Number of speakers and participation

Participation Goals

• Goals should be at a micro level than at a macro worldwide level.
• Participation goals should include things like "burn rate" and "join rate"
• Stable Wikipedias will naturally lose active contributors because there is less stuff to contribute
• Language diversity is critical
• We don't know how much is enough or how few is too few. Intuitively, we do know that you need some critical mass to have a stable project.

Quality Goals

• What does it mean to be the "sum of all knowledge"?
  • Be conscious of other types of knowledge besides Wikipedia content
• Do we want so many people getting their information from one source?
  • Fulfilling the Wikimedia vision does not mean that all knowledge has to come from Wikimedia.

Reach Goals

• Be careful of imperialism regarding the Global South.

In General

• Simply taking current numbers and multiplying them doesn't have a lot of predictive validity.

We have to define what are our reasonable goals in relation to number of participants in projects. So, here is the draft. I am taking Norway as an example.

• 100% for some project is a number of speakers who are old enough to participate and young enough to be familiar with computers.
• Presently, I can approximate that it is 2/3 of population between 15 and 64 years old, which is ~45% of 4.5 millions of speakers (inhabitants of Norway), which is ~2.2 millions [1].
• Presently, Norwegian Wikipedia has 1.1M pages loaded per day, which means that there are approximately 100,000 unique visitors daily. It has 8594 total Wikipedians, ~600 active and ~100 very active.
• In percentages, it has 5% of Wikipedia adoption, 0.4% of total Wikipedians, 0.03% of active Wikipedians and 0.005% of very active Wikipedians.

In this case, I think that conclusions may be:

• I am sure that it is possible to raise Wikipedia adoption to 50%, which would raise other numbers: total Wikipedians 4%, active Wikipedians 0.3%, very active Wikipedians 0.05%.
• Further, we should work on raising other percentages. The most important number is the number of active Wikipedians. I think that it is possible to raise that number to ~5% of population.
• When would we raise those numbers, it depends on a lot of factors, but I think that something like ~10% raise every year is achievable.
• And we should adapt those numbers to population growth and other relevant factors.

By using method like this one, we would be able to put much more realistic numbers in relation to growth. By comparing results of actions which, let's say, Wikimedia Norway did and raising number of readers and editors, we would be able to make much more relevant conclusions.

Millosh, would it be your supposition that it's best to break things down to the country level like this, or do you think we could possibly do it regionally and/or super regionally? This is really neat thinking, thank you for it.

We have a ton of really really great art that was put together for this project, and some of it is directly relevant to this discussion. At Eekim's request, here are a few of the applicable illustrations... (btw, if you have a couple of free minutes [[Category:Illustrations]] (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Illustrations) is worth browsing...

File:Fastest_Internet_growth_MEA.png
File:Wikimedia_users_by_region_by_language.png
File:Wikimedia_penetration_world_map.png
File:Internet_growth_by_region.png
File:Wikimedia_content_areas_mapped.png
File:QOTW_12-21.png
File:Contributor_growth_size_by_wikipedia.png

We're looking a lot at our "distance", but not enough at our "velocity". We definitely need goals for our absolute number of volunteers, but we're not looking at stuff like our burn rate (or join rate). It would be useful to set goals for those... although achieving those goals is another discussion.

We might even want to set out goals that will help us achieve those goals. Create new dispute resolution systems, for example. Or improve usability.

goals for editor retention, goals for editor improvement, process for editor "coaching" moving from first edits to FA editing

Five percent of the population active Wikipedia contributors? The idea actually scares me. It would mean we were the government. And fifty percent of the population all getting their information from the same source? A dangerous level of concentration. This is nuts. Let's keep things in perspective.

Personally, I don't care if Wikipedia ever gets any bigger than it is now. Quality, on the other hand, I would like to see improved. Major components of that are, I think, 1) reducing the degree of cultural bias in the encyclopedia; 2) being more inclusive of other cognitive styles.

Wikipedia is written by middle and upper class White guys. Its content reflects their interests and biases. People on this page seem quite aware of that; but in its daily workings English Wikipedia seems to trundle on more-or-less oblivious to it. The problem may be unsolvable: that demographic is the one with computers, internet, and leisure time -- the ingredients of a Wikipedian. Nevertheless, I think a frank and explicit admission of, and consciousness raising about, this phenomenon might of itself be somewhat revolutionary.

