What happened in May 2007?
What happened in May 2007?
Something much more dramatic than a falloff in user retention happened around May 2007. The total number of Wikipedia editors that had been increasing rapidly suddenly started to decline. The falloff in new editors was even more dramatic. So something must have happened. What was it?
There don't seem to be dramatic changes to the software. The policy on creating new articles didn't seem to change then. The BLP policy happened some time before. The speedy deletion policy doesn't seem to have changed.
Does anyone have a long enough memory to know?
- Someone else already mentioned Facebook getting more popular (i.e., taking up time). I just looked at its Timeline and I think that's quite likely to be an explanation of at least part of what happened. That timeline also mentions MySpace, which was also getting popular at that time. I think Bebo in the UK was also popular. There's also "and then the novelty wore off" explanation. 'First adopters' move on, same as 'entrepreneurs'. It's what they do. They love 'new development', they hate 'maintenance'. Which is why, imo, it's not going to work to keep trying to attract that same sort of contributor. They're not interested, and we're turning off every other sort of contributor.
The "Userbox wars" about that time probably alienated a lot of would-be contributors. While some of those involved were drawn to Wikipedia due to the hype & would never have joined in the first place, I suspect not a few were the exact types whom Wikipedia wanted. However these were alienated by the aggressively negative attitude towards userboxes at the time, & not only left but warned off other potential contributors.
For the record, speaking as one of those "old guard Wikipedians" others have blackened with a broad brush, I never fully understood the dislike for the userboxes. Although creating them doesn't help create more useful content, the campaign waged against them was the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill mosquitoes.
Thanks for both of those comments. But they don't seem to address the sudden change. Up till March 2007 (I've read the graphs a bit more precisely) there was a growth in active Wikipedia editors of about 2,100 per month. After this date there was a decline of 1,400 a month - though it recovered somewhat after that, whilst continuing to decline. That is a HUGE change.
Social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Youtube+) must have a longer term effect on Wikipedia but would it be so sudden?
I've never heard of a controversy about user boxes and can't find the controversy. Can you point me to it? -Chris55
- (inline answer for brevity) I think I have the answer about May 2007: students were a major portion of contributors and they left on 3-month school vacation in May 2007, at a time when general interest in Wikipedia began to decline, and more American schools banned Wikipedia use. There were similar, but smaller, drops for school vacations in May 2008 and May 2009, but the user-base seems to have broadened to include more people not leaving on vacations in May-July each year. Many U.S. schools banned use of Wikipedia because the unbalanced (or untrue) POV-pushing of article contents became notorious, or students were unable to focus on their own school work, due to the vast distractions on Wikipedia: it is a bottomless pit of problems and articles not related to typical school subjects. The chart above (as a modified en:negative binomial distribution) shows a similar decline in the article-growth rate, for addition of new articles, rather than new users, each year (also drops in May each year). The original wide-open growth was reduced by widespread news and more school policies against bad problems in Wikipedia (short answer). -Wikid77 12:55, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
- Fascinating. So you would say that the hyper-growth in English wiki between 2005 & 2007 was mainly fuelled by US schoolkids. It would only take about 20,000 of them - I suppose there are no stats available: have wiki editors ever answered anonymized questionnaires about themselves? It would certainly tie in with the suggestion that Facebook was the next fad. I hadn't considered Wikipedians and Facebook users to be similar types, but I can buy it for teenagers.
- My feeling is still that it's only a partial answer. For one thing the decline started in April (though the June decline was the biggest), but also why did the direction of the graph change so much? Even if the last kids were still dropping out a year later the growth should have recovered at some point. (And the long term graph you've included is pure fantasy:) Chris55 13:59, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
Have a look at the WikiEN-l archives in January 2006 for the thread "The userbox fad". That won't tell the whole story, but it will illustrate how established editors viewed an otherwise innocuous activity favored by a new generation of editors. I don't think it would be very hard to see how newcomers reacted to this response.
I could see Yoville, Mafia Wars and Farmville drawing a lot of people, but I agree the drop you're referring to was remarkably sudden. Obama announced his presidential campaign in February 2007, and that campaign attracted a lot of young and tech-using people - iow, the same sort of volunteers as Wikipedia. Still, we may just be seeing a typical peak-then-plateau as the novelty wears off. As for any userbox flap, I never was aware of one. I just copied mine whenever I found one I liked on someone else's page. ;-) Flatterworld 05:40, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm coming to the conclusion that the change in April 2007 was about a change in the way that new editors were treated. It may have been a change in the registration procedure or in how their first edits were treated as many others have suggested in other threads.
