Editor retention

Sue Gardner on the Wikipedia 'death spiral'

A video [2] of Sue Gardner talking at London meetup (Sunday 13th November 2011) about the difficulty of editor retention. Transcript below. She talks about what WMF call the the 'holy shit' slide, showing that editing peaked at 2005. She says she is not going to use the words 'death spiral' in public (but then goes on to use the term not a few times). It is essentially "endless September".

2:00 Editor retention is not not not OK. It's a big problem. It's the thing that needs to be solved.
2:30 "the holy shit slide" New editors aren't making it to their first year anniversary. People are coming in large numbers as they always have, but they are getting rebuffed. Why are they failing to enter community. Warnings have gone up, criticism is 'way up', and praise and thanks have been in decline. People join and then it's warning template after template.
5:20 The templates are well-intended but they make new editors feel like 'Wikipedia hates you'.
6:00 Pre-2006 there were no automated warning. Established editors would talk to new editors and help them through.
6:55 Now, 4 out of 5 messages are bot-delivered.
7:20 Someone asked about the 'goldrush' hypothesis - early gains are over. The low hanging fruit has all been picked.
7:56 "You are completely wrong. I can see why you would think that. We did a kind of meta analysis and pulled together everything that we knew, all the research that we had done and that other entities had done. I'll show it to you later. We did a testing of hypotheses, maybe brainstormed 20 hypotheses. One of them was that, which we at the WMF called the 'Gold rush theory right'. The notion that early prospecting days - that lots of gold to be made - are over. And so naturally today you would have fewer people because there's less to write about, and so forth. There's very little evidence to support that. There's really no evidence to support that.
8:35 Like, the contrary. You see the same pattern that we're seeing in the English Wikipedia in the German Wikipedia. You see it on the Hindi Wikipedia, right? You see it on Wikipedias that have 5,000 articles, right. So there's nothing to support that that is what happened. And there's lots of evidence to suggest it's the endless September, that it's the other hypotheses that are actually true.
9:15 After a couple of years a Wiki gets "crufted up" with rules and templates.
9:40 People talking about their first edits. Usually bad, but you used to be able to recover from bad edits. Newbies are having a terrible experience.
11:00 SO! Deletions and reversions stop people hanging around.
11:20 The indicator of good Wikipedian is to make lots of edits in first few days.
11:45 But these are the most disincentivised.
12:20 "People think the website is yelling at them. " People don't distinguish between people on the website, and the website itself. They feel like the website hates them. "Its super super challenging".
13:20 Q: Are there any patterns in established non-admin editors? - They think anecdotally it's harder for everyone. There's a ripple effect that is troubling for everyone. There aren't enough people to do the work. Qualitatively, people are stressed and worked out, and the culture is 'fightier'. It reminds her of how a newsroom operates. Seasoned editors need a desk job. Her impression as a working journalist, was that older guys still acting like junior reporters. "Where are the new generations of people to do scut work [?]". the older editors will age out and there will be no one to replace them. People start editing when at school, and the "forgive me for saying this, but your wife makes you stop". Sometimes parents, sometimes girlfriends "time to put away childish things". "When are you going to make partner?".
19:00 the problem of FA.
20:40 In 2005-6 the wall started to go up. [Mention of how difficult she found Florence Devouard] She discusses FA and how the bar has got so high that certain articles will never go to FA.
22:00 The Saturn article analogy. "I honestly think we have lost our way, I really do right. I sometimes think we have become Nupedia, and we need another Wikipedia to feed into it. I just think we are really really rigid ... We have lost sight of what makes the project special, which is that everybody really does have something to contribute, it's not just a priesthood".
23:20 Someone comments about a user who started an article on their user page, and told that if they did not stop their disruptive editing they will be blocked.
24:00 Sue thinks this came out of the Seigenthaler thing, when Jimmy insisted there must be a focus on quality, also the same time as Essjay. "There was a moral panic created around quality". This gave a whole lot of people license to be jerks.
25:00 People are playing Wikipedia like a video game, shooting down vandals, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the AK47 and just gets murdered. "What we think now is that it's all nuns and tourists. There's a big massacre and there's one vandal in the background running away. And meanwhile everyone else is dead."
25:30 Q: - So what are WMF going to do about it?
26:00 "I deliberately kept out the phrase 'death spiral', because I didn't want to put it in writing. It's too depressing".