Cognitive Styles: Somebody is chattering about the "sum total of all knowledge." Is poetry knowledge? You sure can't put poetry in en.wikipedia. Not even close. Some people operate more on intuition, others more on reason. Clearly we cater more to the latter type. Again, partly inevitable: computers are linear, rational, rules-oriented machines. However, here I think there remains some room, we have some play, some possibilities for altering the situation with different policies and resource-allocations, if we want. How can we be surprised that women stay away in droves? They don't play chess either. Is there room for poets, mystics, and dreamers at Wikimedia? Should there be? Their output is certainly information. Whether it is knowledge depends on your definition. Arguably, it is very powerful and useful. If it is knowledge, then we've either got to include it or throw away that slogan about the sum total of all knowledge and admit that we're just an encyclopedia.

I concurr that we should be trying to connect with the global South. A caveat is that this carries with it a serious risk of cultural imperialism. We should consider not just telling them what the universe is like, but asking them.

I realise that these points differ in tenor from much else that is on this page. I hope you will not dismiss them out of hand. -- Ong saluri

I think your points are very well taken. We're aligned on the importance of diversity and also connecting with the global South (with your caveat in mind). I also agree that quality is more important than size, although I struggle with how we measure that.

One thing I'd like to note, and I've made the point in a number of other threads: The Wikimedia vision does not state that the sum of all knowledge should all come from Wikimedia. I think that's neither realistic nor desirable. However, the Wikimedia movement can help encourage the sum of all knowledge to be freely available through partnerships and advocacy.

Is poetry knowledge? You sure can't put poetry in en.wikipedia. Not even close. 

There is a lot of poetry in Wikisource. Wikipedia is not the only Wikimedia project and as Wikipedia comes closer to being completed other projects will get more attention - as commons has recently.

Possible future Wikimedia projects which would never have a place in Wikipedia:

• Original research - a wikimedia archive of new field recordings
• Non-notable facts - a wikimedia database of facts harvested from info boxes and usable by any language - could include items which are not notable enough to each get their own article
• Not neutral POV - Wikisource is already archiving lots of opinionated stuff.

Responding to: "I am sure that it is possible to raise Wikipedia adoption to 50%, which would raise other numbers: total Wikipedians 4%, active Wikipedians 0.3%, very active Wikipedians 0.05%."

I think that taking current numbers and multiplying them doesn't have a lot of predictive validity, and would caution against setting goals that way, because there are a number of factors which can influence the dataset making a linear prediction faulty. For example, ceiling effects may mean that as contributor levels rise, number of articles rise, and general quality rises, which may mean there are less areas for improvement that would be obvious to casual readers. Looked at another way, if I'm a Wikipedia reader, and my favorite article either doesn't exist, is underdeveloped, or has errors, that might motivate me to join and fix it. On the other hand, if all the articles I look for are always present, factual, and well-developed, (or "good enough"), then I might never be motivated to join and contribute.

This is just one example of a confounding variable. There are others as well. Be cautious about using current proportions to predict later proportions. The two ("current" and "later") might not be well correlated.

5% active Wikipedians (making more than 5 edits per month?) is way too much. Actually the country WP that are getting stable (EN, FR, DE, ...) will loose active wikipedians quite naturally and thats okay because most of what people want to put in wikipedia will be in (while of course there is a basic level of ever newly created knowledge so there will always be at least activity necessary). Apart from that the quality can be improved and thats a global challenge. I really don't think that white, male, educated, middle-upper class people are a problem for Wikipedia in any way. Not in the natural sciences, where I am contributing, where most of the things are objective and neutral anyway but also because WP is so transparent and aims for neutrality that it virtually doesn't matter who writes it down in the end. However it will matter in which language. English is not my native language, but I increasingly check the EN WP first, since it contains most information. With the ongoing dying-out of languages around the world, it could be that WP visitors of special languages might even decline while EN WP hits will go up. However, this means that the regional WPs are really valuable documents preserving languages and language-related knowledge. For everyday life it could be that EN WP's importance will even increase. Like I am a contributor to my regional WP and EN WP (and male and white.. :) ) basically providing all knowledge in both languages.

I think this conversation on targets for participation is really interesting. To re-hash some previous discussions on this topic, I'd point you to a graphic the Bridgespan team posted awhile back that engendered some controversy. [[1]]. We'd posted this graphic that shows what, to my mind, seemed like a really low rate of contribution from Wikipedia visitors - the ratio between visitors and contributors is less than .05% across all projects. What was controversial about this graphic was that folks didn't agree on the right target percentage - it is true, there is no way to know if .05% is fine, or if we should shoot for 1% or 10% for that matter. I think the second point on this graphic is really important, though, which is that for some projects there are very few total contributors. While I don't know how few are too few, it does make intuitive sense that you need some critical mass in order to protect a project from vandalism and build content.