Actually, I'm one of a few editors who's made an unusual amount of edits without, some would argue, creating "actual content." In fact, there's been times I've stubbified articles full of peacocks, weasels, and other forms of puffery. Even though I'm easily replaced by someone who WikiGnomes and also content edits, I'd say that my edits are still valuable, since it frees up the time of content editors to actually add content. (I'd trust the author realizes this, having had conversed with her in the past, but I fear others may protest to the contrary.) --I dream of horses(Contribs)(Talk)15:42, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
When the current generation of active editors passes on, their replacements will probably be a mix of:
The WMF eventually opened its purse and hired a real editorial staff and topic lead editors
AI tools matured and allowed these editors to generate sensible copy for new articles
The obsolete wiki markup is replaced with something more easily machine-editable
Anonymous editing goes by the wayside
Truculent editors are shown the door
New editors are recruited from academia and news sites
The Five Pillars are made into a nice needlepoint and displayed at WMF HQ
At that point, it would already be dead. What you're describing is not Wikipedia. Citizendium already tried something much like that, and well—it's been dead for a very long time. SeraphimbladeTalk to me06:11, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
(Ironically, even with all our values thrown away, the name would likely still be "Wikipedia", and this may become an issue one day. Forking is hard if the brand is stronger than the content and the community. "OpenOffice" to "LibreOffice", "MySQL" to "MariaDB", ... "Wikipedia" to anything else would be far more than just a technical challenge.) ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
When AI tools mature enough to generate sensible copy for new WP articles, they won't have to. They'll just do that, custom made for the knowledge and tastes of the user, when desired. Meanwhile, at editathons I sometimes say, "No, I no longer think Wikipedia is too small, and seldom make Wikipedia bigger by adding good things anymore. Mostly I make Wikipedia smaller by subtracting bad things." It is perhaps an exaggeration, but I think it makes the point. No use expanding if we don't have enough maintenance workers checking for new bloat, spam, redundancy, lies, and other bad content from the many ignorant and the few malicious. Jim.henderson (talk) 05:17, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The last paragraph sums up perfectly what I've learned about Wikipedia and how you should behave on it in my (almost) two first years of activity around here. Thank you! Oltrepier (talk) 09:28, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Good article, but three things I'd add. Firstly the effect of SUL, Wikimedians on other projects especially other languages, will come visit here while logged in. They may even copy an image, but if they don't make an edit here they just count as a new account created here but not editing on this Wiki. My own account has gone live on 174 projects, about a sixth of the total, but on most of those I have zero edits and only on four do I have over a thousand, I expect many of you will be similar. Secondly, and probably much bigger, just over a decade ago we replaced a lot of vandal fighting with edit filters. So an unknown proportion of accounts with zero edits are vandals whose "contribution" was rejected as vandalism. OK not all of those filter rejections will be accurate, but those filters were thoroughly tested when they were first deployed. Maybe we need to review them now as the culture has changed and there could be a word which twelve years ago was almost always used in vandalism, but now it is the name of a successful song or Ukrainian village. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, the last decade or so has been the era of the smartphone. I have been told that despite my own personal failure it is technically possible to edit with a smartphone. But very few of our community are from the large proportion of internet users who only access the internet by smartphone, and in my opinion this is the biggest driver of the lack of growth of the community at least during the current era of the post 2014 rally, and probably for some years before during the latter part of the 2008-14 "death spiral" era of declining editing rates. "active editors" shows quite neatly the three thirds of Wikipedia's history thus far, the exponential growth of 2001-7, the increasingly misnamed death spiral era and our own normality, the post 2014 rally of 2015 to date. I no longer fret about this as much as I used to. I hope that one day an AI typo fixer will be trained on my contributions and take over such easily confused words as calvary/cavalry, pubic/public, preform/perform, manger/manager, minster/minister and causality/casualty, and maybe there are other tasks where AI can replace editors. But to really make a difference to editor recruitment we need to solve our smartphone problem. Maybe in the next few decades smartphones will go the way of punch cards and wind up car windows, and perhaps their successor(s) will be better editing devices. Maybe nothing much will change technologically in the next forty years and the community will then be rejuvenated by a generation of retirees who grew up with smartphones and don't see how they were ever a problem. I used to naïvely hope that the WMF would see the problem and get developers to fix it. ϢereSpielChequers11:12, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The essay resonates with me, but the comments also make good points. It is a complicated matter. Add