Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-14/News and notes

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The relative drop in retention is obviously worrying. I am wondering though, do we have numbers available on the net amount of editors who are still active one year later? A quick look at the chart suggests (though there is no evidence) that this number is fairly constant. If it is, or is even rising slightly, there is less to worry about. Does anyone know if and where these numbers can be found? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think the information you want is at Editor_Trends_Study/Results. Even if that's not what you're looking for, it is an interesting & informative read. -- llywrch (talk) 17:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It was an interesting read. I'm wondering though where I could find the tabular data from these charts, if available. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 21:31, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As you can see at Editor Trends Study/Software, both the software used to generate the datasets from the Wikipedia XML dumps and the tools for analysis are open source. That page has step by step instructions for recreating his software platform if you want to run your own analysis -- more at Methodology too. My understanding is that it's actually not in tabular format currently, since he stores everything on his server hosting MongoDB (which is document-oriented). However, Howie who worked on the study might have it in CSV form though in order to generate the graphs, so you should ask on the talk page of the March Update. Steven Walling at work 22:57, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'll repeat here a suggestion I made at Wikipedia talk:Modelling Wikipedia extended growth, but that page doesn't appear to attract much attention any more. I'd be curious to know what the trend in the ratio of stubs:non-stub articles. If the ratio since the 2006 peak of new articles has been in favor of non-stub articles, that would support the "low-hanging fruit" hypothesis of declining new article creation -- viz., it is easier to improve an existing article than to create a new one. But if the ratio has remained roughly the same then the cause of the new article fall-off might be due to increased barriers to new article creation. (I don't know whether the XML data dumps would permit one to easily determine how the number of links to a page or template increased or decreased over time, which is the only way I can think of to arrive at this ratio.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Article count inflation happens all the time with (what should be) the smaller Wikimedia wikis. Recently, the Malagasy Wiktionary jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 entries in the space of five months with entries copied verbatim from other wikis, such as "stop". – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 08:08, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hats off to User:Utcursch for recognizing the value in providing useful quality content over junk stub farms. I applaud his decision. -- œ ^™ 08:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The thing I don't get is why people who ought to know better are surprised that recent new editors don't stick around as long and blame it on how hard it is to use tools, that they aren't feeling welcomed, etc. Certain people are more suited for editing an encyclopedia than others. Individuals who read books, have editing experience and have a desire to share knowledge are only a subset of the general population. It seems to me that if someone hadn't already become an editor years back based upon hearing about Wikipedia and being interested, odds are good they just weren't all that interested. Early adopters are going to be more suited for the tasks involved, obviously, and the pool of available potential newbies will just get worse and worse as time goes on. That's not to say that we should not treat newbies with respect and welcome them, but I think we already do that to the extent we should be. As a basic philosophy we ought to do more to hang onto and encourage long time contributors who have proven themselves to the project. While Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, not everyone should be editing it regularly. They can contribute what they can add of value, and as time goes on and articles are already established newbies will have less available to do. And that's a good thing. DreamGuy (talk) 14:42, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is getting big, is widely used and I would assume we could at least attract 10 times as many contributors. So why don't we? Two factors, learning to edit and motivation, of which I think the last is the most important. Most people are not self-starters and need to be told by someone they respect, community leaders etc. So even though we need to have a welcoming environment and keep on trying making it easier to contributer, I think we really need to have various big-shots to recommend contributing. Ulflarsen (talk) 19:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the idea. If the WMF acts on your idea, we'll likely end up seeing Jimmy Wales' mug at the top of every page for the rest of the year. And the PTB will also disable our ability to suppress these messages even for users with a login. -- llywrch (talk) 22:46, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]