Kerry,
I like this a lot except for one small, but critical, distinction. I want
to get your take on it (yours specifically, in this case, because of your
background and the thought you've put into this issue).
I think that explicitly forbidding newcomers from performing certain kinds
of actions, or editing certain pages, is a mistake. This was a mistake with
ACTRIAL, and it would be a mistake with any other newcomer quality-control
or harm-mitigation strategies--however well intentioned.
It's a mistake for two reasons, First, it runs counter to the spirit of
Wikipedia. Wikipedia has become more 'closed' over time in both formal and
informal ways. This is a common patterns for social movements as well as
organizations--it's not unexpected, and to a certain extent it may be
necessary, but in *Wikipedia's *case it directly violates the fundamental
values and goals of the project. That means creeping bureaucracy and
"in-group" mentalities are inherently more damaging to Wikipedia than it
would be to, say, Microsoft, or Facebook, or even Stackexchange.
Second, being explicitly denied the opportunity to make particular kinds of
contributions (as opposed to being nudged towards other options, explained
to why something is a bad idea, or shown the likely outcomes of certain
actions) is an even bigger motivation-killer, long term, than having bad
experiences due to stumbling onto the "freeway" (nice metaphor!).
Especially considering that both the current EnWiki community and the
current content embed major biases and gaps, we can't afford to make it
harder for the new people who have the expertise, the perspective, and the
passion to correct those biases and fill those gaps from participating as
full-fledged members of the community. Full stop. You can't have higher
walls and easier quality control, but you can't have higher walls and
higher newcomer retention (or diversity).
Wikipedia (esp. EnWiki) has basically two options at this point, with maybe
some narrow-ish middle ways between them:
1. Continue to make it harder and harder for new people to contribute,
through political and technological means, thus preserving the current
content to a great degree, but diminishing the relevance of the project as
a whole as it becomes increasingly incomplete, out of date, and limited in
scope.
2. Try to make it easy as possible for newcomers (with their new knowledge,
sometimes different values, and yes, sometimes *mixed motivations*) to
contribute, and try to make the project feel as exciting for them as it was
for people who joined in 2004; accept that taking this track will lead to a
degree of vandalism and COI (although probably not different in scale than
current or historical levels), and invest heavily in algorithmic quality
control, streamlined onboarding and socialization, diversity-friendly
policy change, expansive and public offline initiatives, and all the other
"suite" of methods intended to scale the ability of the current community
to handle additional growth and diversity in content and contributors.
#1 involves no great risk to the "community" besides gradual obsolescence;
Wikipedia will go the way of many other social institutions that failed to
adapt. But it will do so slowly, and continue to provide value in the
process. It just won't ever be the world's encyclopedia.
#2 involves risk because the intention behind it is that the community will
look different, the content will look different, the mechanisms for
contributing will look different, and the policies will look different in
10 years vs. today. But it is the only shot at continuing to meaningfully
pursue the original mission at this point. I personally would love to see
this happen--as a contributor, as a scholar, as a world citizen who
believes in Wikipedia--but it involves risk because it means that people
who have power will need to give it up. That's never easy.
(Opinions my own, not those of WMF)
- J
On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 1:54 AM Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Stripping out a long email trail ...
I am not advocating lowering the BLP bar as there are genuine legal needs
to prevent libel.
What I am advocating is not letting new users do their first edits in
“high risk” articles. When I do training, I pick exercises for the group
which deliberately take place in quiet backwaters of Wikipedia, eg add
schools to local suburb articles. Such articles have low readership and low
levels of watchers and no BLP considerations, i.e. low risk articles. If
the newbie first edit is a bit of a mess, probably no reader will see it
before it is fixed by a subsequent edit. They will be able to get help from
me to fix it before anyone is harmed by it and before anyone reverts them.
The “organic” newbie can dive into any article. It would be a very
interesting research question to look at reverts and see if we can develop
risk models that predict which articles are at higher risks of reverted
edits (e.g. quality rating, length, type of article eg BLP, level of
readership, number of active watchers, etc) and there might be separate
models specifically for newbies revert risk and female newbie revert risk.
Or we just simply calculate the proportion of reverted edits and just use
declare anything over some threshold as “high risk” and not bother finding
out what the article characteristics are. We could also calculate what is
the newbie revert rate.
Then we have something actionable. We could treat the high risk articles
(by predictive model or straight stats) as semi-protected and divert
newbies from making direct edits. Or at least warn them before letting them
loose. For that matter, warn any user if they are entering into a high
conflict zone.
When you learn to drive a car, you normally start in the quiet streets,
not a busy high speed freeway, not narrow winding roads without guard rails
up a mountain. Why shouldn’t we take the same attitude to Wikipedia? Start
where it is safe.
Kerry
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Jonathan T. Morgan
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