On 04/09/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's because it's bloody impossible to get through them without being fabulous at the politics, even for experienced editors. FAC in particular is a great example of gratuitous requests for shrubberies BY POLICY!!!

Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is, no doubt, better than using edit counts.

But it is also may not be the best approach for the future, if we are really switching to a "quality over quantity" mentality.

At the least, there should be careful choices about what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results like these. My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a significantly larger portion of established editors as the main contributors, even by the word count metric.

I also bet that if you ranked editors by surviving words in the encyclopedia (not project or talk) you might be quite surprised to see who ranks high. People get noticed on Wikipedia for participating in project-space, for one reason or another, not for their article contribs.

But it is also may not be the best approach for the future, if we are really Are we?

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is, no doubt, better than using edit counts. But it is also may not be the best approach for the future, if we are really switching to a "quality over quantity" mentality. At the least, there should be careful choices about what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results like these. My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a significantly larger portion of established editors as the main contributors, even by the word count metric. -Ragesoss

I think (as I said in the reply that seems to have gotten lost in the flood) that level of citation (citations per unit length, or similar) would be a good parameter for choosing the sample. With regard to what makes us the #17 most-visited site, you are right (of course). It's defintely not the FA's and GA's. But high-quality articles (by whatever idiosyncratic measure each reader uses) are going to be responsible for future growth in readership and attracting the the most capable and knowledgable editors, (probably) more so than continued growth in the number and size of the unverified articles and content that good anons typically add. As anecdotal evidence, I was talking to a new professor at my school yesterday (a historian of molecular biology) who was gushing over the Rosalind Franklin article (props to User:Wobble). He's now thinking about coordinating some of his course assignments with WikiProject History of Science. To repeat what I say on the "expert rebellion" pages, I think we are handling the transition from a quantity-emphasis to a quality-emphasis the right way (i.e., slowly). The leaving experts either have a different set of priorities (i.e., they think that the real-life authority of editors should matter), or are leaving because of problems that we are working on (i.e., edit creep and the inability to preserve a "good" version). But metrics like AaronSW's are important for determining how fast we should change policy/software to favor ease of participation vs. verifiability and/or stability. I guess ideally, we could have a measure based on each type of sample: random articles, FA's, GA's, long articles, old articles, high-citation articles, most-visited articles. -Ragesoss

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> This is also a BIG stick to use on Byzantine overengineered processes > and policy. Excessive process is actively newbie-hostile.

So is excessive randomness. Policy protects new users.

Incerdentaly is there a reason why [[Etch-A-Sketch]] is coated in (r)s?

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: So is excessive randomness. Policy protects new users.

-- geni

On 05/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, which is why process is important. It's a good thing AFD has never done that. Oh, wait. The point of this is some indication that if we don't explicitly care about the newbies then it will in fact be damaging to the project. Please read the thread.

Which is precisely what I mean by using it as an example. I still get contacted by people upset that "Wikipedia called me a vanity writer, what can I do short of taking legal action?" and trying to explain that it's a jargon term ... one which the AFD regulars were kindly asked not to fucking use for this precise reason. Nuke from orbit, rebuild from scratch. Policy: We delete some stuff. Process: something Kafka would have found implausible.

On 9/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Policy probably. I'm taking about process in general too. There's > plenty of process that should be culled regularly, per the wisdom of > [[m:instruction creep]].

Do you want to tell the people trying to outlaw the CVU through guidelines and process this?

What happened to blanking all AFDs?

On 9/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not remotely. We have two policies writen by people who appear to be in favor of the destuction of the CVU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RBI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_is_not_a_game Both were writen after the attempt to speedy the CVU had failed. The only difference between these pages and [[WP:DENY]] is they also attempt to outlaw the CVU directly ([[WP:DENY]] has some effect on some of it's aactivies but nothing of significance).

True, we should care for newbies, but we should have the good of the project at number one. I can't find a single policy that we don't need (can you?).

Why should we expect newbies to have a doctorate in wiki-lawyering? Reasonable arguments should not depend on the ability to cite policy cruft.

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: You can't expect a site the size of Wikipedia to run without a serious amount of policy. If we stop adding policies things like living person bios would have degenerated into flame wars with no way out. Newbies do face a steeper learning curve, but in the end it is best for Wikipedia and it is the project rather than the newbies we should care about. -

The thing that alarmed/amused me the most was "If we stop ***adding*** policies ...." (my stars obviously). That combined with the notion that all policies (and I presume processes) are needed gives me much fear for the future.