Talk:Attracting and retaining participants/en

From Strategic Planning

What approaches could be taken to lower the barriers to participation that non-users face (e.g., usability problems)? How feasible would a graphical user interface (a la Word) be instead of the code-based editor currently used?

This discussion seems to focused primarily on English and primarily on Wikipedia. Is participation being addressed separately for all the projects? Jennifer Riggs 17:37, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

New ideas while keeping old contributors

  1. The lifecyle of a Wikipedia is limited
    1. Well, yes it is. Sorry to say, but once curiosity is gone, the newness is gone, people will flood to a different hype.
  2. Barriers to engagement for non-contributors
    1. Evidence shows that this conclusion is right.
  3. Under-represented groups among contributors
    1. Here we'll have to conclude that the life cycle of Wikipedia depends of underrated groups.
  4. At present, the Wikipedia interface has limitations in its ability to facilitate social interactions
    1. We'll have to think about social interaction indeed, however will a Facebook or Twitter interface help us?

Here we have a very short sketch of Wikipedia in the current internet world. If people are not concerned about knowledge any more, but focus on "reality", we will lose that competition very very quickly, and I doubt we'll want to try. What we do want, is to stick with our core business and possibly to expand that. We can do that, by either:

  1. expand our regions
  2. pull down the barriers
  3. strengthen our strategic bonds
  4. stick to presenting quality and make sure that readers find what they ask for

To my mind, the latter is the main thing. If we lose focus on that, we're lost. Should we drop to 25th site in the world just doing that, we should be happy. Our core thing is simply, to present knowledge to the world.

We're now worrying if the Anglo-Saxon world will be able to maintain what we have reached, and if we are able to drag our mission one step further. On the other hand, could we hand over that mission to Asia, Africa and should they be able to carry the flame, we should be all the happier. What we should worry about, is whether the knowledge that we gathered, is reaching the world at all. - Art Unbound 21:17, 20 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Move to proposals

Instead of making proposals here, make them in the proposal section. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Social_Interaction_Features

Mdupont 14:42, 24 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keeping contributors, encouraging readers

A proposal for online human assistance for the newbies / readers. MarianoC 11:18, 25 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The role of reverts

As http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMFSurvey3.png clearly shows, the high rate of reverts for the contributions of new contributors, is obviously not a deterrent to contribution, so this problem should not be over-emphasized (or at least not for this reason) Julien Demade 12:16, 28 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be interested to know how much of the rising proportion of reverting of newbie edits is our increased efficiency in spotting vandalism, and how much is due to increased spamming of wikipedia due to its high profile and openness to editing. Also once we've filtered out spam and vandalism, are we seeing a fall of good minor edits by newbies? And if so is this due to our increasing quality resulting in there being far fewer typos for newbies to fix? I'm reasonably confident from anecdotal evidence of users who've logged out and done the odd IP edit, and from my own observations of newbie editors that good IP and newbie edits are rarely reverted. But statistical info would be useful. Also I'd be interested in info from other wikis, as I suspect that EN wiki may be atypical. WereSpielChequers 13:12, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Good question. If it's not already, would you add it to the key questions for the task forces? Each strategic priority has a series of key questions linked for it. I would guess this would fit nicely under the content quality section? -- Philippe 19:29, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence of increasing bureaucracy

I note that article reviewing and wikiprojects all seem to have been bundled into "Evidence of increasing bureaucracy". And that Article Talk pages were described as "for discussing articles" rather than "for discussing improvements to articles" (though I've corrected this now). Here are a few examples from the English Wikipedia of what this analysis counts as increasing bureaucracy as opposed to building encyclopaedic content:

As opposed to building content such as this, this and this.

I also suspect that a large part of the increase in Article talkpages has been from bots templating articles with project classification templates like this. WereSpielChequers 20:31, 9 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've changed the evidence of increasing bureaucracy into a more neutral "Evidence of increasing activity that isn't directly content related". My suspicion is that one of the maturity indicators of individual wikipedias will be that the role of the reference desk will increase over time as we see more users of the encyclopaedia as opposed to contributors to it. What would be interesting would be if we could get some more meaningful metrics of this. It might also be helpful to rearrange the various spaces in the pedia so that reference and review were split out from Wikipedia space. WereSpielChequers 15:03, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'm also concerned that this research was measuring pages rather than say edits or words, so a bot adding project tags to article talkpages would have each of the tens of thousands of article talkpages it created given the same weight as an article talkpage that might have had hundreds of edits. But the idea of measuring how wikipedia is changing over time is a good one, however we need a better divide than article space/bureacracy. I'm thinking more along the lines of:
  1. Vandalism & Spam - edits that have been rollbacked, creation of articles subsequently deleted as attack pages, hoaxes or vandalism pages
  2. Vandal fighting edits done using rollback, vandal warning templates, speedy deletion tags for vandalism and attack pages, block notices, reports of vandals for blocking, sockpuppetry investigations WereSpielChequers 21:50, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Bureaucracy policy pages, "election" pages including for admins, crats and arbcom. Talkpages of election and policy pages, templates in article space other than ones related to possible deletion of the article.
  4. Article writing edits in article space, other than those counted in the categories above.
  5. Editing and article review Article talkpage edits other than those counted above. edits in the wikiprojects, Good content and featured content review processes.
  6. Reference desk edits to the reference desk area - we might want to subdivide this into queries from readers and responses by wikipedians
  7. Training Helpdesk edits, new admin school, welcome templates in usertalkspace.
  8. Miscellaneous Other edits.
Unfortunately this would leave large numbers of edits in a miscellaneous category. Unless anyone has suggestions of how else to allocate other groups of edits? WereSpielChequers 21:50, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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