Looking at the study, one change is that 57 new admins were appointed in March 2007. This is the highest number in a single month apart from the period March-May 2005 when a total of 175 were appointed. Both of those periods have been highlighted as significant in the study. It might be worth looking more closely at the way this cohort was instructed and what they did in their initial period. It could be either that their actions scared off many potential new editors or that they were appointed because of some other perceived threat, which had a side effect. I'm not even sure these figures apply to the English Wiki.
March 2007 only had 31 successful RFAs, which was a fractionally below average month for RFA as far as 2007 was concerned. Also it came soon after a slight lull in December 2006 and January 2007. There were a couple of spikes in May and November, but neither was as much as double the trend for that year. en:User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month
It was a bunch of different things that all added up. Here's an overview.
- Wikipedia was criticized and tried to correct things by harsh enforcement of the rules
- Wikipedia became a hostile environment as people started using the rules as weapons
- Other Wiki-alternatives became available
I'm leaving out a bunch of stuff for brevity, but I'm sure you'll get the idea. During this time, there was a lot of criticism of Wikipedia and some of it was highly visible. The media questioned Wikipedia's quality[1], reported vadalism[2], reported "paid editing"[3] and somebody got sued for a BLP violation[4]. Also, the first vandalism study said 97% comes from IP editors[5], w:WP:WIF became more visible[6], the w:Essjay controversy became big news[7], a person was detained as a terrorist because of another BLP violation[8] and Jimbo was criticized on TV.[9] This was also the time that w:Citizendium was launched[10], so people had a new alternative to Wikipedia.
I am sure the issue was the community's response to the media coverage, rather than the media coverage itself.
I do not believe that the media coverage in late 2006 and 2007 did any serious damage to how Wikipedia was viewed by the public. This is for two reasons: - prior to 2006 Wikipedia did not have a reputation for reliability, so news about its unreliability wasn't really news - growth in Wikipedia readership has continued to increase massively, not what you would expect from a damaged brand - none of the "competitors" to Wikipedia have gained a significant number of editors compared to us.
My explanation for the dropoff in new editors in 2007 would be that at that stage, the low-hanging fruit had been eaten. Prior to then, editing Wikipedia tended to mean adding facts from your general knowledge. Since then, Wikipedia has tended to be at a higher level than peoples' general knowledge and we focused on citations and verifiability. This was the right thing for the project, but it came at a cost.
I would quite concur that the community has since become less welcoming to newcomers. There are technical steps that can be (and have been) taken to protect the integrity of the encyclopedia and I for one am glad that we don't let random people insert images of penises into widely-used templates any more. However the social trend in the community has, in my experience, been to bite newbies more and more. Very few of the technical changes that have done anything to help new users.
In consequence I am concerned that we are failing to reach the people who we now need - people with patience, willingness to educate themselves in order to improve our articles, people with useful references close at hand. They are not necessarily ready to leap into an unfamiliar interface and are very unlikely to respond well to a hostile response to their first edits... we need to change that.
Hydroxonium, I think your analysis here is exactly right. (And The Land, you are correct too: that it was likely the community's response to the media coverage that was the important factor, not the media coverage itself.)
To elaborate a little: Between 2005 and 2007, readership to the Wikimedia projects reached critical mass and Wikipedia became a household name. That brought in a wave of new editors, including --as always-- some vandals and pranksters and spammers. It was hard for experienced editors to cope with that influx and they responded in normal Eternal September fashion, by erecting barricades designed to preserve quality, such as new editorial policies, templated warnings, a higher bar for notability, and the development of tools making it easier to delete new articles and revert edits. This was all normal Eternal September response. And yes, it was likely heightened by editors’ sensitivity to criticisms about quality from people they respect, such as educators and authoritative culture critics.
(((Further elaboration of that last point: As Wikipedia grew in popularity, many educators and cultural figures began publicly questioning and criticizing it. In November 2005, the Seigenthaler biography controversy broke. In July 2006, Steven Colbert made fun of Wikipedia in a sketch he called Wikiality. In February 2007, the essjay scandal broke. Wikimedians are typically diligent, serious-minded, and scholarly people who admire high-minded cultural and educational institutions. I theorize that they felt really wounded by criticism from people they respect, which resulted in them further upwards-prioritizing quality, even when the pursuit of quality had damaging effects on participation ... thereby exacerbating and amplifying otherwise ordinary Eternal September effects.)))
The barriers worked. Quality continued to improve, but the improvements came partly at the cost of participation. Reversion and deletion rates, particularly of new people’s edits, began to climb, and newbies began to bounce off the barricades.
