On 21 Feb 2017, at 8:33 am, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kerry,
Thanks for the ideas. Jonathan Morgan, Aaron Halfaker, and I have had more than one
conversation about wikiprojects as a way to engage with new editors. Unfortunately, there
are a lot of derelict wikiprojects.
I have some ideas about how to improve the training system for ENWP and Commons in
particular. But that's different from the motivation issue, which I think is more
challenging. With enough money and time, the training system can be upgraded. I'm not
sure if the same is true for motivation. I have the impression that student Wikimedians
are mostly motivated by grades (hence the precipitous decline in their participation after
their Wikipedia Education Program class ends), and many other people are motivated by
money or PR (hence we get a lot of people engaging in promotionalism or PR management.)
It's not clear to me how someone goes from being wiki-curious to feeling motivated
enough to contribute for years. There are many other hobbies that are lower stress,
healthier, offer more opportunities for socializing, and offer a friendlier environment. I
think that some Wikimedians are motivated by desire to promote or share their interest in
a particular topic, which might keep content creators interested and engaged for years,
particularly if they meet people with similar interests. But it's a phase change to go
from being a content creator or curator, to taking on roles that benefit other individual
Wikimedians, or broad cross-sections of the Wikimedia community. We could use all of those
kinds of good-faith long-term contributors.
Perhaps we should include information in our training about "career paths" for
Wikimedians who would like to develop their skills and/or move into new roles?
I'm not sure what else to suggest. I find it challenging to figure out how to
motivate people to want to contribute productively for years, and there are some roles for
which lengthy experience is an informal but significant prerequisite for acceptance and/or
success. I'd like to see more people make that journey.
Pine
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 2:10 PM, Kerry Raymond
<kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Pine,
It sounds to me that there are two separate parts to your question.
One relates to the survival of such editors to being ongoing active editors. The second
seems to relate to recruiting them and perhaps upskilling them for specific purposes, eg
administration, guild of copy editors, and whatever initiatives you have in mind.
The first question probably relates to being able to get them better informed about the
policies of Wikipedia at least in relation to the area of their contributions and how to
engage with the community because it is the abrasive interaction with the community that
seems to drive people away.
The second probably relates to raising awareness of WikiProjects and other collaborative
initiatives. (Obviously all of WP is collaborative, but some things require higher levels
of coordination and I think this might be what you are referring to). I think probably
needs some analysis of the nature of their contributions and/or their topics of interest
in order to introduce them to targetted WikiProjects etc that seem logical trajectories
for them. The mistake we make constantly in onboarding newbies is overwhelming them with
information (think of the standard Twinkle welcome templates) because "THEY NEED TO
KNOW THIS" instead of what they want to know "how do I do this current thing I
am trying to do". For similar reasons I think any attempts to draw them into
particular projects/initiatives should be highly targeted, not too frequent, and based on
what their interests seem to be rather where someone else would like them to work. (I
think we should avoid the mindset of "I need to recruit some cannon fodder").
Having got their attention, someone probably has to hold their hand through whatever
upskilling is needed to get them productive. Just pointing people at a Project page
isn't helpful, there needs to be some human outreach and shepherding.
In some idealised universe, we should see Wikipedians as being on a learning journey,
where (through analysis of past contributions and interactions) we are tracking them
against a series of learning objectives (as we do with coursework curriculum "they
have passed this unit, let's offer them some new units that build on that"). So,
using newbies as an example, we look for some threshold of surviving-edits that
demonstrate skills like "add text", "format text", "add list
element", "make links", "make piped links", "add
citation", "add templated citations", "use a template",
"edit an infobox", "add an infobox", write on their talk page, write
on an article talk page, write on another user's talk page, add to their own user
page, etc. The idea being to suggest as various competencies are attained how to add a new
skill to their repertoire. Once they have acquired the basic how-to skills, we could look
at the suggestions of where they might apply these skills and how to specialise their
skills in various ways.
Kerry
Sent from my iPad
On 21 Feb 2017, at 2:49 am, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Research-l,
A human resources problem that I am experiencing is a shortage of human resources of
community members who are willing, available, and have the skills to work on a variety of
useful initiatives. Is anyone on this list aware of research that talks about motivations
of long-term contributors? In particular, I'd be interested in research that suggests
ways to convert productive, relatively new editors (say, 50-500 edits) into long-term
community members who are likely to develop into long-term, productive Wikimedians.
Thanks,
Pine
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