Diminishing ability to contribute

Have the strategy people here considered the possibility that the growing size and coverage of the encyclopedia can itself negatively affect a bypasser’s ability to contribute? As a newbie back in 2005, it was very exciting to work on Russian Wikipedia—pretty much an unplowed field at that point—and there was still plenty of room in English as well. Browsing the English WP today I see an enormous number of articles that explain a broad range of subjects with clarity and precision I could only dream of. Other articles suffer from non-trivial problems, such as POV conflicts or lack of proper references, that are hard and boring to solve. No longer can you pick a favorite subject and immerse yourself in writing about it—unless your favorite subject happens to be something rare and obscure, which frankly I don’t think happens all that often. This seems like an obvious development to me and I’m sure others have pondered over it, so maybe it’s me underestimating the scale of missing content in Wikipedia? In any case, I would be glad to see some discussion about this. --Vasiliy Faronov 10:43, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I think the major problem is a need for a reality check. You need new peoples (and existing editors) feedback. Wikipedia states things like new people and experienced editors (esp. with administrative level privileges) are on a equal footing when that does not seem to be the case. Tell that to someone struggling to keep their article viable in a Wikipedia that seems full articles and complexities that might not have existed in the early days of Wikipedia. What new people see is someone who holds the keys to their article going in for the delete tag. There clearly is not a equal footing and contradicts the kind words of equality offered up by Wikipedia. This results in trust issues!

Wikipedia has also seemingly in the past (and now) gone for monetization and the lesser known shrinking of articles to fit the mobile phone market (possibly a temporary technical problem). New users are getting bombarded with all sorts of stuff and probably come to Wikipedia with preconceived ideas also. Politics such as monetization have a habit of making new users very confused.

I think you should carefully consider the negative things that can happen to users (and some existing articles & users) because of social interaction with editors; Wikipedia policy that might get out of touch with new people (and existing people); and perceived social changes and expectations that are happening withing the internet community that will change how they expect Wikipedia to behave and the type of information they might be looking to find. An interface that prevents bad interaction before it happens for example would be helpful--This is part of the secret of Twitter, which is so unlike communicating on ICQ chat channels for example.

People today are experiencing exponential growth in technology in some areas, especially in the internet, so you might expect that will change their views of what a Wikipedia should be in a much more rapid way then in the past. The fact is there is vast creative energies out there in the community that people have access to. People are looking to make sense of it and track their favorites. People are looking to expand their once small interest groups to a global scale. Without any flexible feedback systems you will miss that message and be unable to improve Wikipedia. New things are becoming "NOTABLE" and critical today for new users. New channels of communications have opened up new ways to spread the message around the world to make things significant. "New People" can see the old establishment isn't liking that and is resisting it. To them--"the old guard"--the economy and the way of doing things of the old world is under threat.

A feedback-loop would provide a possible solution to that. You might not have to read every feed back form, but if there is a rapid escalation of negative feedback (or positive feedback) you might get the urge to take a look at the situation causing it.

Your only problem is to make the feedback forms as fun as possible while making people feel their privacy is not being invaded and bombarded by all sorts of information that has nothing to do with their task at hand (such as writing an article for Wikipedia). The information I am talking about is an unlimited number of disruptive advertising techniques that expects you to wait around until they are finished. People might just be irritated enough to dismiss a form in such cases if it was done in the wrong way or presented incorrectly.--(Gharr 02:31, 12 March 2011 (UTC))

Vasiliy Faronov has hit it right on the nail: the idea of helping to build something new and potentially very important was exciting and inspiring back then; there was no lack of glaring holes in the coverage of notable topics, and new editors had much more the feeling than now that they were part of a vanguard community, going against the common idea that a project like this was destined to end up soon on the garbage heap of history. An editor then was much more likely to recognize an other editor's name, and have a notion of their style and interests on Wikipedia.

So I think that today's lower retention can at least partly be ascribed to a lesser sense among new editors of belonging to a community, and also increasingly less commitment to a "cause" as Wikipedia is finding more mainstream acceptance. Wikipedia being less of a cause, and the attendant reduced commitment, are unavoidable consequences of (by itself desirable) wide acceptance. But I feel more could be done about the sense of belonging to a community.

As a start, I think it will definitely help if newbie editors get timely feedback on their edits. It doesn't have to be WikiLove-style feedback, but should of course be positive for good edits, and friendly but not condescending for good-faith not-so-good edits. It could be questions like "do you have a source for that?" or "did you really mean that?", anything that makes clear the newly recruited editor's work does not simply vanish to insignificance in a huge stream of unseen and unacknowledged database updates.  --Lambiam 11:56, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

P.S. I just found out about User:EpochFail's NICE script, that makes it easy to see when you're about to revert a newbie's edit and to interact with them. I've not tried it out yet, but would nevertheless encourage people to try it out and help to develop this fledgling tool.

I agree with Vasiliy Faronov and Lambiam that the Gold Rush is over, and we are no longer in the phase where any sort of content was wanted and applauded. The 'pedia is now in a more considered and sophisticated phase where quality matters more than quantity, and this requires a different sort of editor - one who has a willingness to learn and follow our quality standards. Such an editor is harder to find than the slap and dash editor, so numbers will fall. A more pertinent study would be: has the quality growth of the 'pedia occured despite the fall in numbers of editors or as a result of it? SilkTork 12:46, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

The token mistake though is that quantity is a kind of quality.

On popular culture topics, it may be true that the average Wikipedia article is good. On the majority of academic topics however, you are better off picking a random source from the en.wp article's references and reading that instead, or searching google books and finding a suitable book for larger topics. Wikipedia's strength is quantity (of articles) over quality (of any given article) by and large. There was an academic study on the quality of FA-rated articles; about half of them were found deficient by experts. Yes, Wikipedia is better than Britannica, but nowhere near a specialized source for any given topic, or even broad area (say like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).