on 7/26/09 9:47 PM, Brian at brian.min...@colorado.edu wrote: > These are some excellent mailing list and Wikipedia stats that Erik has > cooked up/refreshed, although kind of a pain to do meta-analysis on. You can > however paste the html tables into OpenOffice Calc which is nice (after some > serious complaints from your cpu!). The csv format was not very fun. > > http://www.infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/ScanMail/ > http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm > > I notice that the 364 power posters (posters with more than 200 emails > across all lists) account for 312569 / 458349 ~= 70% of all mailing list > posts. Also, 164 of these power posters account for 46579 / 52201 ~= 90% of > all posts to foundation-l. I denote this subclass of power posters uber > posters. Combined with the project statistics we have (I realize this is > somewhat arbitrary, but still quite interesting in my view): > > 1 benevolent dictator, 7 board members, 27 foundation employees, 164 uber > posters, 364 power posters, 635 wikimania attendees, 12927 very active > wikipedians, 91067 active wikipedians, 744752 monthly wikipedians and 928022 > total wikipedians. > > There are many other interesting numbers you could include. I couldn't find > the total number of mailing list contributors and only an admin with access > to all lists could give us the total number of subscribers. We could also > compare the number of sysops etc.. across all wikis in addition to the total > number of visitors and especially donors. > > The most interesting part of this data to me is the power posters and uber > posters. It would take a careful analysis of the anatomy of a decision to > draw any conclusions from it. For example, you would need to draw links > between conversations on the lists, conversations on the wiki and > conversations in person to know how many people actually contribute to a > decision, and it would be interesting to see the average number of > contributors to decisions weighted by the importance of that decision, > further scaled by other factors. My feeling though is that a relatively > small number of uber posters act as voices that are representative (in the > eyes of the foundation) of the much larger number of contributors across the > projects (these data are largely specific to Wikipedia), and that foundation > staff then make an assessment of consensus based largely on the opinions of > foundation staff which has been informed by whatever conversations happened > to occur on list. > > It is hard for someone to be everywhere all at once given the astronomically > large number of places that one can hold a conversation across all WMF > hosted media and I know that some foundation staff are excellent at > patrolling and knowing absolutely everything about places such as meta and > the english wikipedia and that many important conversations happen in person > that most of us never hear about. </endrunon> All that said, I continue to > worry that our benevolent dictator, board members, foundation employees, > power posters, uber posters and wikimania attendees are not very > representative of the the community at large. Part of the problem is that we > have almost no way of measuring that. Even if the community only included > everyone up to wikimania attendees it would appear that only a tiny fraction > of contributors account for all of the decision making. When we include all > contributors we see an awesome consolidation of power. > > To put it simply, I am not very happy with this consolidation. I would like > to see the foundation use technology to bring more of these contributors > into its fold and involve them in the decision making process. We can use > technology to increase the signal to noise ratio while simultaneously > improving the quality of decisions and finding alternate and optimal > solutions that would only occur to less than 1 person in a thousand. As it > stands, those solutions are not being found. As the foundation continues to > bring in employees it gains more and more power and takes it away from the > community. That's my view at least. I would like to drastically reverse that > trend so that there is no consolidation - so that it is easy (and indeed, > beneficial for us all) for anyone who wants to be involved in whatever > decision to get involved and make a difference. Starting mailing list > threads just doesn't seem like it. I also note that the mailing lists have > been on the decline since June of 2006. > > /Brian
Thank you for this excellent work and analysis, Brian. I, too, am concerned about the consolidation of power; because it is power groups such as this that set the values, direction, and very tone of a project community's culture. Marc Riddell _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
