The decline of the WP "Community", Light at the end of this dark tunnel? Options

[Kato]

Back in December, we briefly touched upon some statistics which showed a decline in the number of new Wikipedia users, and a tailing off of editors with all number of edits -- basically, a decline in the community across the board.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=21890

It was hard to know how seriously to take these statistics, but the other other day, I listened to a broadcast of Wikipedia Weekly (Andrew Lih's well produced but difficult to stomach pro-Wikipedia radio show). Lih and his on-air "zoo" of cohorts, high on Jimbo-Juice, discuss the findings at some length.

Their comments make quite interesting listening. Through the wailing and gnashing of teeth, it is clear that they are concerned by this drop off. One Wiki-pundit asserts that if the community fails, the project dies. Lih himself compares WP to a shark that needs to keep moving, or it will die. Another pro-WP voice bemoans the statistics as "the most depressing thing I've read in all my time at WP" (which, given the hurtful strife and multi-layered defamation WP has unleashed on the world is galling in itself).

Interestingly, it is agreed that February-March 2007 was the peak of WP, and it has been downhill ever since. The statistical figures back that up, and this ties in with anecdotal evidence from pretty much all Wiki-watchers.

Lih noted that activity on all WP fronts declined from that time, including on mailing lists and so on. At the Review, we can confirm that the community began to eat itself around that time, and a third phase of unending internal conflict had replaced the peak era (which was 2005-2007). Somey here has talked long and hard of the "Maintenance Phase", the inevitable period when new articles are hard to find, and where Wikipedios spend their time chasing their tails in an ever more meaningless tasks.

As noted by Greg Kohs and others here, February-March 2007 also coincides with the Essjay scandal. Greg wrote:

The Essjay incident appeared to have an adverse impact on daily financial donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. The downward slide closely mirrored a number of ethically questionable decisions by key administrators of Wikipedia.

In 2007, the wool was removed from the eyes of some of the media, and it seems now that even the most pro-Wikipedia pieces are laced with negatives. And the public at large are much more skeptical of the site than they were 2 years ago.

So, we've discussed the demise of WP many times before here, but now, Wiki-evangelists and Cultists like those on Wikipedia Weekly are beginning to take the decline seriously.

Is this it?

[Somey]

If we could just take a short break from playing Bash-a-Cache for a moment, I'm glad Mr. Kohs resurrected this thread. Reading back on what Kato posted originally, I contradicted myself fairly badly when I started off saying that WP's Maintenance Phase would lead to an Attrition Phase and finally a Breakup Phase, and then not long after, saying the Maintenance Phase would be followed by a "Lockdown Phase."

I realize now that I was trying to oversimplify an extremely complex set of factors and determinants which, if people can handle the complexity, are actually all going on at once. In other words, the Maintenance Phase doesn't necessarily resolve itself into some sort of neat little "fifth stage" that features a predictable or consistent decline - in fact, in some areas Wikipedia may actually improve as the ongoing shakeout continues.

In some ways, the future of Wikipedia really depends on how they handle the lockdown process. I wanted to believe, and to some extent I still do believe, that if handled correctly, fairly, and consistently, the locking-down of content could actually extend Wikipedia's life-cycle by several years, even decades, until the inevitable paradigm shift that leads the world away from screens and keyboards and into whatever comes after, be it wetware or A.I. constructs or Big Brother or being continually punched in the testicles by an angry dwarf that you can't actually see because he isn't really there, he's just a hologram beamed into your head by the CIA or whoever ultimately takes over.

So far, what we're seeing is that if Wikipedia does handle the lockdown process with any intelligence or cleverness at all, they're going to implement it so slowly (mostly because of reactionary "frei-kultur-kinder" resistance) that well over half the regular "community" will be gone by the time it starts to pay off.

If I had to apply a single word to the next (and probably final) phase of the life-cycle, it would probably be "dissolution," but that's so vague as to what will actually happen, it's almost meaningless. (We can still hope the next phase will be more like "Extirpation," but that's never been all that realistic, unfortunately.)

[Abd]

I realize now that I was trying to oversimplify an extremely complex set of factors and determinants which, if people can handle the complexity, are actually all going on at once. In other words, the Maintenance Phase doesn't necessarily resolve itself into some sort of neat little "fifth stage" that features a predictable or consistent decline - in fact, in some areas Wikipedia may actually improve as the ongoing shakeout continues.

To me, the interesting possibilities will come up when a fork actually starts to get some participation.

In my view, to be practical, a fork must copy or link to all the standing Wikipedia content. Then it reviews it, and, for the long run, it could do so slowly. The form must be operated such that someone looking up a topic in it will get the Wikipedia content or better.

Yeah, there is this BLP problem. However, trying to keep harmful material off of Wikipedia is pretty useless if the material can be hosted by any nutjob anywhwere. A fork might blank unapproved BLPs. It might even delete them routinely if wikipedia deletes them, which would be an exception to the normal Keep that I'd suggest as the default. The fork would have its own policy and procedures, and, this is important, there could be many forks with differing policies. Only one or a few would survive for long.

There is also the Wikiversity approach. Imagine Wikipedia with subpages in mainspace. Notability standards for the top level would be high, for the next level, low, and there might even be what I called a "junkyard" space.

The key for each fork is decision-making process. Exactly what is decided will be up to those who work on it -- or fund it. It is possible for a fork to pay for the work, if it gets enough momentum. Or to pay for the supervision, the high-level management.

It's open. If we could design a quasi-governmental process, what would we design? There are traditional models that were neglected when Wikipedia was begun, that work. There are improvements on these models.

As to the process of Wikipedia "dying," it won't happen completely. The model would change. Some form of lockdown is inevitable, Flagged Revisions is clearly coming, and it is clearly necessary, and not just for BLP. It's the hybrid between open and closed.

I think that the most serious initial error was to allow anonymous editing on article pages, other than something like flagged revisions, and even there, I'm not sure that it was worth the hazards and huge inefficiency. (It was efficient in one way only: it meant that casual readers could make small corrections. But, in the end, in practice, *most* of these corrections are reviewed anyway by RCPers, it's just that the process isn't efficient: one change might be read by a dozen editors, while another is completely missed in the flood. Flagged revisions, among other things, organizes the review, so that anyone can see what's been reviewed and what has not. The reviewer who approves or allows becomes the "responsible editor.")