Benutzer:Fthobe/discussioncommunity
Name of the area of concern
Description of the problem
Two days ago I started my first own content page of a musician Takahiro Yoshikawa after years of editing a typo here and there and adding some references. Within two days I was showered with:
- Conflict of Interest Accusations
- Page Cancellation warnings
While my article hit three of the requirements of WP:MUSICBIO, it was defined by all authors voting on the deletion page of the article as not relevant enough and it looks like I will loose the vote and that's fine for me. While I don't share that opinion and find it frustrating writing a page to have it cancelled, it's not primary concern.
The concerns I have are following:
- The current documentation is for new users overwhelming and too complicated. Even with basic understanding of HTML it's not easy understand where what kind of comment goes.
- Established Authors range in their behaviour from immensely helpful to simply accusing anybody of making paid content on Wikipedia and I find a behavioural pattern of accusing people by default worrysome.
- The current development of unique clients visiting wikipedia (growing) and quantity of active authors (contracting) indicates that the current community is not successful in attracting new authors.
- The current development of articles (growing) and page views (not growing) indicates that what is perceived relevant by authors, is not perceived relevant by readers.
Analysis of the problem
Development of Content and Pageviews proof an issue with the relevance vetting process of new pages
As you can see in the chart above there is a continuos but not exponential growth of articles. Theoretically, if new articles would be vetted successfully for relevance the overall traffic would increase to a certain degree together with the Page Views as new pages (content articles) would cover a broader spectrum of questions and result in more traffic coming from Google. The fact that it doesn't can point to three very different explanations:
- The content currently created is not relevant
- Organic traffic is falling and overall relevance of Wikipedia is falling
- Wikipedia has reached the maximum of page views archivable due to having achieved a critical mass of users across all regions and language areas that can not be increased anymore
Let's assume for a second that the last option is not very probable given the current growth of articles across many smaller language sections. It's also very difficult to argue point two as Wikipedia is arguably the most relevant page on the web regarding search engine authority. I really believe that the overall selection process of new content is significantly flawed and that many articles that can argued as relevant are dismissed for three reasons:
- Established authors struggle to recognize reputable sources outside their primary language area
- As a consequence established authors prefer to defer an article of interest rather than permitting it as they perceive relevant sources as irrelevant due to not knowing them
- New authors are not helped enough to write new pages and instead of receiving help are majorly attacked and dismissed
In my case multiple sources of national relevance have been voted as not sufficient, the sources included
- Italy's largest Newspaper
- The Japanese public broadcasting company
- A review of one the leading American magazines for classical music
- Italy's 4th largest newspaper
Not only this, in the turn of the discussion in which I replied via comment to votes on the deletion of the page I was accused of harassing other users.
Possible solutions
This section is for proposing solutions only. Critical evaluation of these proposals should take place in the Discussion section below, and wait until we have a good number (5–10) of proposals. The first priority is to compile as many ideas as possible. Add your own ideas, and feel free to improve and build upon the ideas of others.
Modify an existing policy or process
Propose a new policy or process
Discussion of the proposed solutions
Please withhold criticism of the proposed solutions until there is a good number of proposals. If you feel that one of the proposals above has a shortcoming, build on the proposal and propose an amended version of it that avoids the shortcoming. Once a sufficient number of proposals have been made (usually 5–10), discuss and evaluate the proposals in this section.