Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary Approaches to Attracting More and Better Content

The Strategic Plan/2010-2015 WMF Business Plan Draft has plenty of excellent initiatives that would address the content editor problem. Implementation planning seems now to be the goal.

Partnering with the right organizations with strengths in specialized social media (i.e., not Facebook) would improve visibility of the content provider role. Note Boomers are heading into their early retirement cycle, freeing enormous intellectual capital with tremendous professional expertise to be targeted by WMF. Creating a tiered structure with some for-profit activities that accelerate the WikiMedia mission and vision, perhaps through spin-offs, is also worthy of discussion. These discussions, in the planning and investigation phases, need to be discreet, not communal.

Tool development is also critical. Historically, free, volunteer operations have been overtaken by commercial ones eventually because the commercial ones have the resources to greatly simplify the effort required to gain the desired result. If WMF cannot create such tools, they will be overtaken by something that does.

(Btw, I would guess that this is the primary reason that more women don't contribute. Figuring out how to create content is incredibly complex for anyone who is not a programmer, and most programmers are male.)

Finally, the new tools need to facilitate Meta data; we'll never achieve our vision if we can't turn information into knowledge.

Yes, there are plenty of ideas. The trick is to figure out which of these ideas help us achieve our strategic goals. A lot of the focus in the coming year should be on experimentation -- trying ideas out, measuring whether they have an impact on, say participation and diversity, and then rolling promising features out on a larger scale.

I'm also interested in how larger population trends (such as the one you noted about boomers) could impact our contributor base. One thing we know is that free time (or the desire to make free time) is a pre-requisite for being a heavy contributor. These boomers could be a huge source of knowledge with the time to contribute that knowledge, though the current editing interface will no doubt be a large barrier for this group to overcome (as it is for many folks, not just boomers).

Are you part of the the Wikimedia Gender Gap mailing list?

"Figuring out how to create content is incredibly complex for anyone who is not a programmer, and most programmers are male."

Programmers are not superhuman, and are not appreciably smarter on average than people in many other professions. The main difference is that the programming profession rapidly weeds out people who either will not or cannot read instructions and follow them. When someone with previous programming experience comes to Wikipedia, he (or less commonly, she) expects to learn the complex unfamiliar system by reading manuals.

When I came to Wikipedia I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Wikipedia has by far the best internal documentation of any system of any kind that I have ever seen. Even though reading manuals is a bit of a chore, on Wikipedia it's as good as it gets.

There is also the fact that Wikipedia is at root a software development project, and the system is inherently more open to someone who has a programming background. I can't think of a way to make this "problem" go away. Given the relentless encroachment of computers into seemingly every aspect of life, having an understanding of some basic computer science concepts gives a person an advantage in our brave new world. Knowing something about computers is a basic life skill now. It would make more sense to teach people about computers (perhaps with actual classroom training at user groups, university extension classes, etc.). Even if we could radically redesign Wikipedia to level the playing field, all the people we shield from the harsh reality of computers would still have the same handicaps with computers in every other area of their lives.

Reading manuals on Wikipedia is not much harder than reading recipes in a cookbook. Instead of thinking of manuals as this horrific obstacle, we should encourage people to think of the manuals as they think of any critical resource such as water, air, shelter, and food. Few people spend much time complaining about the expense of keeping a roof over their heads, and even those who do complain about the cost are unlikely to imagine they would be better off without the roof.

The reality is that reading a manual takes time and energy. It's a volunteer project. If it doesn't make intuitive sense from the get go, I think we can expect them to volunteer their time elsewhere. The main people who will have enough motivation to transcend the barriers and read the manuals is someone who is highly committed to pushing a POV, or who is extremely technical (or both).

I don't think it's any surprise that Wikipedia's decline started roughly around the same time as the increasing prevalence of social networking. Social networking is fun and easy. Wikipedia has since become neither.

Wikipedia is still increasing in size and quality. That is, the deletionists have still not managed to outpace the contributors. In what sense is Wikipedia in decline? The rate of Wikipedia's growth has declined but that is not the same. The rate of growth of the US economy has also declined from the boom years of the 1950s but real wealth is higher in the US today, and there are still plenty of opportunities to innovate and get rich.

I agree that social networking is sucking up a lot of oxygen. How much of that comes at Wikipedia's expense, I cannot guess. Over on Facebook there are community pages which look like an attempt to piggyback off of Wikipedia's content. In principle this could give untold numbers of Facebook users an incentive to write articles on Wikipedia - if only we would relax our silly notability restrictions to allow more local and specialized content. Facebook is fun in part because it doesn't delete anything, it ignores copyright restrictions, and it celebrates the long tail. On Facebook, people can gather around any topic of common interest, without fear that anyone who isn't interested in that topic can deem it unworthy and delete it. On Facebook you can share any information you like without regard to copyright or licensing or any of that rigmarole. Although how long the lawyers will let that continue I don't know.