James Carroll

California and Larkin streets in San Francisco

Restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

— George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts - Narrative Essays, 1939

Why Has Wikipedia's Workforce Been Shrinking Since 2007 ?

Background

Anyone who does a Google search with the keywords "Wikipedia decline of participation" will find numerous articles on the problem of Wikipedia's shrinking workforce.

In a 2013 article by the MIT Technology review, the situation is quickly summed up by a couple of its statements:

The primary source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

Also disturbing is the existence a gender gap, which as of 2001 stated that less than 15 percent of users are women. Research has also found that active Wikipedia users often retreat from Wikipedia for four months at a time.

What is it that causes many users to disappear from Wikipedia, either on a permanent or temporary basis?

Content-Creators verses Deletion-Editors

Wikipedia likes to refer to all users as 'editors,' but that is too simplistic, especially for an analysis of its problem like workforce participation. Spend time contributing to Wikipedia, and it becomes apparent that there are in fact two main classes of users: Content-Creators and Deletion-Editors. This trait can be revealed by examining an individual user's Contribution Page, which is a time-ordered list of their latest Edit-Events upon Wikipedia.

It can be seen that Content-Creators, who spend most of their time doing research and adding new text to articles, will have positive Byte-Counts in parenthesis after each Edit-Event upon their Contribution Page. However for deletion-prone editors (i.e. Deletion-Editors), that Byte-Count in parenthesis will mostly hold negative numbers for their Edit-Events upon articles (and if we also exclude counting their edits upon Talk Pages).

Content-Creators make different and more substantial investments in Wikipedia than do Deletion-Editors.

Content-Creators will spend many hours researching books and the Internet, and then spend still more hours crafting the text that they content they will submit to articles. Content-Creators often spend days working on a single article. Also of interest is a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia's editors have generated 77 percent of the site's content -- thus the Content-Creators are but a small percent of the site's participants.

However, Deletion-Editors seem to only spend minutes upon an article before casually reducing its content, often in a cavalier style. And after a mere matter of minutes, they then move on to another article, do a quick first read, and again slash and eat away at its content like a locust. This tendency, to quickly hop from article to article, can also be measured by examining a user's Contribution Page. Upon that page, we can see how long a user will dwell on a single article before they might move to a new article to apply new Edit-Events. Deletion-Editors rarely spend much time on a single article, but will quickly hop across many articles within a day. And Deletion-Editors are much more likely to engage in Edit Wars than Content-Creators. Sadly, we see that Deletion-Editors rarely invest much time doing research, but only quickly read existing articles before casually slashing their content -- and will frequently rationalize their destructive and demoralizing actions by citing a controversial Wikipedia rule.

A Clash of Cultures

Recent studies suggest that the number of Content-Creators is decreasing, while Deletion-Editors are in fact increasing in size. Also disturbing is the reality of a gender gap, and that less than 15 percent of Wikipedia users are women.

What is it that is discouraging women as well as new users from staying with Wikipedia?

Is it possible that new users and women tend to be Content-Creators, and that older users tend to be the Deletion-Editors? If so, it might explain why new users tend to quickly become discouraged and not return to Wikipedia. It has also been noted in the press, that upon Wikipedia Talk Pages, there exists endless bickering and debate during the process of consensus building, whether the issue might be small or large. How demoralizing is it for Content-Creators to see their many hours of work casually be destroyed in a matter of minutes by a Deletion-Editor who spends more time reciting Wikipedia's rules that they do to acquaint themselves with the substance of an article. It appears that the demoralization caused by Deletion-Editors, with their endless bickering over rules upon Talk Pages, is now causing new users, women, and Content-Creators to flee Wikipedia in large numbers. This should set off an alarm -- Wikipedia now seems like a failing a soccer team that has too few players on the field, but too many coaches on the sidelines. Someone has to be on the field doing the hard work of Content-Creation for Wikipedia to survive and expand.

A Possible Solution

If the culture-clash of Deletion-Editors verses Content-Creators is the source of an abrasive atmosphere and a shrinking workforce, then steps could be taken to address the problem.

Perhaps Wikipedia should impose mechanical restrictions that halt the ability of users to delete text, if that user has not made a significant amount of content-creation during a specific period of time. That is, if a deletion-prone editor cannot do some net amount of content-creation, then their ability to delete should be mechanically disabled until they have done additional research, created new content for articles, and brought their sum of Byte-Counts for Edit-Events to a positive number. In other words, if someone is not an administrator and does not do research and add material to articles, then they should progressively lose the right to delete the work of others.

When Deletion-Editors begin to spend more time doing research and writing content, it is likely that they will become more sensitive to the demoralization that they often deliver to Content-Creators. And if a Deletion-Editor can NOT bring themselves to do actual research, then we have to wonder if they really belong on Wikipedia at all? ... James M. Carroll, Content-Creator for Wikipedia

References for Essay on Shrinking Workforce

James Carroll (talk) 21:31, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

You can't let the inmates run the asylum

In the same way that MySpace was destine to succumb to FaceBook, Wikipedia – despite its current popularity – is destine to succumb to a future more robust competitor because of its fundamentally flawed management model.

Within the software industry, which originally pioneered the concept of dynamically changing teams for individual projects, there was a realization that every project needs some temporary leader at all times to be able to quickly diffuse controversies among the team's members.

The same way that a ship can only have one rudder, some project leader must always exist or a project’s team can easily degenerate into endless squabbling and eventual conflict.

Unlike Wikipedia, software companies sought to encourage individuals with the most passion for a topic to take ownership themselves – at least during the start of a project – and also realized that as a project matures, new project leaders were likely to be assigned over and over again.

Wikipedia’s central flaw was that it falsely assumed that if they wrote enough rules and documented them, that team members would instantly transform into trained and self-regulating lawyers, and be able to quickly and efficiently resolve project issues in a democratic and diplomatic style.

However time would show that the large body of rules would ironically not clarify but only create a fuzziness that aggressive individuals with a false sense of entitlement would seek to exploit, sometime in concert with other aggressive individuals, in arbitrarily forcing their decisions and designs upon a project (an article) – sometimes dictatorially reigning in this power-play for years at a time while stagnating the project.

The only salvation for Wikipedia to repair its broken management model by recognizing the continual need for some responsible and diplomatic individual to be always placed in leadership of a project, so that conflict resolution can happen quickly and diplomatically without festering into persisting irrational and emotional disputes.James Carroll (talk) 11:35, 6 January 2014 (UTC)