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* http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study | * http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study | ||
The English Wikipedia appears to be plateauing in terms of attracting and retaining new editors, even while readership continues to grow and each year's fundraising campaign is more successful than the last. There is a lot of discussion about this problem, whether it is even a "problem," and what if anything to do about it. Many people put the "blame" on Wikipedia's increasingly powerful [[ | The English Wikipedia appears to be plateauing in terms of attracting and retaining new editors, even while readership continues to grow and each year's fundraising campaign is more successful than the last. There is a lot of discussion about this problem, whether it is even a "problem," and what if anything to do about it. Many people put the "blame" on Wikipedia's increasingly powerful [[mw:deletionism|deletionists]]. I largely concur, but I think Wikipedia's late intervention multiplies the damage to goodwill. Wikipedia presents itself as an open, welcoming system to the new user, making it relatively simple to create new articles, but without first adequately warning the new user about Wikipedia's thriving article deletion industry which enforces a fantastically complex list of rules for content ([[wikipedia:WP:NOT]], [[wikipedia:WP:NOTABLE]], [[wikipedia:WP:CSD]], etc.). The hapless new user typically has only a vague awareness of these rules before plunging in to the mine field. Only after the new user struggles for hours to put a new article together does he or she discover it was all a waste of time. Even worse, deletionists typically do not bother to inform the authors of an article that it has been deleted. The new user typically discovers that something is amiss after searching for the article on Wikipedia at a later time, only to find it no longer there. | ||
Small wikis typically have the opposite problem, in my opinion: not enough rules. Without clear and detailed rules, it becomes difficult for distant strangers to collaborate effectively. The number of different editors who edit a particular article on a small wiki like Appropedia is much less than on Wikipedia, where hundreds of people may collaborate on a single article. Only when rules are extremely detailed can hundreds of strangers pull together in something like one direction. If trivial details of formatting and presentation are left to personal whim, friction and uncertainty can result. Changing someone's work can become a personal issue rather than a dispassionate application of rules. Site-wide inconsistency, if left to persist, misleads users to create more of it because people tend to learn from examples rather than by referring to canonical written rules. | Small wikis typically have the opposite problem, in my opinion: not enough rules. Without clear and detailed rules, it becomes difficult for distant strangers to collaborate effectively. The number of different editors who edit a particular article on a small wiki like Appropedia is much less than on Wikipedia, where hundreds of people may collaborate on a single article. Only when rules are extremely detailed can hundreds of strangers pull together in something like one direction. If trivial details of formatting and presentation are left to personal whim, friction and uncertainty can result. Changing someone's work can become a personal issue rather than a dispassionate application of rules. Site-wide inconsistency, if left to persist, misleads users to create more of it because people tend to learn from examples rather than by referring to canonical written rules. | ||