Wikipedia is not a social networking site

Fragment of a discussion from Talk:May 2011 Update

Encyclopedic articles are best presented in modest formatting. We do not need eye-catching graphics in order to publish encyclopedic articles. E.g. textbooks for university students have a rather simple formatting, they don't have to have lots of fonts, lots of colors and so on. I spend more time on Wikipedia than on Facebook, although Facebook looks more attractive, visually.

Tgeorgescu00:09, 26 May 2011

When I was involved at Wikipedia, I was the same way. But if we want to broaden our audience, a little more attention to design would help. I don't imagine the design would have a lot of bells and whistles. I figure it would be minimalist, but just a little less drab.

Randomran12:51, 27 May 2011
 

"textbooks for university students have a rather simple formatting". Yes, but textbooks for middle/high school are waste of good paper IMO. I would disagree with Randomran's premise in "if we want to broaden our audience". We don't want. The audience is here and expands. The discussed problem is the number of active editors and the quality of articles grows slower.

All considerations must be aimed at the main goal: to collect and disseminate knowledge efficiently.

My daughter was very happy when she got her iPhone, with all things one-touch. But after a while she started craving for my Android, where you may have to do 3 touches instead of 1, but with way higher flexibility. I don't know whether newer iPhones cach up with this, but this was and is the point: after a very quick while the focus changes from "how easy I can do things" to "how many things I can do".

Altenmann20:46, 27 May 2011

That's bunk. There isn't anything I can do on Wikipedia that I couldn't do faster somewhere else. I can format my writing more easily in any word processor. I can reformat links more easily on bit.ly and is.gd. I can discuss more easily on virtually any forum. The question isn't "how many things can I do", but "how many people have enough time to do them the way you've designed it?"

There's also a fundamentally elitist and blatantly false assumption a lot of technophiles have (not to say this includes you, but it's another prevailing problem). It's the idea that anyone who would choose twitter over a clumsy interface designed by computer programmers must be too stupid to contribute anything useful to Wikipedia. Quite the contrary. There are a lot of computer programmers who have a very specialized and limited set of knowledge, and Wikipedia suffers in want of more diverse expertise. But the experts in other fields -- Business, Art History, Public Policy -- have better things to do than to struggle with markup language.

Randomran22:20, 27 May 2011

Bunk back to you, colleague. See what you've just wrote: wikipedia is worse than the combined power of word procesor+bit.ly+forums. Are you aware how many man-centuries it took to develop a modern wordpocessor? And you want a dozen of mediawiki guys compete with them? They are working hard, and they will not work faster despite all this nagging. Do you think they are keeping us in stone age because of lazines, stupidity or malwill?

As for "elitist and blatantly blala", I am afraid that you are at least 20 years late. Yes, on the eve of computing, when programmers were elite indeed, you could have said something like that. Wait, someone had already said this before! "real programmers write in fortran", use only vi editor and think in binary. But technophiles of today know this is a good laugh, and they widely use (and write) various productivity/automation tools. w:Ferrari vs. w:Fordson tractor. Contrary to popular cliche belief, technophiles are stupid in many "real life" respects, but not that stupid: they know the value of high performance.

As for "struggle with markup language", I personally hardly ever use any fancy stuff; anything beyond [ ] < > and { } . There are more than enough wikignomes who would happily format a table after me, put a reference into a nifty "cite" template, fix my typos and whats not. And in my time I did the same after countless art historians and dance teachers. And nobody deleted their articles merely because they lacked flashy markup. But I have an impression that for some reason many of these people like to write mostly about themselves, their girlfriends, teachers and family members. (Oh, and Public Policy experts are extremely keen on pushing their own political agenda).

So. colleague, let's not attack these mediawiki techophiles, say thanks for what they deliver, don't spit onto what they deliver, and help them any way you can: donate your time or money; heck, you may even teach them how to do things. But don't tell them they don't know their job.

Altenmann01:28, 28 May 2011

I don't think this is a programming fail. It's a managerial fail. Any organization that expects to stick around for a long time should do a better job responding to the competition. The data is clear: right around the moment the web jumped into the social sphere -- YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter -- there was a sudden and sharp loss of interest in Wikipedia. Not a crippling failure. But in a competitive environment, you have to adapt. Wikipedia cannot fulfill its mission unless it is competitive.

