[toomuchtodo]

Excuse my sloppy comment. Lila did a terrible job, but Sue was running Wikimedia while there was a slow decline in editors since the mid 00s. Having donated to Wikimedia previously, I no longer do, because senior leadership (across "administrations") is more concerned with issues completely disconnected from their core role ("To unlock the world's knowledge"). Those dollars go to the Internet Archive now (which stores copies of Wikipedia distinct from Wikimedia's control).

Non profit dollars are hard to come by, and the greater issue and frustration is watching orgs like Mozilla and Wikimedia incinerate them on causes that are not their mission (in stark contrast to efficient, nimble orgs like Let's Encrypt and the Free Law Project).

[bawolff]

There is some research to suggest that (en) wikipedia's growth pattern (a peak followed by slow decline as beurocracy becomes ossified) is common in similar projects. So maybe they didn't do anything wrong they just failed to fix it. That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

[wombatmobile]

> i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

How was this problem presented and discussed inside of WMF?

As an editor, I had an opportunity to discuss it with Sue Gardner at a meet up with other editors. The feedback from other editors was so strong, I'm baffled that WMF couldn't address it.

Although, I understood from Sue that WMF's role was only as a software company that made tools. She said quite clearly that the editor community ran itself.

But if dwindling editor participation is an existential threat, surely that's a core WMF problem? I'm curious what this looked like from inside WMF.

[toomuchtodo]

> That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

Pay them? Tens of millions of dollars in donations, what's the excuse not to?

[bawolff]

So there are roughly 150,000 active editors ( hard to get good numbers cross language/project https://wikistats.wmcloud.org/wikimedias_html.php?s=ausers_d... but if you sum you double count people active in multiple which is common).

WMF had 104 million in revenue in 2018. Even if you could give all of that to contributors, no administrative fees, no money to buy servers, no developers, no bank fees, etc (highly unrealistic), you would only be able to give rmeach person $690. That hardly seems like enough to actually get people to edit wikipedia as a job.

There's also plenty of articles on the internet about how introducing money into volunteer projects can very easily cause the project to collapse and have unexpected side effects.