Looking at writing and documentation practices in the business world, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon that is quite similar to what we’ve been observing on Wikipedia for quite a few years: just adding a little bit more restriction to a publication platform dramatically reduces contributors. Like, it’s a exponential relationship. Why is this? Writing, as a part of a person’s everyday workflow, is very sensitive to interruptions. In general, there aren’t very many people in any particular community who are have a disposition toward writing. Of the few who do, they tolerate very little interruption. Matter of fact, they have so little tolerance toward interruption in the writing process that they will flat out reject any platform that requires a review process. Nope, it doesn’t work. Zero tolerance toward review processes.
The ideal environment to get the most written information is a “dumb” slate: you write to the device, and it retains your writings without any question as to the political validity of the writings contained therein. As soon as you define a “process” for writers to follow through for approval, writers quickly change their mind to simply avoid the process in its entirety. Writers will aggressively switch to a different medium or platform as soon as restrictions start getting added. Again, remember that these are people who do not intend to be “professional” writers: writing is simply a part of their workflow to bringing other tasks to completion. Therefore, the overhead on concentrating on a publication process, following through on communications, and participating in the review process is too much wasted time to be worth it.
So, getting back to Wikipedia. We can see this exact same story clearly played out. Wikipedia started adding restrictions to combat vandalism, then contributor and article growth slowed down. Why did this have to happen? The motivations should be obvious: Wikipedia is a volunteer contributor encyclopedia. The mainstay source of Wikipedia’s information is that of “nonprofessional” writers: that is, people who are primarily interesting on working on a different task, say IT systems administration for example, but also want to build a useful information reference they can refer back to. Hence, Wikipedia historically played an extremely instrumental role in this regard. In particular, the collaborative community nature of Wikipedia was instrumental in making the site familar to the concept of user groups, a concept very familiar to those in the tech community to help with learning new technologies and problem solving.
Wikipedia’s lock-down actions nearly crushed this community. With the growth in power of super-admins and bots on Wikipedia and the bureaucracy they imposed, many contributors found that it was non-productive to stay on the site and just left. Remember, productivity here is being measured in terms of working on a different task and using Wikipedia as a tool to help accomplish the primary task. By far, the biggest problem of super-admins and bots is that they tend to focus on the system as “an end in itself” rather than a means to an end: rather than thinking the system is something that is merely in the way of achieving another goal, they think that the system is the goal in itself. (Bots are the ultimate manifestation of bureaucracy, as their goals being the system in itself are in fact one-in-the-same.)
However, this community of tech subject contributors hasn’t completely vanished from Wikipedia. Some of the senior members, who started early in this community are still around Wikipedia. Theses are also people who, naturally, worked with older technologies of times past, so they have knowledge to write about those subjects. By contrast, the biggest hit was taken on the junior members. The junior members have an interesting demographics compared to the senior members: whereas both groups work with similar technologies in the present, the junior members have no memory of the older technologies of times past. For them, their only knowledge for writing articles can be on the latest technologies. The point in hand here is that the cut-off of junior members has resulted in distinctively skewed content on Wikipedia in the tech sector: newer technologies are less represented than expected. Unfortunately for the case of Wikipedia, this sets it off in a serious spiral decline: senior members will be almost exclusively interested in learning about the newer technology, but junior members are not there to add information on it. This in turn demotivates even the senior members from continuing to contribute, which thus causes the spiral decline.