The Gardner interview
Sue Gardner is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit, non-commercial organization that operates nearly 300 online projects. Originally from Canada, she worked with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in production, journalism and documentaries.
In 2007, she took up consulting for the Foundation on operations and governance and within a year was in the top job. Her tenure has seen a precipitous increase in the staffing at the San Francisco office, which now employs some 100 people, up from 65 just six months ago, and a budget well in excess of $20M a year. In October 2009, Gardner was named by the Huffington Post as one of ten “media game changers of the year” for the impact on new media of her work for Wikimedia.
The Signpost interviewed Gardner on her fourth anniversary as executive director. In person, the boss of one of the world's most powerful websites is all charm and professionalism. Much of the interview concerned the issues she raised in a landmark address in November to the board of Wikimedia UK,[1] in which she said the slide showing a graph of declining editor retention (below) is what the Foundation calls “the holy-shit slide". This is a huge, "really really bad" problem, she told Wikimedia UK, and is worst on the English and German Wikipedias.
A prominent issue on the English Wikipedia is whether attempts to achieve high quality in articles – and perceptions that this is entangled with unfriendly treatment of newbies by the community – are associated with low rates of attracting and retaining new editors. Although Gardner believes that high quality and attracting new editors are both critical goals, her view is that quality has not been the problem, although she didn't define exactly what article quality is. What we didn’t know in 2007, she said, was that “quality was doing fine, whereas participation was in serious trouble. The English Wikipedia was at the tail end of a significant drop in the retention of new editors: people were giving up the editing process more quickly than ever before.
There aren't enough people to do the work ... people are stressed and they're burned out ... you still have lots of [older editors] doing scut-work ... So where are the new generations of people, relieving them of the need to do all this scut-work? — Sue Gardner, UK address
Participation matters because it drives quality. People come and go naturally, and that means we need to continually bring in and successfully orient new people. If we don’t, the community will shrink over time and quality will suffer. That’s why participation is our top priority right now.
At the core of Gardner's philosophy, then, is an intrinsic connection between editor retention and what she calls openness. But The Signpost wanted to know more about where article quality fits into this model – specifically whether the three factors are sometimes at odds with each other and whether a purely one-way causality is involved. Deletions and reversions might be distasteful to new editors, but how can we, for instance, maintain strict standards about biographies of living people (BLP) without reverting problematic edits and deleting inappropriate articles? Gardner rejected the premise:
I don’t believe that quality and openness are inherently opposed to each other. Openness is what enables and motivates people to show up in the first place. It also means we’ll get some bad faith contributors and some who don’t have the basic competence to contribute well. But that’s a reasonable price to pay for the overall effectiveness of an open system, and it doesn’t invalidate the basic premise of Wikipedia: that openness will lead to quality.
What do you say, we asked, to editors whose focus has been on improving quality and who may have taken your comments and the recent focus of Foundation initiatives as an indication that their contributions aren't valued, or even that they are part of the problem?
If you believe there’s an inherent tension between quality and openness, then yes, you might believe that when I advocate for openness, I’m speaking against quality; but I don’t believe that. Quality improvement work – like page patrolling, the FAC, developing content partnerships, and staging competitions like Wiki loves monuments – makes Wikipedia better and more valuable for readers. Where we run into problems is when we do things that repel or frustrate good-faith new editors. But I’m not sure there’s a fixed relationship between activities designed to improve quality and activities that hurt new editor retention, so I don’t think editors who focus on quality improvement should feel attacked or unappreciated when openness is being emphasized.
... we’re not falling off a cliff; but we are having serious difficulty retaining good faith new editors, and that will cause our community to dwindle if we don’t fix the problem.
Does the Foundation have any solutions to enable the editing community to address the cultural issues that might be driving editors away – beyond the WMF's technical initiatives such as an easier editing interface and means of empowering kitten distribution, and external initiatives such as outreach and institutional partnerships?" For Gardner, "The editor retention problem is our shared problem. ... it's easiest for the Foundation to help when there's a technical or tools aspect to the problem. But when the issue is purely editorial or cultural, it’s harder for us to play a role." She singled out two areas: the first is behavioral problems, and the second the sheer quantity of policy and instructional text ("simplifying it would help everyone").