to the list of problems that much of the low-hanging stuff has been done, sources are often hard to find, and even when found, are often inaccessible, and a large proportion of knowledge is ineligible because notability cannot be shown. · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 05:52, 7 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There will be editors, maybe even active ones, just that if the average editor doesn't last here for 25 years, there can be times when there will not be active editors in the top 1,000 (also, there may be times when there will be no active editors in the top 1,000 if the average editor does last here for more than 25 years, however, the longer they last, the shorter that time becomes). Also, there are many unregistered editors as well, editing approximately every second. However, if there are not enough active and well-behaving registered ones, missing articles will be long missing. Alfa-ketosav (talk) 15:23, 8 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I for one am trying to fill the gap by writing an article on a subject that I'm honestly surprised we don't currently have an article about. (It's the kind of subject that you'd expect a white, suburban, educated, middle-class male from the US would have already written.) I haven't written much of this article because I needed to do some serious research first (e.g., it's context in a larger subject) which required collecting reliable sources, & now I'm trying to figure out how to present the material. But given enough free time, I will get it written, for non-Wikipedia reasons. -- llywrch (talk) 00:41, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There was a time when scholarly papers and sometimes books were typed on word processor screens with 20 lines of 80 characters, and apparently there are now people who feel comfortable using a palm-sized screen to write a moderate sized Wikipedia article. My guess is no, content creators in this field and others will for a long time prefer a bigger canvas than is used in consuming the product. Certainly the software could be better; it's easier to write long Quora posts on a little touch screen than short WP articles and goodness, why can't Wikidata statements and Commons categories be easily entered in the field? Anyway I've been teaching newbies this year at a slower rate than before the plague, at fewer editathons. On average they're at least as bright as the ones before, but yes, their lesser numbers support the concern that as we old-time copyeditors slip into our commas, we won't be replaced. The Admin corps is already in such a situation. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:25, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would add to the second point of "What to do about this" to note that it's very discouraging to add good faith content and then find it's reverted by a Page Guardian When that happens I find myself wondering if I want to waste my time arguing with a trigger happy Page Guardian and eventually start looking for useful things to do elsewhere.
Doing something to discourage the behavior of Page Guardians might help to keep more of the productive editors that we do have. Perhaps there could be a reversion patrol to jump in with an independent view on any reversions which are other than reversion of obvious vandalism or the other instant reversions for policy reasons (libel, copyvio, etc.). 2A01:CB19:599:F00:212:4B42:693:9588 (talk) 20:33, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I like your idea of reversion patrol. I have been thinking about that for a long time. We now have rollbacker, patroller, etc. But nothing like reversion patrol. Power is not balanced. And the reward system is skewed. This needs to be fixed. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 18:03, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Except not really, as many IP editors do edit. I've made four edits in mainspace, more than 80 percent of registered editors. So it wouldn't need quite so many as it sounds. IP editors are rarely super prolific, but still, that's useful. 71.112.180.130 (talk) 15:28, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Sheesh, if the numbers for editors are this bad, I shudder to think about the numbers for admins. We're down to how many monthly-active admins these days? How many successful RfAs per week? Somebody should do the math and figure out exactly how many years we have before we'll have to start posting to meta:Steward requests/Miscellaneous. --NYKevin23:53, 12 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Some of our youngest current admins might still be around in half a century. But we go beyond any sort of reasonable crisis point long before we just have 1 admin. Aside from the number of admins needed to keep the deletion process running, we always need at least one admin at AIV. With fulltime staff it takes five people to have one person on duty 24/7 - 6 if you allow for holidays and sick leave. Doing that with volunteers needs a lot more, especially if you aren't running some sort of rota but just relying on having so many volunteers that there is always one around. That isn't an argument for a rota, if we ever get to the point where we need one, we immediately turn adminship into more of a chore that is harder to recruit for or retain volunteers for. And given the size of EN Wikipedia, I don't see we can do this with stewards from Meta.
But to answer Kevin's point, the number of active editors has been broadly stable for a decade or more, our problem is that fewer and fewer of them are volunteering to be admins. ϢereSpielChequers09:08, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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