Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Opinion essay

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• Well written and I concur.--Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:54, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
• Well stated Ironholds. I agree with you on many points --Guerillero | My Talk 03:02, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• There are many truths in Ironhold's commentary. According to statistics, the average contributor was born since desktop computers became commonplace. Although the average serious user is computer savvy enough to create and edit a proper article that complies with Wikipedia policies, changes are urgently needed as the Wikipedia matures, and new users come on board. However, there are also those who have 'done FaceBook/MySpace' and who are now looking at what they can do to Wikipedia. These are the ones that Wikipedia needs to guard against, and some recent suggestions for necessary change have been rejected. Nobody is arguing for making page creation or user retention more difficult. Fortunately, and partly due to this, methods for protecting the encyclopedia against uncontroversially unwanted pages and edits are now under priority discussion and development, and at the same time of course, methods for encouraging new users to respect Wikipedia policies. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:14, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Agreeing with this piece. You're probably aware of the Foundation's present work on a WYSIWYG editor, which now has direct support from grants. Systems like LiquidThreads have been trying for years to bring the basic usability benefits of web forums to our discussion pages. I hope in the future the community will embrace effective new usability measures like these. Dcoetzee 03:22, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
  • Last time I saw LiquidThreads brought up at one of the Village Pumps, it was meant with a resounding chorus of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" – which I guess illustrates Ironholds' point pretty well. Jenks24 (talk) 04:03, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
    • To be fair, LiquidThreads does (or did) suck, massively, and "it's really ugly and slow and useless" would have been a valid reaction. As you say, however, the reaction was "what's wrong with what we're doing now?". Ironholds (talk) 04:24, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
      • LiquidThreads probably came out of the proverbial oven a little too early. Early versions were very clunky and not an improvement on the way we do things now. However, its gotten better with age and I think it worked quite well on the StrategyWiki. I think a lot of the opposition to it comes from people who tried the early versions and haven't seen how much it has improved. Back on topic, this is an excellent piece Ironholds and I agree completely. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 08:52, 11 October 2011 (UTC).

• Thanks Ironholds. Until now, I thought I was the only one (besides the WMF staff) that understood the big picture. Let hope this message spreads. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 03:31, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Agree wholeheartedly. I'm quite a nrrrd, of the liberal arts variety; I was on Usenet back in the day, as a wee nrrrd before the Web, hanging around the Alt hierarchy. And I feel the same marginalization here. When the Web went mainstream, Usenet bit the dust. I wonder if the same tsunami-scale cultural change will happen to Wikipedia when the WYSIWYG editing GUI is updated. Probably it will be the same, yet different...lol.

OttawaAC (talk) 03:45, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Wow, thanks everyone! I honestly wasn't expecting this level of agreement. It's great to see that, whatever the general trends or issues, we still have it within us to recognise issues for what they are :). Ironholds (talk) 04:22, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Kudos. We have to get rid of the fear that hordes are waiting to destroy us. The light of proper user interface design and intelligent (and accessible!) help and policy documentation will win out in the long run. Note: I think there's a typo in the Why it Matters section--first sentence: "The problem is that there aren’t" should be, "The problem is that they aren't"... I think. Cheers! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 04:42, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

  It's correct, I'm afraid; "the problem is that there aren't [similarities between the two groups]". Ironholds (talk) 05:01, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Well, I'll go ahead & disagree with some of what Ironholds has written. The points where I disagree with him are as follows:

