Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Opinion essay

''Oliver Keyes (User:Ironholds) is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. The following article on the conservatism of the Wikimedia movement was adapted from an August 27 2011 post on his website, Quominus.org. Oliver previously spoke about related issues in his address to the 2011 Wikimania conference "Hippies with Guns: how ideological conflict shapes Wikipedia and what we can learn from it".''

''The views expressed are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.''



The status quo
Above is one of my favourite images at the moment – a graphical representation of all the key words found in taskforce planning for the Wikimedia Strategy project, in which the community got together and basically crowdsourced a long-term strategic plan. The reason I find it interesting isn’t because of the words which are displayed prominently, but the words that aren’t; specifically, those looking to move the community forward neglected the word “community” (slightly to the right of “work”) and the word “social” (slightly above “working”, and, in comparative terms, dwarfed by the word “php”. Sigh.)

I’m not going to lie, this doesn’t surprise me. Wikimedians actually tend to put a fairly small amount of stock in changing things to boost the community or the social aspects of the movement. Whether it’s WikiLove, help reform or any other project to ameliorate the less pleasant aspects of the projects, the same refrain comes from an annoyingly large chunk of the community – “I managed to edit and contribute to the projects without [whatever is being proposed], so other people can too”.

The source of this is fairly clear – people don’t like change, and because existing editors are largely comfortable with the current situation (after all, they built it, either accidentally or deliberately, and since they’ve stayed around we can conclude they don’t mind it that much) they don’t really see that there’s so much of a problem. In a way, I reckon this is a result of our successes more than our failures; while new user numbers are dropping, we maintain an enviably high retention rate for existing editors. As a result, experienced users don’t see a problem. Why would they? Oh, sure, they hear rumours that user numbers are dropping, but all their friends are still here, so it can’t be that bad. Cries that “yes, all your friends are still here, but you just missed out on a thousand new ones” aren’t met or internalised well.

The problem
My problem with all of this isn’t just that there is genuinely a lot of stuff we need to do to Fix the Wiki that people don’t get, it’s that this position is based on a pair of fallacies that the individuals in question could, with a bit of effort, think through and avoid. When people say “I managed to edit and contribute to the projects without [whatever is being proposed], so other people can too”, what they’re saying is:


 * 1) The on-wiki system has remained the same
 * 2) The people we’re trying to recruit are the same as the people we already have


 * The on-wiki system has remained the same

People drop ideas for reform on the grounds that they managed and therefore anyone else can. This is based on the fallacy that the system has remained the same since they started, which is of course not the case – except, possibly, for our newest users. Even users who are a year old are dealing with a completely different environment from the one they started off with; policy bloats, our tolerance for expansion has been reduced, and the community has become increasingly harsh and automated in its dealings with new users over time. The fact that the system in 2006 when Exampleexperienceduser joined was nice and characterised by decent, friendly communication and a million opportunities to expand the wiki does not mean that the current one is.


 * The people we’re trying to recruit are the same as the people we already have

In other words – for the aforementioned statement to be true, the potential new editors now have to be largely identical in terms of motivation, interests and enthusiasm to the existing users. We can’t say that our current system works for new users because it works for established users unless there are actually similarities between the two groups.

Why this matters
The problem is that there aren’t. Early adopters of Wikipedia were, by-and-large, nerds. Utter nerds. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean that in a “it was 2001 and they were on the Internet” way. Longhairs from the 1960s and 1970s counterculture movement (cf. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, recommended), early computer and Internet proponents, FOSS addicts, codejunkies, we had them all. Early adopters were people who saw a nascent project – or later on, an established project that everyone with any academic or political value ripped the hell out of – as something it was worth contributing to, for free. Early adopters were happy to use a pseudo-HTML markup scheme to contribute and delve deep into the raw guts of an article or talkpage to make their views or facts known.

What we’re dealing with now in terms of potential volunteers is largely different. People bandy around the term “Facebook generation”, but it’s true; we’re dealing with a completely distinct group of people. 2011 users are likely to be people who have grown up with the Internet and with Wikipedia. If you’re at university now, Wikipedia will have been around since you entered secondary education, and possibly before that. It is no longer new and exciting, it is no longer a step into the unknown, and so the motivations of people who do try to contribute are likely to be pretty damn different. Moreover, the people we’re dealing with don’t want to have to deal with markup, or raw pagetext in this fashion; they aren’t used to looking under the hood. If they’re WordPress users they live in a world in which looking under the hood is not mandatory; if they’re Facebook users they live in a world in which looking under the hood isn’t even possible.

So we’re not dealing with the same system, or even the same people; we’ve got a bloated and increasingly unfriendly wiki on the one hand and a pool of potential recruits with vastly different motives and expectations from our norms on the other. This means that we can’t simply sit in our ivory tower and make judgements about whether Wikimedia is failing, or succeeding, or what our potential users expect; we have to go to those potential users and ask them. The problem is that the Foundation has been doing exactly that in a lot of places, trying to get information on what people want from the horse’s mouth, and when acting on the data (as with WikiLove) has largely been met with a big stubborn sign saying Do Not Want.

What we can do about it
Wikimedia is a fantastic movement. It’s the Whole Earth Catalogue for the 21st century, a smorgasbord of educational material and trivia that for the first time offers the potential for people to truly take their education into their own hands – after a fashion, anyway. But if we want to live up to the expectations, if we want these projects to continue, we have to start accepting the data people bring us and accepting that we might need to make some changes. We need to throw out our assumptions, throw out our fallacies and innate resistance to change, and seek to build a movement that people want to contribute to rather than one people don’t mind contributing to.