User:Llywrch/It is no longer 2007

I was reading a thread on a theme that is regularly discussed on Wikipedia: why are we losing members? People point back to the high numbers in 2007 & contrast that to how the number of active editors is smaller now. At that moment it occurred to me that the problem is not quite as bad as it seems.

Consider in 2007, Wikipedia hit its high point for active editors, about 55,000 people. The problem with that number is that is was an unsustainable spike. That year Wikipedia was the cool website to have an account at, so many people signed up for one. It was going to be the next Facebook, another success story of the new social media web, & lots of other buzz words I can't remember eight years later. However, the number of volunteers started dropping after that; the journalists & Internet experts all began to ominously repeat that Wikipedia was dying (film, mpgs, etc. at 11:00), & it seemed to be true. Outsiders complained that it was hard to get edits accepted on articles, & muttered about "Wiki-Nazis" running them off. Meanwhile, observers complained about errors, how it wasn't that reliable, & systemic bias.

Well, when you consider the facts with a little objectivity, things aren't as dire at Wikipedia as they may seem.

First the numbers. As I wrote, people around that time joined Wikipedia thinking it would be another cutting-edge, Internet experience. All the press was talking about how cool Wikipedia was: after all, anyone could edit it, so why not you?. Sooner or later, some of these people realized that the point of Wikipedia was not to hang out with their cyber-friends & share jokes & memes, but to create an encyclopedia. Doing that means writing articles, & to write a good one -- by that, I mean an article better than "start" class -- required about as much work as writing a term paper for an undergraduate college class. In other words, work. (And that's the more enjoyable part of contributing to Wikipedia. Dealing with all of the trivial administrative stuff like checking out copyright violations, handling quarrels between editors, handling backlogs of articles for deletion or grading articles for importance & completion -- that's the tedious stuff. If you don't think writing is enjoyable, then you're going to hate chores like those.) So it should be no surprise that active editorship dropped from that high point. Since then, it seems to have plateaued at 34-35,000.

Second, ease of editing. Even if Visual Editor worked from the first beta as good as its creators intended it to work, editing articles on Wikipedia has gotten more difficult since the beginning, & will continue to get difficult. The reason is simple. When I made my first edits back in 2001, there were very few articles, & most of them were little more than a few paragraphs written to turn a red link blue, & written in haste because there were a lot of red links. Anyone could contribute to Wikipedia because Wikipedia needed content, & the assumption then was that no matter what was added, someone would come along later & fix it. Wikipedia might not be very useful as an encyclopedia, but anyone could contribute.

Fast forward to today, & that's not the case any more. Yes, there are still articles needing to be written, & yes there is still a lot of work to be done, but to handle that work requires something called research. Research requires one to not spend one's spare time on the Talk pages arguing over some stupid and petty matter, but reading and looking for things to read. Often reading books & periodicals that are not in digital format, but in print. Often discovering that the information one was looking for wasn't in that print source. Or having to wait while one's local library searched for that print source through InterLibrary Loan. Or handling materials in a foreign language, an increasing amount of the time in a language one did not know, & had to take the time cut-&-pasting -- or even typing -- the text into a translation program.

When I attended college, there was a rule that a student spent 3 hours of studying for every hour in class. That appears to now apply to contributing content to Wikipedia: unless one is Wikignoming, based on my own experience it takes about 3 hours of research (or offline organizing & re-writing) to each hour of online editing. If it's not clear why so few people contribute to Wikipedia, go back & read those last three paragraphs until you do.

As for accuracy, all reference books have errors & mistakes. Einbinder wrote a book on all of the errors he found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Despite this, the EB remains a useful reference work because it covers so many subjects, & is correct enough that it serves as a useful place to start to learn more about a subject.

Now for the charge that Wikipedia isn't that welcoming to newcomers. Here's an experiment to try: write some code & try to get it accepted at one of the more successful Open Source projects, such as the Linux Kernel, one of the BSD communities, Gnome, KDE, Apache, etc. (Whether or not you can program doesn't count.) Next, compare that chore to making an edit to Wikipedia. (Whether or not you know anything about the subject doesn't count.) Now, which is the less welcoming environment? (Hint: many of the senior members of these communities routinely use language that would get anyone banned from Wikipedia.) Yet the software these communities create is used by millions every day without hesitation.

Wikipedia's draw is that there are thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of people who like to learn about subjects, & eventually reach the point where they want to share their learning with other people. Once upon a time some of them would go on to become teachers & college professors, but that outlet has been choked with highly qualified people for as long as I can remember. Wikipedia may not be a perfect solution for that need, but it is better than having to justify to oneself having spent hundreds of dollars (if not a few thousand) on books & materials on esoteric subjects none of one's friends or acquaintances cares about.

And creating new software won't change that fact. There are people out there who use Wikipedia on a daily basis and will never make an edit, no matter what shape, form, or functionality Visual Editor, Media Viewer, or Flow has. These people don't want to edit for any number of reasons, & short of holding a gun to their heads, they will not edit.

This is not to say Wikipedia is perfect, or that improvements can't or shouldn't be made. But instead of looking at 2007 as when things started going to hell for Wikipedia, it should be seen as an aberration for Wikipedia's general growth. Wikipedia may never see 55,000 active editors ever again. Better to drop that data point & examine Wikipedia's long-term trends as if 2007 never existed; in that case, things don't look so grim.