We queried her take on this second area, pointing out that all publishers that aim to present high-quality information find they need complex rules, whether explicit or via accepted standards of writing and scholarship. Could she give specific examples of areas where we could simplify policy without sacrificing standards?
Yes, the premise of this question is absolutely correct. The analogy I often use is the newsroom. Anybody who’s curious and reasonably intelligent can be a good journalist, but you do need some orientation and guidance. Just like a newsroom couldn’t invite in 100 random people off the street and expect them to make an immediate high-quality contribution, neither can Wikipedia expect that.
So if we say that becoming an editor should be easy, really, that's a little delusional. And it’s exactly why people need easy instructional text and videos. The resources used by Wikipedia Ambassadors aren’t ideal in every respect, but they’re increasingly road-tested and optimized for the real-world instruction of new contributors. They're pretty good. In general, to the extent that we’re showing instructions as part of the user interface, we need to make them concise, and emphasize the must-read items instead of trying to cover every edge case.
I don't have specific examples of where policy should be simplified, but I do think it would be helpful for us to visibly embrace "be bold" again, as well as "break all rules." People get embarrassed when they make mistakes, and some of our policies seem almost impossibly intricate. So, I think one helpful thing we could do is to tell people that making mistakes is normal and okay.
We need to be able to experiment, to do stuff. We’re going to consult when when we think it’s helpful and necessary, … but we need to do tiny bits of experimentation ...
At this point, Gardner stepped back to take a big-picture view of how the community and the WMF should interface, saying that the Foundation isn't the expert in either the behavioural or the cultural aspects:
The community understands them better than we do, and will probably have better ideas about how to solve them. ... The Foundation will lead on technical initiatives such as the visual editor, and I think the editing community should lead on others. There are other initiatives where we’re partnering with the editing community – for example, the Foundation built the feedback dashboard to make new editors’ experiences visible to experienced editors, and to give experienced editors an easy mechanism for coaching the new people. We’ve started working with editors to create new page triage, a tool that will make page patrolling easier, and will offer options that support and encourage new editors as well as repelling vandalism and other bad edits.
While staking the Foundation's claim to the more technical side of the equation, Gardner doesn't shrink from providing advice on how we can fix the cultural problem.
If you look at new editors’ talk pages, they can be pretty depressing – they’re often an uninterrupted stream of warnings and criticisms. Experienced editors put those warnings there because they want to make Wikipedia better: their intent is good. But the overall effect, we know, is that the new editors get discouraged. They feel like they’re making mistakes, that they’re getting in trouble, people don’t want their help. And so they leave, and who can blame them? We can mitigate some of that by toning down the intimidation factor of the warnings: making them simpler and friendlier. We can also help by adding some praise and thanks into the mix. When the Foundation surveys current editors, they tell us one of the things they enjoy most about editing Wikipedia is when someone they respect tells them they’re doing a good job. Praise and thanks are powerful.
What, then, does Sue Gardner believe are our significant social challenges? She puts these questions in response:
How do we counter systemic bias when it comes to defining reliable sources and notability – that is, in a context where decisions are made by consensus, and in which many types of people are underrepresented, how do we ensure systemic bias doesn’t weaken and harm the quality of the decisions we collectively make? How can we better distinguish in the patrolling process between good faith new-user mistakes, and bad faith edits? What are the three most essential pieces of advice that every new editor should be given, and how do we make them front and centre, early in their experience with us? In general, how can we best equip new editors to edit well, as quickly and enjoyably as possible?
[Around the time of the Siegenthaler and Essjay controversies] Jimmy went to Wikimedia and said "quality … we need to do better", [and through the distortions of the ripple-effect in the projects] there was this moral panic created around quality … what Jimmy said gave a whole lot of people the license to be jerks. ... Folks are playing Wikipedia like it's a video game and their job is to kill vandals ... every now and again a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the AK-47 and gets murdered ...
