Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/News and notes

Participation of women on Wikipedia; a random thought
This isn't responding to anything in particular, but I've been commenting on some FACs recently, and it struck me that the usual figure of 15% participation by women in Wikipedia is a somewhat misleading measure. At FAC, many of the active reviewers and article creators/expanders/copy editors are women. I am guessing that if someone made a study of featured content and GAs, one would find a much, much higher proportion of female participation. Don't know why I'm posting this here, but it just occurred to me (a male). -- Ssilvers (talk) 03:46, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Attracting and retaining participants
I read with interest that User:SvHannibal, the fourth recipient of a Community fellowship, will be working on the Account Creation Improvement Project. A timely announcement, since I had just listened to the podcast version of:
 * http://www.economist.com/node/17902943?story_id=17902943&CFID=159433305&CFTOKEN=60207840

As that article notes:
 * For all Wikipedia’s achievements, however, it inspires three worries: that it contains too many inaccuracies; that it is not financially sustainable; and that it has lost touch with its founding ideal of being open to all

Read the article if you want more about the first two...its the third item that is relevant to the fellowship of. To quote:


 * It is the third worry—that Wikipedia has become ossified and bureaucratic, discouraging new users from contributing—that is the greatest cause for concern. In recent years its most active contributors have become obsessed with obscure questions of doctrine and have developed their own curious jargon to describe the editing process. The number of regular contributors to Wikipedia’s English edition peaked in March 2007 and has since declined by a third; the number of new contributors per month has fallen by half. Growth in the number of articles and edits has also levelled off.

I've been contributing to Wikipedia for over seven years, mostly without logging in. The barriers to doing so have steadily grown. I understand the motivation and suspect that the reduction in vandalism is significant enough that discouraging IP editors is probably viewed by most as the price we pay. But it would be nice if the Attracting and retaining participants strategy would include a vigilant effort to continue to support the legitimate contributions of editors like me. In the past few days I've been the target of multople false positives from both User:ClueBot NG and the WP:Edit filter. For example: I'm hoping that the latest false positives are a statistical anomaly...most month's the anti-vandalism bots and subsystems aren't quite so concerned with my contributions. 67.101.5.135 (talk) 13:09, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
 * http://report.cluebot.cluenet.org/?page=View&id=189868
 * It's probably because of the exclamation mark in 'Yahoo!' Mostly bots do revert blatant vandalism... I don't think they're mainly the reason there are less contributors. :-) -- Menti  fisto  22:48, 14 January 2011 (UTC)