide greater security against their 'dragnet' surveillance practices than the current digital system."
As of publishing time, editors of the English Wikipedia have created a request for comment, which looks certain to oppose the proposed new policy. "The barbarians are already at our doors," stated one user without apparent irony. "They will compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia."
In related news, to present the best face to these newly enfranchised editors, the WMF has announced plans to fundamentally redesign the English Wikipedia's main page. As of publishing time, English-language Wikipedians have mobilized in force against this attempt to modernize the main page for the first time in nine years, as they have done several times previously. One editor opposed the measure by calling it a "vanity project": "we don't need readers to read us anyway," forgetting why they originally joined the site in 2004. E
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