This has had ripple effects throughout the Wikimedia community. The community is ageing. Fewer editors are self-nominating to become admins and bureaucrats, and fewer of those nominations are succeeding. Experienced editors say they are tired and overworked, and there are signs that internal fightyness is increasing, with editors reporting fatigue due to bullying, hostility and unfairness. Some small projects report that they’re tolerating bad behaviour from editors because they need the help: if bad editors are kicked out, there aren’t sufficient others to do the work that needs to get done. And, there are signs that some small projects have become vulnerable to exploitation by trolls, because they don’t have a large enough pool of good-faith editors to successfully repel them. And, some women and members of other underrepresented groups are reporting systemic bias on the projects: they believe their edits are being unfairly reverted by young male Western majority gatekeepers. Which makes sense: if "community consensus" is how editorial decisions get made, then the demographics and attitudes of community members, particularly those in positions of authority, will naturally shape the content of the projects.
That's where we're at.
I'm sure all that is true, but are you assuming all/most of the previous editors came to Wikipedia in good faith? I remembered (finally!) the 'nofollow' kerfluffle which meant SEO people lost interest in using Wikipedia for their own purposes. We still have some of that at the article level (perhaps some articles about smallish companies - notable, but most 'uninvolved' people wouldn't think of writing an article about one), but not all the spamming of company links in a variety of articles, related or not. And the fake refs (e.g., a non-controversial statement with a ref to a site selling shoes). iow, nofollow was a good idea which got rid of editors we didn't actually want or need. That would explain some of the earlier sudden rise, as well. SEO people used to rely on Dmoz to get 'moved up' in Google. That stopped working, so they moved to Wikipedia. That stopped working, so they moved to...I have no idea. But they did move on, and I for one am grateful for that.
Of course not every person registering an account does so with good intentions. However we are very good at dealing with disruptive contributions from people we don't know, and very bad at dealing with constructive ones. How many people who were trying to help had their edits reverted with either no explanation or an impersonal (possibly incomprehensible) one? How many of them felt welcomed an encouraged to contribute again?
I should have been clearer - not all SEO-type contributions were or are disruptive. It's just that they weren't interested in 'volunteering' their time once nofollow went into effect. We're talking about a very specific point in time when new editors suddenly dropped off. As I said, I'm agreeing with what has already been said, but I find it 'required but not sufficient'. I was editing during that time period, and I don't remember the bullying of newbies suddenly changing, or some 'Eternal September' effect suddenly showing up. What I do remember is the switch from listing all the sources used in a group under 'Sources' to requiring inline citations. Which was a bit confusing and annoying (especially for articles using only one source), but I honestly don't recall any general revolt against it. Most of the visible effect - still is - is that some editors are too impatient to go back and forth between the source and article, and just create bare url links for someone else to fix later (or fill out everything but the url 'from memory' which creates some odd titles!) But that's okay - I've fixed plenty of those over the years and never felt the need to 'admonish' the original editor. It's certainly possible the inline citations turned off new editors, but I would guess it's because they clicked 'edit' and saw so many citations they couldn't find the actual written material, or thought the material itself had to be formatted in some mysterious way. 'Wikifying' a term is easy enough to figure out, simply by seeing a blue link, clicking on 'edit' and seeing that term has brackets around it, and figuring it out. But that's only 4 added characters - citations take up a lot more room, and those using the cite templates require a lot of memorization. And guess what? A lot of non-techies don't immediately recognize the difference between 'curly brackets' and parentheses, use parentheses, and then can't figure out why it doesn't work. Look - all these things would show up in focus groups, or just by watching a non-techie friend try to edit something. Once someone learns to edit, they forget the details of how they learned, what was annoying, what was difficult, etc.
I remember the userbox debate and took part in it. I think some senior admin suddenly decided to take action and hundreds of people objected their favourite user boxes had disappeared. I never used a user box but the complainers were right. What was the point in banning them? There were some technical arguments about computer power, but it was rubbish (and someone worked out a fix). The main objection seemed to be the idea that users might be banding together in interest groups who might act together in a way which challenged the established authority on wiki. Suddenly instead of a friendly group of people having fun it was back in school and do as you are told. If you dont like what we do, get lost. No individuality allowed. The establishment was horrified the editors had rebelled.
wikipedia was created on the principle that a bunch of half informed people lobbing in ideas can defy entropy and create meaning out of chaos. A bunch of people in a free for all can put something together which turns out to be helpful.
I think wikipedia's reaction to criticism about its content was a mistake. Wiki has sought to become a traditional encyclopedia written by experts. There are several people who have said on this page that what wiki needs is exactly these experts and nothing else. Which completely misses the point about how the encylopedia grew and the principle that anyone can contribute. Wiki has become a bunch of reference obsessives. Funnily enough, wiki is driving the world into being reference obsessives, not the other way about. Traditional encyclopedias are not reference obsessive. They just tell you what you want to know.