Many people have complained that Wikipedia patrollers and administrators have become insular and taken on a bunker mentality, driving new contributors away. Do you agree, and if so, how can this attitude be combated without alienating the current core contributors?
I wouldn’t characterize it as bunker mentality at all. It’s just a system that’s currently optimized for combating bad edits, while being insufficiently concerned with the well-being of new editors who are, in good faith, trying to help the projects. That’s understandable, because it’s a lot easier to optimize for one thing (no bad edit should survive for very long) than for many things (good edits should be preserved and built upon, new editors should be welcomed and coached, etc.). So I don’t think it’s an attitudinal problem, but more an issue of focusing energy now on re-balancing to ensure our processes for patrolling edits, deleting content, etc. are also designed to be encouraging and supportive of new people.
If the presumably less important issue of controversial content merits outside study by consultants, why isn't the Foundation putting resources into having social scientists diagnose the problems of editor retention and offer suggestions to the community to reform its internal culture? Why aren't there Foundation usability experts recommending overhauls of dense and daunting policy and procedural pages and not just of technical aspects such as the interface?
As I said, we do want to work with community members to figure out how to reduce policy and instructional cruft: probably the first step in doing that, though, would be a convening of interested editors. The community department has been talking about doing that. I think it would be very difficult for most social scientists to help us with a highly specific problem like new editor retention, because it's a deep community issue, and not many social scientists understand very much about how Wikipedia works.
Having said that, Gardner pointed out that the Foundation tries to persuade social scientists who do understand Wikipedia to study it, and has done "lots of informal consultation on participation-related issues" with them.
We put it to Gardner that much of the supporting research she cited to the Wikimedia UK board was informal, small-scale or not entirely rigorous (such as the study based on a dubious assumption that any editor who was not a sockpuppet, vandal or spammer was editing in "good faith" – ignoring self-promoters and POV-pushers). Now that we know editor decline is a very serious problem, is a comprehensive and rigorous research initiative being planned to analyze the phenomenon?
No. The Foundation isn’t a research organization, and programs like the Summer of research aren’t intended to conduct comprehensive, authoritative studies, but to produce actionable insights that guide and support our work. That’s why we tend to focus on small, fast, tightly defined research projects that will answer simple questions, such as "Which warning templates deter new editors the least?" and "Which help avenues are most used by new editors?"
How can a culture that has a heavy status quo bias be changed? How can the community be persuaded to become less risk-averse?
My hope is that the community will become less risk-averse as the Foundation makes successful, useful interventions. I believe the Vector usability improvements are generally seen as successful, although they of course haven't gone far enough yet. Wikilove is a small feature, but it’s been adopted by 13 Wikipedia language-versions, plus Commons. The article feedback tool is on the English Wikipedia and is currently being used in seven other projects. The new-editor feedback dashboard is live on the English and Dutch Wikipedias. New warning templates are being tested on the English and Portuguese Wikipedias. And the first opt-in user-facing prototype of the visual editor will be available within a few weeks. My hope is all this will create a virtuous circle: support for openness will begin to increase openness, which will begin to increase new editor retention, which will begin to relieve the workload of experienced editors, which will enable everyone to relax a little and allow for more experimentation and playfulness.
Regaining our sense of openness will be hard work: it flies in the face of some of our strongest and least healthy instincts as human beings. People find it difficult to assume good faith and to devolve power. We naturally put up walls and our brains fall into us-versus-them patterns. That’s normal. But we need to resist it. The Wikimedia projects are a triumph of human achievement, and they’re built on a belief that human beings are generally well-intentioned and want to help. We need to remember that and to behave consistently with it.
