If anyone was wondering, I was not confusing power law with power dynamics, but Jan's
original question talked about community health, redistribution of power and things like
training, user friendliness and documentation as strategies, so I assumed power dynamics
were in play in the conversation.
The power in Wikipedia is held by administrators and other functionaries, the loudest and
most persistent (and most willing to canvass openly or off-wiki) in consensus building
and, as I have already argued, in the latitude given to the *mass* of very occasional
contributors (whether good faith or bad faith) to do bad or low quality edits which others
have to deal with.
If you redefine power in other ways, such as impact (or influence) on readers (those who
we serve), then of course the more active users do have the *potential* for that power
provided their contributions are made to creating/expanding content rather than fiddling
with existing content (most edits are "fiddling"). An occasional contributor has
much more limited power wrt to impacting/influence the reader (probably disproportionately
lower that their number of edits would suggest as they are more likely to be reverted).
But equally not all very active editors get to shape the reader view. If you look at the
activities of the top editors by edit count, they tend to do a lot of very repetitive and
arguably more administratively-focused edits with the reorganisation of category system
being a major activity. Studies of readers show they don't look much beyond the
References and hence aren't looking at the categories so if power is about reader
impact/influence, then this group have very little power relative to their number of
contributions.
If we talk about community health in Wikipedia (specifically English Wikipedia), we all
know it's a massive problem and somewhat independent of power (by any definition).
It's an abrasive environment with far more criticism than praise/appreciation across
the board. Active contributors regularly burn-outand dealing with "the
community" is often given as a reason. While there is always one final issue that is
the straw that breaks the camel's back, it's rarely just about that issue but a
level of frustration that develops over a long time. Good faith newcomers get turned off
by bad initial experiences. Unfortunately this group mean well but often make bad edits. I
do outreach to new good-faith contributors in my topic space, but it is a WikiProject
Australia message delivered by Twinkle (nobody has time to write personal messages to new
contributors each day) but I do try to ask them where they got their information from
(failure to cite being a big problem with this group) but rarely do they reply or make
further edits.
Jan mentioned training. I also do outreach which is mostly face-to-face edit training and
supporting editathons (generally working with a library or university as the partner
organisation) so I do a lot of work with new users in face-to-face situations, but for all
my efforts (for which the feedback is always very positive), these new users rarely
contribute again after these sessions and this experience is common to most people doing
outreach work, leading to the belief that "Wikipedians are born not made". There
are efforts already taking place to provide online training or on-boarding systems
(currently being trialled in some other language Wikipedias) but, even if shown to be
effective, I don't think there is much likelihood of mandating any of such things on
English Wikipedia with its strong libertarian ideology and most new users are "on a
mission" to make a particular change/addition to an article. I don't think most
of them will voluntarily do some kind of training or on-boarding first (people on a
mission are not easy to deflect in general). I like to believe training in some forms
helps individuals but at that end of the power graph the effort/return on individuals is
poor. To work with that mass of folk it must be scalable and that tends to rule out
anything personal (like a buddy system).
As to user friendliness, there isn't a lot of it on Wikipedia. I recollect someone did
a study to see if welcome messages helped improve newcomer retention and found they
didn't. Indeed our watchlist/welcome system can easily be perceived by new users as
stalking. While a welcome message is intended to be encouraging, it does at the same time
send the message "I am watching you" which has been described by some new users
who receive welcome messages during my training sessions as "creepy". As someone
who sends such messages (via Twinkle, there aren't the hours in the day to welcome new
users in a more personal way), some of the responses are "creepy" (clearly they
looked at my user account and knew I was a woman and felt it was OK to make some
inappropriate remark). There are friendships of course between some users, but you
don't come to Wikipedia to make friends (join Facebook). To survive I think you either
have to be pretty committed to free knowledge (strong mission alignment) or it rewards in
some other way (stroking your ego through edit-count-itis, admin power over others, get to
push your POV).
As to documentation, well, ours isn't great. It's hard to find and full of jargon
and assumes you know wiki text. And people on a mission won't stop to read it anyway.
And frankly as much as I don't like it, I believe my time is better spent researching
and writing content than fixing the documentation. Wikipedia is a moving target for
documentation in any case as the underlying software is in constant evolution as are
various tools, templates, and other things contributors use.
So I think we don't have a healthy community but whether that's related to the
power law graph, I am far less convinced. There are a number of quite deliberate choices
made on en.WP that create and perpetuate our problems and the community is highly
resistant to experiment with these choices. This suggests to me that there are people who
get benefit from the current structures, possibly those who are nicknamed the
Unblockables, a name that suggests a power dynamic in play!
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Pine W
Sent: Thursday, 23 January 2020 2:22 PM
To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:
Hi Jan,
I think that we may have given you a lot more than you had in mind when you asked your
question. I'm aware that you were thinking of "power law" in a way that can
be very different than "power dynamics", but I have the latter more on my mind,
partially because of recent discussions on Wikimedia-l related to strategy.
I remain interested in knowing what the goal of your research is.
I'll be busy with non-Wikimedia activities for the next few days, but I'll try to
get back to the Wikiverse by this Saturday. If you don't hear back from me after about
two weeks then please feel free to email me off list if you'd like me to follow up. In
the meantime, Kerry and other capable people may be able to help with any further
questions regarding your research interests.
Best wishes,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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