Excited to share this new blog post on my research: https://blog.communitydata.cc/revisiting-the-rise-and-decline/
The pool of active contributors to Wikipedia started declining in 2007. Researchers blamed a calcifying bureaucracy and hostility to newcomers. Are these problems in other wiki communities too? Could there be a deeper reason why these dynamics emerge?
I replicated Halfaker et al 2013's analysis of 'The rise and decline.' The dynamics observed in Wikipedia appear to reoccur again and again in many wiki communities.
@groceryheist seems to be a characteristic of most if not all organisational forms, judging from my limited and subjective experiences...
Yes. No one is surprised when authority exists in a top-down organization. But when this first started happening on Wikipedia people acted surprised that radical openness, consensus, and cooperation could give rise to and co-exist with powerful enacted social structures.
However, the fact that these structures arise is a problem and a mystery when we think about commonsbased and cooperative production.
@groceryheist @ofehrmedia In the case of Wikipedia, did not structure self-elucidate and stiffen in reaction to troll editing? The first page to be locked was that for Jesus, IIRC. I'm reminded of ostensibly democratic regimes in the MidEast throwing up their hands and chucking elections at the prospect of Islamist-extremist-favoring majorities. It's a conundrum.
@risabee @ofehrmedia Yes the growth in policy and tools on Wikipedia was in large part a response to high visibility and vandalism. Part of the rationale for replicating the analysis on Wikia wikis is that they don't face those issues to the same extent.
Yet we see the broad strokes of the Wikipedia 'rise and decline' narrative: policies become entrenched, newcomer contributions get rejected, and newcomers are less likely to survive over time.
@groceryheist could you comment on how the plot in the blog post (wiki age vs normalized active editors) shows such a *mild* rise-and-decline pattern, from an initial 1.1 to a peak of 1.8, before a collapse to—well, I guess the plot is cut off, but just considering the rise-and-peak part, this seems very mild compared to the *exponential* growth we see in the big Wikipedias, then a top, followed by a gentler exponential decline.
The attached plot is on a *log* scale.
@groceryheist @risabee Ah, I'm reading your paper finally and you answer exactly this question :) sorry for not reading before commenting!
@22 @risabee Thank you so much for reading the paper!