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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ironholds (talk | contribs) at 02:05, 13 October 2011 (agreed). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.



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  • 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    • 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)[reply]
      • 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)[reply]
        • 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).[reply]
  • 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)[reply]

  • 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Ironholds: Maybe we both misunderstand each other on this point. What I hear from the WMF is that we need to be more civil & supportive of the new editors in order to keep them. What I would like to see is that we try to be more civil & supportive of established editors not only to keep them, but because then we will also be civil & supportive to all editors. Everyone expects a little hazing when they join a new group; it's a part of the rite of passage, an instinctual behavior of humans. But with Wikipedia as it now exists, contributors get hazed all of the time.

As for your comments about markup, those are the words that cause me to believe, bluntly, that you don't know WTF you are talking about. Wikimarkup in itself is very simple & easy to learn: in almost 9 years of writing articles, for most of what I do I only use a dozen tags. IMHO, the only trick any newbie realy needs to know -- beyond the basics of spelling, grammar & punctuation -- is that to create a new paragraph one presses the enter key twice. Now, had you mentioned things like image syntax, or how user unfriendly our templates are -- lack of documentation, not well organized for end users, not consistent between projects -- I'd agree with you 100%. But because everyone says wikimarkup is hard to use, resources get thrown at that, & at creating helps for using templates.

Eloquence: All of the research I've seen has been of the nature of statistical analyses of relationships between Wikipedians or how articles grow. Nothing about how to make Wikipedia content better. A survey of established Wikipedians about what they think needs to be changed -- not just a talk page where anyone & everyone can post their favorite rants -- would be a good place to start. (My suggestions: more help in obtaining sources to write articles with, & teach new users how to research topics.)

Another area would be how to write better encyclopedia articles. You can find books on how to write in many different genres -- poetry, autobiography, novels & short stories, resumes -- but there's nothing on how to write an encyclopedia article. I know this because I've looked. It's not because the information is proprietary: from what I've learned, the editorial staff at Encyclopedia Britannica & World Book don't know either. AFAICS, the art of writing encyclopedia articles hasn't changed in a major way since 1800. Maybe we'd all benefit if the Foundation devoted some resources to that end.

BTW, I mention a few other areas worth investigating here. In case anyone is looking for a topic for a graduate thesis.

trlkly: Obviously you didn't understand who I was describing as "contributors who have 'hunkered down'". These are not people with ownership issues over a few articles. These are people with one foot out the door, who limit their contributions to things like Wikignoming or reverting vandalism because they're frustrated or burned out because they had to deal with too many cranks, vandals, POV-pushers, or well-meaning but ignorant contributors, yet never received any appreciation for their efforts. I've been cleaning up after one banned user who inserted tangential references to his favorite author in countless articles. Some of these references arguably belong, but most are nothing more than added at the end of the article as "sources" -- even though there are no inline citations to those works. And as I've been cleaning up after him, I've encountered at least three different editors who fought that banned editor, & the experience convinced them to scale way back in their contributions to Wikipedia because of him.

And some long-term editors burn out because they encounter a snot-nosed attitude like yours, & wonder WTF are they trying to improve articles when it's clear nobody cares. If established editors burn out, why should anyone care when the Foundation can send a team out to recruit three or four times more newbies to replace them? The myth of Wikipedia is that we all can be treated like hamburger because Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced creation; we're all doing this in our spare time with no cost to anyone. After all, properly-run oureach efforts -- funded with multi-million dollars grants from famous foundations -- will replace contributors as they burn out. And no one needs to pay all of these volunteers or deal with personnel issues, either.

