message to community about community decline

Hi Everyone,

Looking at Foundation-L and some message here it seems that our natural reaction is to immediately question the numbers and the underlying studies. We are Wikimedians and will not rest until we are sure that we are looking at 100% accurate numbers.

We could also look at this another way. Looking around me and talking to people about Wikipedia (and sometimes the other projects) I hear a lot of stories which demonstrate our inability to welcome everyone and motivate them to become regular contributors. The data strongly suggests the same thing. Instead of doubting the numbers, lets just assume that we are not doing well enough in this department. As one "old timer" told me last week: "Over the past years I have seen the community become more inward focused, more unfriendly to newcomers and more rigid.... and there was nothing I could do to stop it... "

While discussing this at the board meeting I heard examples of people that are doing great work in this area, but we need to do more. At a past Wikimania I asked someone what they did within the projects, her answer was: "not much"...."I just welcome new people and help them find their way". At that time (and I think this still persists on some level) we seem to value "true editors" more than those that perform other tasks. I don't have enough insight to see if this still the case, but my view is: helping new users find their way potentially has an impact that is way higher than editing...

While encouraging those that are doing this hard work now, I invite others to stop doubting the data, and simply focus on the fact that we have a lot of work to do and lets try to solve this together. It could be something simple like really helping out a new user once a week or sharing a great idea which we can execute together. Our projects are growing, and our contributor numbers are not growing with them. That is hurting quality, and at the end of the day... thats what we are judged on.

Jan-Bart de Vreede Member of the Board of Trustees Wikimedia Foundation

PS: Copied to Talk page on Wiki [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update

Oh, you are retaining editors, just not the right kind. It is a natural selection after all, just based on wikibrawling skills. To quote en.wp arbitrator "Who could have known that someone could get away with such behavior on Wikipedia with only a single 24 hr edit-warring block." (google this sentence for context)

I agree with the view that Wikipedia (and its sister projects) is preferentially retaining the wrong kind of surviving editor. See this Summary Diagnosis for the details.