User:KGyST/Why Wikipedia is losing editors

This is an effort to define Wikipedia's growth problems, that emerged from a comment to a ReadWriteWeb post.

Reasons

It's funny to see the extent how people misunderstand Wikipedia's growth problems. At first, it's not about wiki markup language. If it was, the whole project would have ended a few months after its start, back in 2001. The continuously growing number of editors show that the problem is not about the basic rules, the usability and editability of articles. The problem is closer that is described in this article as completeness, but a bit different way. Editors of Wikipedia (who are rather philosophers than engineers) want to see well-written, complete articles, and they form and change their subjects to have an article of a desirable length about it. In other words, if there are two or more, closely related subjects, they tend to write a common article about them, because they see this common article a way perfect.

But this perfectness off articles kills further editing for more reasons.

1. Indeed, there is a barrier of editing articles. But it's not the language, that is the length of the article. If You think You want to add things to an article, You have to know its contents, in order to be sure that's not mentioned somewhere, and so on. A longer article needs more time to be read.
2. Wikipedians tend to exterminate duplications and redundancies in the Wikipedia. If it's here, it shouldn't be there. This is a problem, because if an article gets very long, it's very dificult to cut it into parts, to have some shorter articles (that would start with a copy-pasting of the original article).
3. Again and again, the red links. Red links mark an unwritten article, and thus show everybody, that should be started. But these philologists, lovers of completeness, don't want to see these marks of incompleteness, and (if directly don't erase them) tend not to use links to unwritten articles. And if nobody knows that an article is missing, nobody starts it.
4. Missing templates. I had some problems when I edited, say, 2011 in spaceflight (in the Hungarian) and thought that there should be an empty 2012, 2013, and so on article. And if something is to happen then, i should just add that thing. The empty articles were, needless to say, deleted, because they were considered needless. But when somebody really needs to create that article, he or she needs much more work to create that article.
5. Every (not-so-short) article is a system of compromises between editors, who don't agree with each other. They disagree about things, and wars and conflicts arise. To avoid this, they write "peace agreements", some of them are informal, just can be found in conversions on an article's discussion page and some are formalized editing rules of all levels, from Wikipedia's main rules down to Projects' own rules. If a new editor edits an article, he or she will violate some of these agreements, so the wars break out, again. Nobody wants that. And this also means that nobody wants new editors: they are against this peace. But if they do, they must face that they first edits are modified.

None of these problems are important or lethal to Wikipedia, but they show the trends: editors of Wikipedia wanted to build something that is complete, and by accident, they managed to build something, that -at least from some aspects- has some attributes of completeness, and among them there is the unchangingness. And now they are starting to realize, that it's no good for them, because they will reach a point, where they don't have more to do.

Solutions

Some are obvious:

1. Main first goal is to have more, shorter articles.
   • Allow templating: this means that after writing an article, say, about a certain year number, and copypastynig it as an empty article to other numbers. this has the following advantages.
     • Its easier to put the first data into the already written article
     • Seeing easily what links there
   • Allow stubs and substubs to exist eternally. After the first edit, if somebody doesn't do much work, the article will be considered a substub, and eventually deleted.
2. Another important goal is to encourage new editors to join, but a different way. It's as important as joining Wikipedia to have the first dose of info
   • For newcomer editors, on edit page of a new article there should be the must-have contents of an article, ordered into at most 6-8 paragraphs. (5 sentences, links in and out, references and sources, infoboxes and images, categorizing. Nothing more.)