What could be done to increase the number of active contributors to the projects?
During September 2009 7700 new contributors came to English Wikipedia, but 8900 left it. We are far away from the question how to attract new users to become contributors; we are in the middle of the crisis related to how to attract old contributors to stay. --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
According to that fact, we should think more about how to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as places where people like to stay. --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
I would suggest the next: --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Imposing rules related to abusing powers and playing the system from the side of the users at positions (administrators and so on). --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Globalize community and rules. The vast majority of rules are not related to the particular culture, but to the goals of Wikimedia projects. --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Make a control body (probably, WMF body), which would be checking validity, efficiency and possible consequences of projects rules. --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Stricter insisting on civility and good behavior toward newcomers. Treat incivility and bad behavior toward newcomers as abusing rights. (Consequently, such person can't be admin.) --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
- Split rights into pieces. A contributor who is abusing deletion nomination shouldn't be able to nominate article for deletion anymore (or for some time, at least). And so on. --Millosh 12:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
As I was reviewing some of the reasons why people were posting threads at WR (the site which may not be named...), I noticed a few cases where admins had called contributors really nasty names. Not your typical nastiness but over-the-top nastiness. They were reported, and not desysopped. I find that disturbing. Would there be support for a "Ten Words that will get you auto-de-sysopped" list ? Like the F-bomb for instance.