Dear Kerry,
Though the vast majority of my edits are precisely the sort of minor housekeeping edits
that you describe, I agree with almost all that you say. But would make three little
observations.
1 the solution to the edit conflict problem is to fix the software so we have fewer edit
conflicts. It wouldn't be a big change to have the software treat categories and
project tags as their own sections and not reject newbies edits as conflicts with the
taggers and the categorisers. When you are training newbies you can minimise these
problems by getting them to start articles in sandboxes and to create sections. But the
solution is to get a high priority for various low priority and won't fix bugs on
phabricator that would reduce edit conflicts. For the research community the big
opportunity is to do research on edit conflicts, if the research showed that they are as I
believe the biggest biter of good faith newbies then there is a good chance that some
programming resource could be allocated to them. If the research showed that they are not
significant and that projects like AFT, Visual Editor, liquid threads, flow and the media
wiki viewer really were a better investment for the WMF than reducing edit conflicts, then
I will be astonished, and the WMF somewhat vindicated.
2 don't take the "editors have been in decline since 2006/7" too seriously.
These are raw figures on edits, they don't take account of the edit filters which
during that era lost us most of our vandalism and with it the vandal reversion, vandal
warnings, aiv reports and block messages that were generated in response. Nor do they
allow for the migration to wikidata of things like intrawiki links. The truth is I'm
pretty sure no-one has meaningful figures for community size in that era.
3 project tagging even for currently dormant projects shouldn't cause edit conflicts
on articles as the tags go on talk pages. Whether project tagging has use or not depends
on your attitude about the health of the community. If we are experiencing uniform and
irreversible decline with a dwindling band of editors who aren't changing their
editing interests and no new recruits then I could see the argument that once a wiki
project has become moribund it won't revive. If however we are broadly stable but with
a steady in flow of new editors, then I would see dormant wiki projects as an opportunity
for newish editors to take on a role within the community. Again, somebody could earn a
doctorate studying this.
Regards
Jonathan
On 23 Jun 2015, at 22:44, Kerry Raymond
<kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Given what we that active editors have been declining since about 2006, I have to wonder
if a 2015 study would produce very different results from the earlier period.
From an entirely anecdotal perspective, I do observe that there is a lot of
“housekeeping” edits that go on. I create a lot of new articles and would characterise my
own editing as writing a lot of new content in new and existing articles; this is my
primary interest. However, I am both amused and annoyed at the way that within moments of
my edit, there can be a rash of people wanting to add project tags, add esoteric
categories that I cannot imagine being used for navigation by real readers, replace a dash
of one length with a dash of another length, remove the word “comprised” (one of the most
annoying!), and so on. Many of these folks have massive edit counts and appear (from a
quick look at the last screen of recent contributions) to devote themselves entirely to
this kind of editing. Indeed, I go so far as to say many suffer from editcountitis, a
condition that often can be diagnosed by the User page being largely devoted to reporting
on their number of edits J
IMHO, I would have to say that the value-add of these housekeeping edits is mixed. Some
are genuinely useful (people pick up mistakes I’ve made) or add categories I am unaware of
that are relevant to the topic. Some are useful if you happen to believe the reader
experience is genuinely improved by rigid adherence the Manual of Style (I would be
interested in a study on how important the consistency of the use of various-length dashes
and other MoS detail is to the reader experience). Some like project tagging appear to be
utterly pointless as most of the projects involved are moribund. Other than meeting some
deep need to “mark your territory” like a dog (or get your edit count up), what earthly
point is there to project tagging unless the project has some active processes to improve
articles? Some are just annoying (like the user who dislikes the word “comprised”) and
many of these people create edit conflicts for me as I add further content which is
****ing annoying. Edit conflicts is a particular problem trying to do your second/third
edit to a new article, as new articles attract housekeeping edits like vultures to a
carcass. The folks I particularly despise are the ones who try to add multiple quality
tags or speedy delete a new stub after its first edit (which is sometimes cut short
because I am interrupted – folks, give me 5 minutes please to come back and do a little
more work on it).
I teach Wikipedia editing (indeed I am off to a local university to do it this morning)
and I see first hand how this kind of housekeeping behaviour is really disruptive to new
contributors (even the more useful and well-intended housekeeping) because of the edit
conflicts it creates. New contributors spend a long time writing and previewing before
SAVE, which is probably a desirable behaviour if it wasn’t for the housekeepers. Whereas
anyone who studied my patterns of edits would see me saving very frequently, because of
this issue with edit conflicts from the housekeepers. I try to teach people to SAVE, SAVE,
SAVE as often as possible. Having seen the impact of edit conflicts in edit training
sessions where I am there to explain what’s happening, I suspect that housekeeping edits
are probably frightening off or frustrating away new contributors who don’t have someone
leaning over their shoulder to advise them on dealing with edit conflicts. Because it is
quick and easy to do a housekeeping edit and slow to write good content with citations,
the housekeepers can easily drive away a content contributor.
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan
Sent: Wednesday, 24 June 2015 3:24 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Aaron Swartz Hypothesis on WikipediaAuthorship
On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Finn Årup Nielsen <fn(a)imm.dtu.dk> wrote:
One interesting original study is this one: "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring
Value in Wikipedia" from 2007 by
Reid Priedhorsky and others.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1316624.1316663
Yes, this is the best study of which I'm aware.
- J
best regards
Finn Årup Nielsen
On 06/23/2015 04:46 PM, Krzysztof Gajewski wrote:
Hi all,
I wonder if you know if somebody verified and / or further researched
Aaron Swartz's thesis on structure of Wikipedia participation. You can
find it here:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Best,
Krzysztof Gajewski
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