I'm not attacking the technophiles. Many of them don't have a shred of arrogance, and understand that most people actually have other fields of expertise that don't permit them to be sophisticated computer users. These other types of experts would contribute to Wikipedia, but it's never been clear or attractive for them to do so.

So let me be 100% clear. I'm attacking the idea that Wikipedia should be restricted to the technophiles. A quick look at the demographics for Wikipedia will show it to be roughly the same audience that plays Call of Duty on a regular basis. Meanwhile, you're praising a 3 year old just for picking an android over an iPhone, while showing contempt for the idea that we should broaden our audience -- to Art Historians, Businessmen, and all the kinds of people who can improve content areas where we're particularly weak.

The good news is that the Wikimedia foundation has recognized diversity as essential to improving Wikipedia's quality. I'm sure there are a few people who still cling to the notion that technical hurdles only protect Wikipedia from stupid people. But fortunately those arrogant people are not piloting the Wikimedia ship.

Randomran05:26, 28 May 2011
"who still cling to the notion that technical hurdles only protect Wikipedia from stupid people"

An interesting thought. I don't believe that such people, if of any note in wikipedia, have ever had a decisive say. In fact, just the opposite. For example, wikipedia community strongly resisted the idea to make registration/login obligatory, i.e., resisted to the introduction of an extra hurdle.

Wikimedia foundation has recognized diversity as essential

- No extra glory to wikimedia: this idea was from the very first days of wikipedia - "everyone can edit". And they do! As for Art Historians and Businessmen, I think the major hurdle is for them to get over a habit of an expectation for glory or profit, rather than the wiki markup language. Like I have already written, just input some good text for a missing topic in plain text format.

competition from Twitter etc.

Coincidental. There also were Livejournal, MySpace, etc. There were Yahoo Answers and the likes. There is no such thing as infinite growth. Sooner or later wikipedia had to reach a plateau.

Altenmann07:31, 31 May 2011

True. Growth never lasts forever. But without innovation, growth levels out pretty quickly. Show me an organization that doesn't innovate and I'll show you one that plateaus very quickly. Wikipedia's interface hasn't really changed in 10 years.

In 2001, Wikipedia was still an innovative idea. In a world of static personal webpages and corporate directories, Wikipedia stood alone. Even with the rise of blogging in 2004, Wikipedia still experienced strong growth. Blogs were still just static webpages in search of readers. On the other hand, writing something on Wikipedia had a guaranteed audience, plus a dynamic built-in community where editors with common interests could quickly find each other.

It wasn't until 2007 that growth started to taper off. Some of that is definitely natural. But I don't think the year 2007 is a coincidence. Time Magazine pronounced "you" were the person of the year, citing MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. This isn't to say that any one of those companies is individually a work of genius. It's just that Wikipedia no longer stood alone. If you wanted an audience to express yourself to, there were a whole host of other options that were better than static webpages and blog hosts.

Some of those have already come and gone. But the few that continue to grow are the ones that continue to innovate. Wikipedia has at least done a better job than some of those in keeping the garbage out. But it's just not a rewarding experience for non-technical but otherwise smart people. There are brilliant people who do amazing research for no other reason than their love of knowledge and their desire to teach it to their friends. Facebook makes that simple enough that a child can use it -- just that a PhD or master artist can use it for more educational purposes.

If it were as easy to add a referenced fact to Wikipedia as it is to share a link to a news article on Facebook, you would see a lot more people doing it.

It's possible that Wikipedia's plateau is mostly natural. But the whole reason for this strategy session is that we believe that it's not. If you sincerely believe that the plateau is inevitable, which is a reasonable position to take, then what are you even doing here?