I'm finished here. -- llywrch (talk) 21:28, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
The Land, tempests in tea cups will always be a thorn in the side of Wikipedia: it's an equal problem for the larger world. Recently I was reading a book about the ancient general Hannibal, and came to the part where he leads his men down from the Alps into Italy. Now it is an accepted fact that Hannibal could have taken one of two routes and arrived where Turin currently stands; either route is possible. But, to quote the author, "in the absence of definitive archeological evidence, of which there is not a scrap, the truth will remain buried deep in the past, despite a mountain of argumentation, opinion, prejudice, jealousy, and perhaps even hatred -- a perfect example of an academic dispute grown bitter because so little is truly at stake." If the grownups in tenured chairs at prestigious colleges can't behave, why should we expect a bunch of semi-anonymous nerds on the Internet to act any better? Not to excuse reprehensible behavior, but wiki wiki software isn't a panacea for the imperfections of man, no matter what claims Wales, Gardner, & company might make about Wikipedia. -- llywrch (talk) 20:14, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not forgetting that Wikipedia has grown in sophistication, in terms of policies and processes. Even with a WYSIWYG editor, the impression is that one would have easily just jumped straight to edit something five years ago as compared to now. We will need something that allow new editors to quickly pick up and integrate themselves into the community. - Mailer Diablo 19:49, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ironholds makes good points. Llywrch, Gatoclass and The Land also make good points. I am often put off by the claims about how badly new editors are treated. Almost all of my interaction with new editors has been with vandals, spammers, people who feel they deserve to be listed as notable residents of some city, authors who want their latest books listed in 50 or 100 articles, and such ilk. We do not need to retain that sort of editor. I will also revert presumably good faith edits that significantly diminish the encyclopedic value of an article. New editors who make such edits may be worth retaining, and I can see that I could do more to help them. I have started helping with the Wikipedia:United States Education Program. Rather than making Wikipedia "friendlier" in some vague sense, I think we will be better served by providing specific help to new users on how to identify topics that are not covered very well in Wikipedia, and how to write encyclopedia articles. Of course, I expect some disagreement over how one should write an encyclopedia article, but I think it would be worth trying. -- Donald Albury 10:47, 12 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is certainly uphill work getting even minor change "we all know X" "We've been using it for years" etc. etc. Some people forget that this is a wiki and we need to be agile and smart in making stuff easy for the desireable new editors. Never mind the fancy wisyig stuff, assailing new editors with vast complex edifices of rules, guideines, policies, essays, many honoured more in the breach than the observance, with a plethora of noticeboards, cabals, projects, portals, newsletters: complex rights both social and technical; filters, bots, tools, js, css, HTML, wikimarkup, citation styles... We just have to know that less is soemtimes more. Rich Farmbrough, 19:56, 12 October 2011 (UTC).[reply]
  • While many people (including the writer of this opinion essay) agree with the end result, we tried to implement a change a couple of weeks ago, and you can read about the result in the September 25th Signpost article about it; the community was furious. In off-wiki discussions with one of our best admins on that issue (incidentally, he and I spent many, many hours getting that ready), he told me he came very close to retiring over it, and it's obvious from my comments in various fora that I'm still angry about it. I've refused to help them designing this new interface partly because I think there's a good chance it will do more harm than good, but also because if they don't care about the view of one of the most prolific NPPers on NPP then I have no reason to give up my time trying to help them. Malleus Fatuorum summed it up quite well here; Wikipedia is so desperate to attract new editors that they're willing to forgo the experienced editors, and when they get feedback from us there's an attempt to forge ahead anyways. I think Llywrch has excellent observations above on the subject, so I'll say no further for now. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 00:53, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    There's a fallacy here; I'm saying that not changing is bad. I'm not saying that all change is good simply because it's change. The fact that the writer of this opinion piece is also the person who ran the most supported comment against your proposal should indicate that. I would, however, suggest you do get involved in the NPP work - Kudpung is, for example, and refusing to participate in Foundation discussions over an issue because they rejected a community-centred proposal simply leaves us with nobody talking to anyone else...and that's not how productive change is going to happen. Ironholds (talk) 01:41, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I know you and I don't see eye to eye on this specific issue (which is fine, reasonable people can come to different conclusions); here, I'm more concerned with the way in which that was handled. I wouldn't have thought of it as such a big deal if it was handled in any number of different ways (I've had ideas shot down by the community before; it's just the way the big wheel spins), but what ended up happening wasn't terribly conducive to keeping editors around, which seems to run rather contrary to the stated goal of attracting editors. My frustration lies in the incongruity of trying to make things easier for new editors (in this specific case, easier to create pages) in a manner which aggravates the experienced editors and causes them to perceive (whether accurately or not) their views are being discounted. It's not as much about the change itself being rejected as it is the inconsistent message it sent; I hope this is a bit clearer. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:51, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sure, clearer now; I agree, actually. If the Foundation was going to shoot it down, they should've shot it down as soon as it had gained traction, not during the post-consensus discussion period. The fact that staffers are working on things like the new NPP interface indicates, imo, that they've recognised they need to consult with the editing community and take their opinions into account when making feature changes. It's an unspoken way of saying "we handled that incorrectly". The staffers aren't just focusing on new editors - things like the Zoom interface are designed for experienced contributors, and it would be a real shame if you didn't help it become the best feature it can be. The Foundation has recognised it handled things improperly, and is reaching out a hand; if we want to use their resources and clout to enact real, lasting technical change, we can't slap that hand away. We need to engage, either to improve good features or mitigate the harm of bad ones. Ironholds (talk) 02:05, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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