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?

[Kato]

Here are some old Somey posts about the "Maintenance Phase".

Personally, I'm sticking to my "Five-Phase Lifecycle Theory," which suggests that there won't be a quick collapse at all, but rather a gradual process of attrition resulting in stagnation and ultimately, breakup.

Right now we're firmly in the "Maintenance Phase," which I believe started about a year ago. Just for the record, the phases are:

- Formation
- Growth
- Maintenance
- Attrition
- Breakup

I expect the maintenance phase to last at least five years, and to be characterized by increased authoritarianism and regimentation - mostly in the name of curbing the tendency towards infighting, which in turn is being caused by too many people wanting control of various "important" topic areas. This will result in an almost social-Darwinian "shakeout," which will end with firm control of all worthwhile territories by whichever of the various groups, cabals, cliques (or whatever you want to call them) should "win" them. That will bring on the attrition, which will be expressed as mass "forking" of entire topic areas to other websites.

Jimbo's increasing interest in "open source" web-crawling technology may suggest that he himself has realized this as a distinct, even likely possibility - there's no company better positioned to take advantage of the WP breakup than Wikia, and combining "encyclopedic" content with human-filtered search results may be his primary scheme at this point. I'm not sure I'd even call it a bad scheme, to be honest, though obviously I'd rather someone else was in charge.

(Bolding mine)

So they waste it all spending hours of their lives every day reverting people and trying to get things deleted?

Why not, if they've already written everything they feel they can, and gotten the articles they're interested in well into shape, to last with minimal editorial maintenance over time? I'd imagine it's a lot more fun than participating in "policy discussions."

You mustn't oversimplify this issue, Lamont - these are not people just showing up out of nowhere and wanting to delete things just for the sake of deleting them, or because they're offended by "cruft" proliferation. For the most part, they're established users who have seen the problems of maintaining a 2-million page database first-hand. Every one of those 2 million articles is a potential problem that would, and often does, have to be solved by human intervention - in many cases, LOTS of human intervention.

Obviously in an ideal world, you could build a database of a zillion articles, and all of them would be consistently improved over time until they couldn't be improved any further, at which point nobody would touch them. But realistically that just doesn't happen, mostly because the perception of content-quality is always relative, and perfection is always unachievable. (And, of course, there are people who just like to "vandalize.")

WP has been firmly into its maintenance phase for well over a year now - in fact, I would say two years. As the ability of new users to stake out territory by writing new articles is diminished, WP will be left with a relatively small, and (due to burnout, etc.) shrinking, hard core of committed maintainers, fighting an ever-growing army of spammers and POV pushers. Over time, the database will have to be increasingly locked down to deal with it - there's almost no way to avoid that. Deletionism actually postpones the lockdown phase by making maintenance less of a drain on human resources.

This is also why it's so important that people like JzG, Durova, and other corrosive "black hat" personalities are "shown the door" - in the long term, the "white hat" Wikipedians can't allow anything that causes their core group of maintainers to shrink. On the contrary, they should actually reach out to people in business, government, and academia to help ensure that standards are maintained as long as possible, even if it means making a few concessions, such as opt-out for biographies, noindexing of specific pages or categories, and so on.

Will they actually do any of that, though? Of course not - these are not long-term thinkers we're dealing with here.

On top of everything else, the use of pseudonyms quickly issues in the circumstance that the pseuds in question have nothing else to talk about but pseudonyms.

I actually see this as a sort of "sub-phase" in the Wikipedia life cycle, one that impacts this website as well as other sites that are related to WP in some way, or that include significant portions of the WP community. Another term for it might be "Phase transition factor."

Essentially, I've always posited that the Maintenance Phase (which we're in now) would eventually give way to the "Lockdown Phase," and that this would occur over the course of roughly 5 years (we're now getting towards the end of Year 2). But the mechanism by which this will occur is interesting in itself. My assumption is that three main issues will drive the transition: Editor-gang politics, the leadership vacuum, and the destabilizing effects of anonymity.

It may be that the anonymity problem is the thing they try to deal with first, except that it's a veritable certainty that they won't "solve" it in the sense of making it either go away, or figuring out some magical means of ensuring that the system isn't abused by sock puppeteers, meat puppeteers, or members of the Boston Meat Sox. The only way to even allow for it is some degree of lockdown applied to the actual content - i.e., what I'm assuming will happen.

If they were like, super-smart, they'd deal with the leadership vacuum first, because that's at least theoretically solvable (even if, from a practical perspective, it isn't any more solvable than the rest of their problems). If they had effective leadership, they'd at least have something to help them deal with the other issues - otherwise, they might as well just go ahead and make the whole database read-only now, if only to save time.

[Sarcasticidealist]

As the ability of new users to stake out territory by writing new articles is diminished...

I think the evidence is that something's happening (for exactly what, see Stills et al), but I can't buy the above as an explanation. At a guess, I'd say 95% of the articles on Wikipedia fit the following criteria:
i. could benefit from a complete overhaul, and
ii. do not have anybody "protecting" then who would interfere with a complete overhaul.

For example, I'm working mostly on biographies of the Premiers of Alberta these days - not a major subject, but still relatively high profile in a Wikipedia in which everybody who ever so much as sat in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta gets an article. These articles have all existed for some years, but in stubbish forms with the haphazardly arbitrary selection of information so familiar to us all. I have been rewriting them from scratch, in much expanded form - to all intents and purposes, what I am doing is writing new articles (and, in so doing, I suppose staking out territory, though that's not how I'd have characterized it). There's *plenty* of room to write new articles, and most of the places that you can do that won't run you afoul of any POV pushers or other nuisances. The shrinking contributor base and increased infighting (I'm taking the latter as a given; I haven't seen any quantifiable data, any don't have any strong impressions of my own) must come from elsewhere.

[Jon Awbrey]

(IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sleep.gif)

So you say you're trying to put the Premiers of Alberta in a can?

Ja Ja (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/boing.gif)