References
Discuss this story
For more info and discussion see User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive_93#Declining number of editors and donations. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:45, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I'm someone who started here in March 2010 and am still going quite strong here. It is my firm belief that the people who stay here are usually the people who take the time to make minor edits and read around the project pages to find something they enjoy. I started off by trying to remove the word "perished" from articles, and when I found myself enjoying it I started to branch out, eventually finding NPP. I did it quite voluntarily, but the vast majority of new users don't, and that's when they run into trouble. People who want to immediately do everything, be it trying to gain every possible userright, immediately try to set speed records as vandal fighters/NPPers, or write a brand new article, tend to get smacked down because there's no possible way they can use those tools/complete those tasks as effectively as is necessary, and as much as we want to be nice we can't mess around in those areas. As Sue says in the interview, we can't expect people to immediately become great editors; it'd be helpful to promote, for instance, WP:GOCE so editors can get a start doing something which won't run them into really severe trouble while simultaneously giving them a glimpse of just how diverse our topics are.
I also think we, the community, do understand our own dynamics better than the WMF does, and it'd be nice if the WMF acted on that premise. A look at the talkpage of New Page Triage (linked in the interview) and, dare I say, WT:IEP and WP:ACTRIAL, would indicate they're convinced they know what we need better than we do. New Page Triage will be helpful (at least to those of us who know what we're doing, which is a very small percentage of NPPers), but (the great majority of) the community rather clearly indicated what it wanted and thought was best for itself; alas, we're exactly where we were before that started. Not to say the WMF doesn't do a great deal of good work (indeed, without them I'm not typing this), but saying and doing are two different things; I'd like to see some more of the latter. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:21, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
• "#Editor base stabilized at 34,000 active editors".
Note to readers
As I noted last week, we accidentally spliced the publication of this issue - see last week's Opinion essay for "the other take."he he Cheers, ResMar 21:57, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've been using the word the wrong way all these years...thanks for the grammar lesson I guess. ResMar 03:35, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Schools/colleges banned Wikipedia in 2007
I agree the drastic decline in editors by mid-2007 does not follow patterns of normal population growth. Such drastic changes often indicate a key factor, such as a change in data-collection methods, or a massive societal change, such as a war, natural disaster, or government regulation. What happened in 2007? The closest factor seems to be a trendy movement among colleges and entire local schoolboards to ban use of Wikipedia in schools near the end of the 2007 summer break, and fewer returned for the 2007-2008 school year. To research this school-ban concept, I wrote an essay listing 18 major sources about the growing WP-ban from 2007:
• WP:Schools and colleges banned WP in 2007-2008
Because U.S. schools voluntarily adopted the WP-bans, the decline would not be as drastic as if a bizarre U.S. Federal law (would be from 2006) had censored WP use after 2007, and the U.S. Govt rarely passes drastic legislation. Instead, however, when the growing support for school-bans is coupled with the yearly pattern of school vacations in May/June, then the rapid decline is worsened by students leaving for vacation, and fewer students returning to use Wikipedia in September for the next school year (2007-2008).
There is still a drop in WP editors for May/June each year, but the number returning in September has steadied over the past 2 years. The feared "free-fall decline" has ended, and globally, there are more active editors now, but slight drops in enwiki or dewiki, while Swedish WP has been unchanged as a steady number in 2011. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:53, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Tossing the ball into the Foundation's court
As one of the two journalists involved in this story, I probably shouldn't comment; but please indulge me a little. What I say is just my personal take—not The Signpost's views or those of my co-author, Skomorokh, or anything Ms Gardner said aside from what we printed.
I think there's some truth in Erik Zachte's observation that there was always going to be flattening of the curve after the hype and after the project reached a certain level of maturity. Back in the early days, article quality and comprehensiveness were queasy, but we didn't care that much: a frontier mentality prevailed and we didn't have to compete quite so keenly for our reputation on the internet. Things started getting more serious from about 2005 onwards, and in the process, some articles that university lecturers might have once scoffed at gradually became better written than they themselves are capable of producing. We became more rule-bound (like all quality publications) and more demanding of all editors. In effect, we pulled away from "anyone can edit", and we should accept as inevitable that quality enforcement has made WP less "welcoming" to newcomers, many of whom lack the skills and patience to learn the patterns demanded of this cultural product. Openness and quality are thus pitted against each other in key respects, and although Ms Gardner points to causal connections between these phenomena, in other parts of the interview she acknowledges them as competing forces ("if we say that becoming an editor should be easy, really, that's a little delusional").