• My objection to many proposed changes is not that I manage perfectly without them, but that I don't think they fix the problems we have. For example, the Foundation wants to make editting for newbies easier when I believe they ought to spend these resources on retaining veteran editors.
• I believe that the people we want to recruit are, in many ways, the same people who presently contribute to Wikipedia. To quote one person, who is considered by many an expert on Wikipedia, people who consider writing encyclopedia articles a fun hobby are a strange bunch. And the number of people who consider any activity a worthwhile avocation -- stamp collecting, following sports, needlepoint -- will be a finite number. I could be wrong in this belief, but no one has bothered to do the research to determine whether it is the reason new contributors is off -- or the cause lies somewhere else.
• The problem is that nobody -- not the Foundation, groups with vested interests, opinionated old hands like me -- has bothered to do the necessary research to provide the data needed to move this discussion from an endless flamefest based on opinions to one where objective decisions could be rationally made.
• The "On-wiki system" hasn't remained the same over the last ten years. in earlier days, the Wikipedia culture was far more similar to a social networking website than it is now. WikiMeetups were started to encourage Wikipedians to know each other better, to socialize. Then around 2005 or 2006 a reaction to this community-building emerged; I strongly believe that the Userbox debacle in early 2006 was a part of this reaction. And that could explain why the number of new Wikipedians stopped growing around 2006.
• I won't argue that things have become ossified in many ways for the Wikipedia community; it is harder to propose & make changes now than it was in, say 2003 or 2005. But I will argue that this is because people are going about it in all the wrong ways; once upon a time, either one person or a small group of people could advocate a change & it happened. Nowadays, if someone wants to effect a change that person has to make an effort to reach out & involve people.
• As a last point, no matter what eventually is done, it's going to have a negligible effect on a large number of volunteers. There is a large number of contributors who have "hunkered down" in parts of Wikipedia of their own choosing, & no longer care to have anything to do with the rest of the community. I suspect in many cases, not even with each other. Right now, any significant changes made to the Wikipedia culture will simply frustrate & embitter these people, & drive them away -- unless a serious effort is made to reach out to them. -- llywrch (talk) 06:26, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Research has definitely been done - a lot of it - and the problem with that statement (that it's always going to be a finite number) is that...well, yes, it's true. There will always be a finite number of people who like the idea of editing Wikipedia. So, what we need to do is try to make it easier for them, because what we're doing at the moment means our pool of potential editors is not "people who are interested" but instead "people who are interested, able to navigate our help system, thick-skinned to deal with the more stubborn and aggressive editors, fine with pseudo-html syntax and able to grasp a large number of rules without giving up". That's an artificially narrowed pool. Ironholds (talk) 16:15, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that nobody ... has bothered to do the necessary research — Wikimedia is one of the most well-researched online projects in existence (cf. Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies and of course WMF's recent summer of research, recent surveys, etc.). What kinds of research do you specifically suggest should be done? I'm not denying that further research is necessary (it always is), although it may also be the case that there's existing relevant research that you're not aware of.--Eloquence* 07:54, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

I'll address the points Eloquence did not. Why exactly do we care if we drive those people off who have stopped contributing? If they've hunkered up and hate change, that implies they are the people who WP:OWN articles and drive away a lot of people. We don't need to retain those editors. Trying to keep articles the same is not contributing.

And while I'll agree that Wikipedia editors are an eclectic bunch, there is no reason why bad user interface should be something to embrace. The people that want it to be hard to contribute to the project are the very people rejecting the founding principles of Wikipedia. Again, we need those people to leave. Those people who actually care shouldn't give a crap what changes, as long as they can still contribute. Heck, if they're like me, they want it to happen.

I know many, many people who at one time wanted to contribute to Wikipedia, but got burnt very quickly. There's no easy way for a new person to even see all the various policies, and yet oldtimers will attack them with it, all while pretending to honor WP:AGF. The people leave not because they have nothing to contribute, but because frustration has overridden their altruism. We want those people.

There is a problem with any community that wants to fight to get rid of new people. All online communities with a purpose should be fighting to get new people, or they will stagnate and become an insular club. There's only so much that old contributors can contribute, and chances are they've contributed most of what they can. They need to let new blood in. — trlkly 08:17, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• Well put IronHolds, I wholeheartedly agree. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:28, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

• I quite agree with Ironholds's analysis of the problem. Unless we make some pretty serious changes to both the underlying technology and the way our community works, there is a real risk that we'll run out of contributors.... The Land (talk) 09:22, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

I very much agree with Ilywrch that there needs to be a lot more effort to retain veteran contributors. Experienced editors in good standing are the lifeblood of Wikipedia, they are the people who write and maintain most of the substantive articles, without them there is no project worth speaking of. Yet people keep obsessing about the noob experience. Not that this is not important, but it's far from the most important issue IMO. As someone said above, maintaining an online encyclopedia is never going to be a hobby that attracts vast numbers, what is most important is that the experience for those with a real enthusiasm for the concept remains positive. And personally, I think nothing turns off experienced Wikipedians more than our broken dispute resolution system, which basically allows POV pushers of every stripe to run rampant over the project, often for years before they are held to account, while responsible users who try to oppose them end up quitting in disgust. What we need above all IMO is a dispute resolution system that is both fairer and more effective. To do that, I think we have to stop shunting content disputes into the "too hard" basket, because most of the frustration that is generated on this project is generated by content disputes. These simply cannot be effectively resolved, as the current system tries to do, merely by focussing on behavioural issues. Some time ago I drafted one possible alternative approach, which can be read here. I haven't formally proposed it yet for a variety of reasons, but feedback on it would still be appreciated. Gatoclass (talk) 13:05, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

I'd concur with the need to retain experienced editors as well - speaking as an editor who has been off and on since 2004, and who has kept coming back for different reasons. However I think that many of the steps we need to take to be more welcoming to new people are the same as those we need to take to keep more people onboard. Personally I'm more concerned about the scale of the arguments we have about trivial matters (e.g. just as an example, what sort of dashes to use ;-) and the way those discussions are conducted, than dispute resolution for controversial content. The Land (talk) 13:33, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Agreed; I don't think the two things need to be mutually incompatible. A WYSIWYG editor is not something likely to negatively impact on experienced editors, for example. Ironholds (talk) 16:15, 11 October 2011 (UTC)