message to community about community decline

Hi John!

My name is Brandon, and I am a Foundation employee. I want to make a comment about your concern vis-a-vis the "user" nomenclature.

It may (or may not) surprise you to know that within the Foundation we have a rather rich lexicon regarding our various types of users. Most of our terms revolve around function (e.g., "readers", "editors", "spellcheckers," "patrollers"), a few around actual status ("registered", "anonymous", "autoconfirmed") and some around motivation ("troll," "mentor", "newbie"). All of these terms are subsets of a larger group, "users."

I'm going to disagree with you that technical people think of "users" in a negative light. The use of the term "user" as "any consumer of the product" is and has been common practice in the computer science (and other) industry for decades (long enough that it was considered a widely understood term when Tron was released in 1980). The fact of the matter is that certain industries use certain well-understood terms to create a common vocabulary. Sometimes these terms have different meanings outside of the industry. Since "User" is the common, widely-accepted term for user interface and computer science professionals, we're going to stick with that, I think.

As an aside, I have always had a dislike for the terms "readers" and "editors". That's a very binary distinction, and it actually doesn't mean much when you look at how those distinctions have classically been made (that is, "readers" = "people without accounts"; "editors" = "people with accounts"). We pay very close attention to the processes regarding what we call "anonymous" and "registered" users (we don't call them "editors" since the bulk of user accounts have only 1 or 0 edits). The reason this distinction (for us) is important is the difference in presumptive rights that the two types possess (for example, anonymous users cannot create articles on the English Wikipedia).

Depending on what we're thinking about, we may look at the user base sliced by status, motivation, function, or a vector of any one of the three (e.g., "newbie trolls who patrol recent changes" or "experienced mentors", etc.)

At any rate: no one in the Foundation thinks of "users" as a derogatory term. And, to quote Tron himself, "I fight for the users".