Episode 73: Interview w/Ed Chi of PARC
Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) interviews researcher Ed Chi of Palo Alto Research Center’s Augmented Social Cognition group about their latest research on Wikipedia’s growth and community health. PARC’s latest study gets behind the numbers of Wikipedia’s slower article production.
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Very nice!
The most interesting bit to me is about growing “resistance” and the shrinking “middle class”. I wonder if, rather than resistance pushing the middle class out, both trends are primarily the result of articles maturing. Immature articles generally grow without much serious refactoring or reversion, but once they basically have material that touches on all the content relevant to the article, improving quality (inevitably?) entails more of the kind of editing that shows up as “resistance”, and is the kind of work that fewer people enjoy doing. In other words, it’s all about low-hanging fruit.
Comment by Sage (User:Ragesoss) — April 27, 2009 @ 4:52 pm
Sage: Your interpretation might be correct, but from the data that we have, it\’s somewhat hard to determine if this is really the case. Are new article production slowing simply because of maturity, or is it because the community population composition is changing. There is a chicken and egg problem here.
It\’s worth pointing out, however, that the resistance we found is suggestive of the fact that the newbies are finding it hard to contribute material that passes the filter of the community. This is somewhat consistent with your interpretation.
Comment by Ed H. Chi — April 28, 2009 @ 2:35 am
Hoi, how does all this apply to the other Wikipedias? From my pov this is where the need is for growth.. For instance the growth of the Swahili Wikipedia is relevant, it may become the biggest African Wikipedia.
Thanks,
GerardM
Comment by Gerard Meijssen — April 28, 2009 @ 9:09 am
From the interview, it seemed that the number of edits by users made to Wikipedia was the basis of this analysis. As we all know, there are problems with relying exclusively on edit counts to determine the “value” of edits and editors. How were these concerns addressed in your analysis?
Comment by User:Awadewit — May 3, 2009 @ 1:16 am
I have been an editor for some 5–6 years. In my feeling, things that are probably turning editors away are (1) the novelty is gone: editing wikipedia no longer earns “nerd points”, (2) editing has become more difficult because of more complex markup and tools, more rigid style standards, etc; so people are being required to spend more effort into editing appearance (=boring) rather than conntent (=fun) (3) the recent obsession with scholarly-type references (one per sentence!), which are a real pain to enter, are not reusable, and make the code unreadable. All the best
Comment by Jorge Stolfi — May 9, 2009 @ 8:34 pm
I’m waiting for a twitter that will notify us from a new podcast out there!
Comment by Inge — May 14, 2009 @ 6:48 am