I find Ms Gardner's professionalism and dedication impressive. But the Foundation's great challenge is to engage more deeply with the editors of the Wikipedias; and by that I don't mean that their now massively increased numbers of employees should sit around passively browsing en.WP (which does happen a bit), but that a culture of actively communicating and empathising with the volunteers needs to run more deeply. One disappointing event last year was the WMF's vetoing of our community's decision to stop anon drive-by article creation; this would have required that newbies show that they're prepared to edit existing articles for just a little while before creating their first article. The WMF appears to see increases in article numbers as a highly significant metric of success, whereas a groundswell of en.WP editors know that committed long-term members come from newbies who are keen to improve articles, and are painfully aware that every stub-article created imposes large overheads on existing editors to reach a minimum level of utility for readers. Ms Gardner is aware of this "scut-work" problem, but I felt she didn't place it in this practical context.
We have reached a stage in our evolution in which we need a multi-pronged strategy to keep the labour-force growing, upskilling, and increasingly diverse. It's one thing for the Foundation to develop technical functionalities (although the visual editor does sound excellent); but we need from the WMF a commitment to partner with us in the following strategies:
Tony (talk) 14:38, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Editor base stabilized at 34,000 active editors
The drop in editors has ended: The October and November usage stats have confirmed, along with 3rd quarter editor counts, that the count of active editors has stabilized at nearly 34,000 active editors (>10 edits per month), since June 2011 (October: 35,028 editors). We had discussed this likely outcome, several months ago, that the "free fall" or "hemorrhaging" of editors was obviously ending, at a bottom-out count of 34,000 people who will always edit English Wikipedia each month. The usage data, for the past 6 months (June-Nov.) has confirmed this same pattern of editors staying: each month in 2011 is nearly 99% of the 2010 active-editor counts. See table:
Monthly counts: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
On average, people have stopped leaving: the count never drops below 34,000 active editors. That stability gives the WMF resource planners the controlled usage pattern they need to expect 34,000 active editors each month.
Who were those people who left? Well, along with active users who were edit-banned, about 3,000 "average editors" left in June 2010, and do not seem to have returned. I am suspecting that they were some groups of students who left in June 2010, but now the remaining 34,000 editors do not take "summer wikibreak" as others did in past years. The final core of 34,000 editors seem to work each month, regardless of the northern hemisphere summer-break period beginning in June. However, it could be that more students (or others) use home computers to continue editing Wikipedia when school ends (or on vacations).
Meanwhile, because some other-language Wikipedias are growing in active editors, such as Spanish Wikipedia, the total of all-language active Wikipedians has been growing, slightly, for the past 6 months (October: 80,630 active editors, all-languages). Anyway, the so-called "mass exit" of editors since 2007 has clearly ended. Tell the Foundation not to turn off the lights yet: those 34,000 editors intend to stay all year at the party! -Wikid77 11:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
More articles and page views, but less editors. Low quality of many articles
Editors are leaving for various reasons. Some editors are being driven away. See: User:Timeshifter/Unresolved content disputes
This article has been mentioned: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-26/Opinion essay. It also has a timeline chart of active editors over the years. See it on the right.
See Page Views for Wikimedia, All Projects, All Platforms, Normalizeds. The table has monthly page views for Wikipedia over years. It looks like the total monthly page views for all Wikimedia projects in all languages has almost doubled in around 4 years.
Here are fundraiser stats over the years: Fundraiser statistics - Wikimedia Foundation. Money can not buy editors, nor quality info on Wikipedia pages.
With more articles we need more editors to bring up the quality of the articles. Many articles need to be filled in, and need a higher level of quality info, charts, images, etc.. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:49, 10 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]