Randomran00:48, 1 June 2011

Change anti-social groups to stop decline: The growth of active users has ended: the active-user counts are in decline, now, for numbers of active and highly active editors ("busy" > 100 edits per month). However, Wikimedia projects could be made more-friendly to help attract and retain editors, as explained in the related Talk:May_2011 topic:

The evidence tells me that the initial decline, in active editors, went into freefall when universities (and other schools) began to ban the use of Wikipedia (WP), by decree and by website-blocking within school computer networks. The "rise-of-Facebook-theory" fails to consider that MySpace (now "Myspace") and other large forums were no threat to WP, before Facebook, but the April-2007 drop occurred when major newsreports announced schools banning WP (and whole schoolboards banned Wikipedia use in hundreds of schools). Certainly, the novelty wore off, articles required more tedious sources, and users left to seek easier, new websites. However, the hostility within WP talk-pages is still a major factor, and hence, the reduction of "hostility" is noted as 1-of-5 issues for the May 2011 Strategy goals.

Wikid7717:50, 5 June 2011

This is another pretty good theory I hadn't considered. If the problem is that Wikipedia went into decline due to restrictions at school, what's the strategy to fix it?

Randomran23:12, 6 June 2011

Focus on adult rules, while students banned: I think the school-based bans are fairly permanent, but there are some student-friendly plans for limited exposure to Wikipedia for young students. The focus now is to work with the adults as in: when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. WP needs to change into a non-juvenile environment, based on clear, fair rules, which adults would expect to find in a mature, professional system, where people can socialize within rules of order (overview: "#Stop Wikipedia as an Anti-social Network").

Adults expect to get w:parking tickets, or speeding fines, for small violations of the rules. However, English Wikipedia is twisted, now, to allow severe w:WP:ANI sanctions (1-month block for a veiled insult), rather than a system of "w:proportional punishment" (no article yet?) for policy violations. It is analogous to parking a car over the line, with the punishment as getting your legs broken, to protect the 'pedia. New social systems, for centuries, have had to deal with unfairness, and learn: let the punishment fit the crime (an "eye for an eye") and punishments for false accusations (the false accuser goes to jail, as in the w:Code of Hammurabi). Why? ...it is one of the Top Ten Evils: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor". So, it happens a lot. That is why I recommend to switch to the cadet system of demerits (offset by earned merits), where posting an insult incurs only 100 demerits, acting as a type of fee (or fine) from an account of merit points, rather than a monetary fine. When the punishments are smaller (and proportional to the offense), then there is no need for the witch-hunt, drama-shows at enwiki w:WP:ANI (where hysteria often rules the outcome). One of the social problems, which I had overlooked, is that several people who are casting judgments at WP:ANI are currently serving sentences: there is no clear line between who is a reputable judge and who is a "convict" perhaps casting votes as revenge for their current WP edit-restrictions. Reduce all the juvenile bickering, such as issuing simple demerits for offenses, and more adults will see a mature system of social interaction, rather than a childish w:WP:PLAYground where bored kids come to fight. Change to a system where adults want to stay and edit articles, and that will reverse the growth above the bottom-limit of 3,400 highly active editors, where the decline is headed this year.

Wikid7712:34, 9 June 2011
 
 
If you sincerely believe that the plateau is inevitable, which is a reasonable position to take, then what are you even doing here?

Your question shows that you, as many others are misled by the buzzword "plateau". In context of wikipedia, 'plateau' means (1) decline in the speed of growth of the content (ie. exponential growth no more, but it is still growing, and there is still plenty of space to grow) and (2) arrested growth of the number of editors. That said, I am baffled by the the meaninglessness of your question: there are plenty of things to do "there" even in these circumstances. Or, perhaps, I don't understand you question phrased in a way too general as to become meaningless for me. Care to clarify?

Altenmann16:07, 6 June 2011

It's a pretty plain question. You agree we hit a plateau. We think it's due to some kind of failing or missed opportunity that requires strategic action. You think it's an inevitability. What are you doing here then? I'm naive enough to waste my time fighting the inevitable. What's your excuse?

Randomran23:10, 6 June 2011

OK, think I finally understood what you mean. My point is that a plateau is not always evil. (I will not go into theoretical discussions of why here). What I am doing here is not just idly socializing, but considering how to ensure for the plateau not to turn into a decline or slippery slope or something worse. And this also requires strategic action. Like, how to run fast enough for just to stay in place. :-) P.S. I don't know what you meant under the word "here" in your question, but in my reply it means "in this talk page".

Altenmann02:17, 9 June 2011