26:40 The March 2011 resolution. The WMF rarely speaks to editors (I think "speaks to is US or Canadian for "tells editors what they should do", or perhaps it means 'speak about'). It used to be Jimmy who would proclaim something. As an movement develops matures it needs institutions, not individuals. Jimmy still plays a role as an individual, but the board, the institution plays much more of a role today. The first time was the BLP resolution. The board said on March 2011 that editor retention was its top priority.
27:40 "Some of this is chapter challenge, some of this is individual editor challenge" (At this point they read something which is not spoken aloud).
28:20 Symonds: there are more and more situations where someone has bitten a newbie. They've followed policy and rules. So what if Arbcom tells them otherwise? Does Arbcom de-admin them? "even as arbitrators our hands are tied". "We can't desysop someone over a minor ongoing issue without an awful lot of drama". Someone else comments that they follow them around and revert their edits.
31:00 Someone else moots the idea of a 'topic ban' equivalent, but Symonds objects that at this point they are saying they no longer trust the admin, as a committee and as a community, to carry out certain tasks, therefore the community no longer trusts you therefore [pause] - you should no longer be an admin.
32:00 Yet another person says that as a result of the community becoming a hive [?] the biggest problem is those admins, particularly rogue admins, who don't have a big turnover, who are admins for life, who were elected when it was a lot easier to become an admin etc.
32:30 Sue mentions someone on Foundation-l (or internal l?) who was being 'a real jerk', and a number of people even called him on it.
33:00 He told her "I don't think I was being uncivil, I was being icily sarcastic". Is icily sarcastic what we aim for? Is that success? "I would interpret our requirement for civility as a flaw. You cannot get worse than that". "As though I can be barely civil and that's what we are supposed to do here".
33:20 She then goes on about Occupy Wall St, where she was (at Manhattan) a few weeks ago. The think she liked most was that everyone there took responsibility for maintaining a good tone. She does think that Arbcom should play a role. Not banning, but maybe 'taking a role'.
35:00 She notes that the smaller projects have a big problem, e.g. Wikiversity.
35:43 "What is the WMF doing" First a bunch of analysis (see the pages on meta).
36:20 the 'false tension' between quality and participation. "We fell into thinking that was true"
36:45 The abuse filter does not hurt participation. Wikiproject monuments ditto.
37:45 the attrition pipeline - the problem of the edit interface and other impediments to new editors.
38:40 Maryana's analysis of top editors. "That was where I learned to be nice to Marek69". "Go Marek!"
40:42 - who are the top newbie killers. They are thinking about mechanisms for that. - have they tried to identify who the top newbie killers are? They can't, but they have been thinking about mechanisms. "There are people we call 'moth people'. They are drawn to the flame. And some people are drawn to the flame in a good way (they negotiate, they mediate), others in a bad way, they like fighting. "Its really hard for data to tell you things like that". They had thought about a flag to identify the bad moth people.
41:30 the moth people. They thought about flagging people as 'unhelpful'. The problem is that some admins and arbcom people would be flagged as 'unhelpful'.
42:50 'Dont be a dick' is really unpleasant.
43:30. The building piece. The most important is the visual editor. They can't continue to live in 2001 visual world. "Its a big big big deal". She anticipates lots of upset. She wants the chapters to play a role in creating acceptance. "We cannot continue to move at the pace of 'community acceptance'. The 'bike shed essay'. (A board of trustees can approve the building of a nuclear power station in 5 minutes, but will spend weeks over the construction of a bike shed).
49:00 the volunteers devs tend to increase complexity. She sees the job of the WMF professional devs to reduce complexity, and she sees the chapters as helping.
51:49 Wikilove is the next thing they have done.
52:17 the article feedback tool. Every website in the world has a feedback tool, why not WP? It's part of making it more warm and welcoming.
1:02:45 Other things they are doing. E.g. pink and fluffy templates.
1:03:34 what the chapters should be doing. "Our reach is really important, education is really important". Only Wikipedians can do community work. She can't hire people to work on policy. Chapters have credibility in editing community. The bank account analogy. The UK chapter should spend its credibility on the ideas she has presented. If the chapter stands on the sidelines, that will not be interpreted as 'neutral', it will be interpreted as 'not helpful'.
1:07:00 question about people being aggressive and throwing their weight around. There are people for whom rowing [arguing] is an important part of their life. But they have nothing to do with the chapter.

See also

• Growth and decline