Talk:Wikimedia users/en

From Strategic Planning

What happens after 5-6 years of a Wikipedia's lifecycle? Why do contributors begin dropping out?

Think Big

Is what happens after 5 years really the question?

3 Hypotheses:

  1. Other places where to participate appeared on internet.
  2. Projects are becoming to be saturated.
  3. Community is not friendly enough to attract people.

I think all of them are partly true but none of them is really the core problem.

Look at the typical contributor: Male without children nor partner.

Our project is not a project of 300.000.000 millions people. We have 300.000.000 readers but only 50.000 contributors making 5 or more contributions a month.

The success of the project comes from the ability of internet to gather those strange and spread around the world people in a single project.

Perhaps the question should be:

How make the project attractive for meaningful percentage of world's population?

Or what could be exactly the same:

How make the project attractive enough for women with partner and with children to contribute at least 5 times a month?

This problem is not new but we just realize it is there now because after 5 years almost all of this strange people have contributed yet and have to be shared with other projects.

Answer to the question:

Perhaps after 5 years people find partner and have children.

--Gomà 22:58, 2 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Active contributors and flagged revisions

I find particularly interesting the first graph, as it shows something rather unexpected: among the major wikipedias, the German one as the largest share of active and very active contributors, though it is the one where editing has been made rather hard beacause of flagged revisions. Hence it is not evident that flagged revisions deter contribution. Julien Demade 11:35, 28 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is hard to see the effect without having data from before and after activating flagged revisions. But it seems to me that your conclusion should be exactly the contrary: Only old active and very active contributors continue participating, new contributors are lost. --Gomà 21:43, 29 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Quantity v Quality

The graph showing how a small number of individuals make a high proportion of the edits is not surprising to me, but I don't think it reflects what matters to Wikipedians. Within the community there is an awareness that people who do automated and semi automated editing have inflated edit counts compared to the true value of their contributions. An editor with 20,000 fewer edits than me might have featured articles, have drafted polices that are now adopted, and generally be considered to have made a much greater contribution than I have. I think that only one editor with over 100,000 edits has been on Arbcom, and there are editors with a quarter of a million more edits than him. I would also be interested to know if the analysis ignored bot accounts, and if so whether they successfully screened out unflagged bots or just the flagged ones. A more meaningful analyis would be to put some sort of weighting on the edits - minor edits such as the typo fixing, linking and reverting vandalism that I mainly do are all useful, but not as useful as writing a sourced paragraph of encyclopaedic information. WereSpielChequers 10:18, 7 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]