message to community about community decline

Please, please let's stop referring to the people who edit Wikipedia articles as "users". For one thing, people who read Wikipedia think of themselves as using the encyclopedia. Let's use the term editors for people who edit. Or participants. Or, at worst, contributors (though potentially confusing with those who donate money).

And to implement this, it would be really, really nice if the "User" and "User talk" namespaces were renamed. (Yes, it can be done: the "Image" and "Image talk" namespaces were changed to "File" and "File talk".)

Let's also keep in mind that when technical support people talk about "users", that very often has a semi-derogatory tinge. Worse, the other common use of the term "user" is for drug addicts. John Broughton 01:12, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Hi John!

My name is Brandon, and I am a Foundation employee. I want to make a comment about your concern vis-a-vis the "user" nomenclature.

It may (or may not) surprise you to know that within the Foundation we have a rather rich lexicon regarding our various types of users. Most of our terms revolve around function (e.g., "readers", "editors", "spellcheckers," "patrollers"), a few around actual status ("registered", "anonymous", "autoconfirmed") and some around motivation ("troll," "mentor", "newbie"). All of these terms are subsets of a larger group, "users."

I'm going to disagree with you that technical people think of "users" in a negative light. The use of the term "user" as "any consumer of the product" is and has been common practice in the computer science (and other) industry for decades (long enough that it was considered a widely understood term when Tron was released in 1980). The fact of the matter is that certain industries use certain well-understood terms to create a common vocabulary. Sometimes these terms have different meanings outside of the industry. Since "User" is the common, widely-accepted term for user interface and computer science professionals, we're going to stick with that, I think.

As an aside, I have always had a dislike for the terms "readers" and "editors". That's a very binary distinction, and it actually doesn't mean much when you look at how those distinctions have classically been made (that is, "readers" = "people without accounts"; "editors" = "people with accounts"). We pay very close attention to the processes regarding what we call "anonymous" and "registered" users (we don't call them "editors" since the bulk of user accounts have only 1 or 0 edits). The reason this distinction (for us) is important is the difference in presumptive rights that the two types possess (for example, anonymous users cannot create articles on the English Wikipedia).

Depending on what we're thinking about, we may look at the user base sliced by status, motivation, function, or a vector of any one of the three (e.g., "newbie trolls who patrol recent changes" or "experienced mentors", etc.)

At any rate: no one in the Foundation thinks of "users" as a derogatory term. And, to quote Tron himself, "I fight for the users".

Would you like to rename the User: namespace?

We're actually trying to sort out the various categories of users/contributors/participants now: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Contribution_Taxonomy_Project

While I agree, that the term "user" is completely normal, non-offensive, and standard practice when discussing software, I'm not convinced that using that terminology in the UI is non-negotiable. Your suggestions however seem to move towards more specific terms, which imply contribution. While indeed to have a user page you must make at least one edit, it's probably not a very genuine term until they contribute productively to the project elsewhere. If there exists a more appropriate term than user, we should consider it seriously, no matter what language was used in a movie made nearly 30 years ago - I just don't know what that term is at this point, so it seems that user remains the most sensible option.

Another thing to consider is that moving a namespace involves keeping the old one around as an alias, and then you have most content linking to the User:* namespace, and the rest linking to the <alternative term>:* namespace. This is unlikely to improve the user experience more than it degrades it.

Finally, what do other sites most commonly refer to their users as? A very important usability guideline that might be relevant here goes something like, "meeting the users expectation is always better than not."

Finally, can someone weigh in on how this gets translated? Is this issue relevant to English only?

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that "User Name" is a pretty common interface term that users expect.

I agree with you that 'user' is sensible nomenclature for people. But if you're referring to their home pages, I think we could start saying "Profile" or similar instead.

The American Psychological Association no longer recommends calling people "subjects" in experiments.

At the MIT Media Lab, in our academic papers, the emerging practice is to call them "people" or "participants."

The only two communities that routinely call people "users" are drug addiction and online communities like Wikipedia, so that antiquated terminology is now being deprecated at MIT as well.

On Wikipedia, we find "Users" who are treated as "lusers" to be mindlessly clobbered by a misguided cadre of adolescent Keystone Kops with their toy banhammers, as if Wikipedia were a lame clone of Zynga's Mafia Wars.