I remember reading some asimov when I was a boy where he derided scholars at the galactic university for writing books based on books based on books, with never a primary source to be seen (not that I would have known the term then -see). references on wikipedia are more about settling arguments than about a search for accuracy. people lose my support when they push the concept of eternally adding references which just do not benefit content. If you want the kind of people who are pedantic, then fair enough. If you want the sort of people who wrote most of this encyclopedia, then forget this nonsense about rules.
There is room on wiki for reference obsessives, but only if they are kept in check. If they are allowed to write rules which make it impossible for the non reference obsessed to function, then the non reference obsessed will not stay here. Unless they sometimes like a fight. like me. Lots of edits by me somewhere arguing the ridiculousness of this approach. Usually works, too. Because the policy is seriosly flawed. At the very centre of the rules wiki has to acknowledge that the primary requirement for all content is originality.
The people you want here are synthesists. People who can pick up a subject, roll it about and stick together little facts into a seamless whole. people like that, and references do not matter because they will just sort it. That is how the encyclopedia happened. But no, you have to have rules so you can police it. The faction that do not believe in originality gangs up with the faction that believes wiki cannot function without strict policing. The ones who came here for fun because they enjoy stringing facts together into clever articles just get pissed off. Its a joy to do this stuff and do it well, but you guys, you just want to have all these stupid rules, and stupid little stick it notes that those who like stick it notes splat all over an article. Think theyre clever to point out a problem you knew perfectly well was there but hadnt got round to - then they buzz off and annoy someone else. Stop to fix it? oh no. Just auto delete.
I'm trying to explain. I understand the point of rules, but many who use them do not.
Today I have been looking at the Fukushima article, all day off and on. It is interesting to see how it has grown. Loads of people have been adding stuff as it happens, sentence-reference. Thats fine. A good use of references. Its chaos. the facts are unclear. something arrives and stick it in. Then some more, then try to look at the two sources and reconcile their differences. This is not a normal situation, it is reference heaven because it is a situation where they do matter. but as a busy article, most of those people are not so good at housekeeping the article. No one works on its structure. working facts into sentences. Lots of quoting 'this is how we do it so its got to be this way'. Had to split the article because you can't have a disaster mixed in with a power station article. Then put it back together. Then split it again. All the while it is the busiest topic on wiki. Well...thats how wiki works. But the nature of the argument is quote this rule, quote that rule. Not a lot of, just leave it be and see how it develops.
What am I complainign about? It is a good example of rules because there is a lot of chaos which needs containing and to an extent they impose order on it. But they do not impose a sense of turning those facts into something good. Something as helpfull as possible to those people accessing the article. The idea is to impose goodness on articles. I dont think you can. The rules would not have helped at all if those people contributing had not been keen to help.
Someone on this page complained there arent enough admins. I'm tempted to run and see if I get refused. If I did, then your question is answered. If I'm not suitable, then therese really no hope. People who enjoy being helpfull in a cooperative exercise arent going to want to be here. I would not promise to suddenly start processing masses of deletion requests. Nor masses of anything. Occasionally I might have done something as an admin and sometimes I have got involved in issues anyway, but mostly its hard work to figure out rules and procedures, and then just hard work processing paperwork. The people who are willing to do this, because they believe in the idea of the thing, you seem to be driving them into the dust. By making rules....more work to do....less fun....
About the userbox wars: it wasn't a "senior" Admin, it was simply one who had received the bit from fighting vandals & had convinced the right people she/he had a clue. (You can figure out whom I'm talking about if you read the relevant threads in WikiEN-l.) But if it hadn't been for that Admin, I'm sure one of the other Admins on the WikiEN-l list would have done the same thing.
Nevertheless, the deeper problem in the userbox wars was that it fed the growth of a deeper rift in the community: to use the same words I used above, the "clued" versus "those without a clue." But instead of doing the statesmanlike thing -- reaching out & handing out clues (so to speak) -- they were treated like clueless end users who call technical support for help but can't tell the difference between a backslash & a forward slash. As a result, a lot of respect was lost between the different cliques or groups, & some important traditions -- such as not taking Wikipedia so seriously, remembering to laugh at ourselves.
(And I'm not exempting myself from making this problem worse. Although spoke out against this attack on userboxes, I should have done more: I should have tried to work to bridge between the groups. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time or the confidence to do that. And even if I had, I still might not have made a difference.)
As a result, I believe that Wikipedia has been drifting in a direction none of us really want to go, yet don't know how to change things. But then again, browsing threads in the WikiEN-l list from late 2005 & early 2006, I found numerous emails about how things were worse at Wikipedia than they were only a few years before. How does that saying go, the one about how things change the more they remain the same?
(P.S. -- It is somewhat disorienting to read these old discussions on WikiEN-l I participated in, but have almost forgotten. Sometimes I sound wiser than I think I am now, & sometimes I wrote the most stupid things.)