Dear Wikipedia contributors,
In the past few weeks, I have reached out to this community on
numerous occasions,
requesting help with my undergraduate honors thesis, which examines
Wikipedians’ motivations to contribute. For anyone who would like more
information about this project, a detailed description can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Motivations_to_Contribute_to_Wikipe…
.
In my last email, I mentioned that I hoped to attain a sample size of at
least 100 Wikipedians, but had only received 52 responses. I am ecstatic to
report that I now have 82 responses – just 18 responses short of the
targeted sample size. If you have not taken the
questionnaire<https://us1.us.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8ixU9RkozemzC4s>,
please consider donating approximately five minutes of your time to
complete it.
I am so grateful for the Wikipedia community’s support in this project and
will make a final draft of the paper available to the community.
If you have any questions or concerns about this study, please contact
Audrey Abeyta at audrey.abeyta(a)gmail.com.
Thank you in advance for your participation!
Audrey
UC Santa Barbara | Department of Communication
audrey.abeyta(a)gmail.com
>
> Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:02:29 +0200
> From: Thomas Goldammer <thogol(a)googlemail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission
> Message-ID:
> <CAL0e-KVCetcaaKNQuiSwX5ckBnxqw=9_6vhkdj988yPz3wDwEA(a)mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> > You can clearly document the process that you follow. You can publish
> > metrics like those Lodewijk suggested (and actual numbers, not just
> > guesses). It would be nice to have a page on meta that says how many
> > cases are currently at each point in the process and is kept
> > up-to-date.
>
> You just volunteered to set up such a page on Meta (for 2012, I mean).
> I already described the process we use, so this should be possible for
> you to do. Thanks.
>
I thought Thomas's requests and suggestions in this case were quite valid
and reasonable, and they did not deserve such a condescending and
passive-aggressive response.
I'm sure you're all very busy but that's no excuse for not continually
striving for a higher standard of transparency and accountability (within
the obvious restrictions that your work imposes).
Regards,
Craig Franklin
Here's a thoughtful suggestion on this topic from a journalist who emailed me today about our editor engagement challenges at Wikipedia.
I generally agree with his observations that Wikipedia needs to be more social. And one of the ways we can do this is to encourage more positive feedback for editors, both from within Wikipedia -- and from the broader community outside Wikipedia.
To be continued ...
Fabrice
______________________
Subject: Re: GIFT ECONOMY -- suggestion for Fabrice
Here's my 2-cent suggestion for Wikimedia:
The value that a user gets in making gratis contributions to any site
including Wikipedia is in the feedback from your fellow users. No feedback,
or negative feedback, and you don't hang around.
...
On Wikipedia, there is very little in the way of positive feedback if you
do something good, and a ton of negative feedback for everything from a
style/format error to those "this article needs more whatever" boxes. Yes,
those things are necessary to maintaining quality, but if you contribute
content (which I've only done a little of) they wear you down. It's like
being in a course where the professor fills your papers with criticism and
never once says, "good job".
So I think the answer is that Wikipedia needs to be more social. It needs a
different kind of moderation. And it needs more mechanisms for positive
feedback.
__________________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager,
Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6827 work
fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
On Apr 22, 2012, at 2:51 PM, wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:34:34 -0700
> From: Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
> Message-ID:
> <CAAUQgdCH9wAurhERb_Yb1KvbY2g1oSb20bCaKMV_DSMLfMOYaw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Just to chip in here; Privacy, with *any* feature we introduce, is a top
> priority. When Product Development was coming out with the features
> engineering plan, anything that looked like it could screw with individual
> privacy was very, very quickly nipped in the bud.
>
> Now, if by "social" you mean "features purely dedicated to
> recreational/sharing activities", the answer is no: we're not currently
> planning any. From my (personal) perspective, it is very very hard to do
> these things and integrate into other services without putting our users at
> risk. And putting our users at risk is not what we're about. We're not
> doing what Facebook does because we're *not Facebook*.
>
> If, on the other hand, you just mean "features to promote greater
> communication and networking between editors", that's a clear priority -
> I'm happy to talk to people about the work we're doing, and to hear any
> suggestions along the way :).
>
> On 21 April 2012 21:52, Mono <monomium(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Tom, has a reputable news source actually verified this? Even Wikipedia
>> editors know that HuffPost isn't reliable...
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 16 April 2012 18:41, Jan Ku?era <kozuch82(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi there,
>>>>
>>>> how do we want to work on editor retention if we lack social features
>> at
>>> all???
>>>>
>>>> These go in the right direction:
>>>> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Improving_our_platform
>>>> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_features
>>>>
>>>> Is WMF going to act finally???
>>>>
>>>
>>> Only with community approval. On English Wikipedia, we have discussed
>>> social media/social network integration repeatedly. Share This buttons
>>> and so on. And editors don't want it.
>>>
>>> See
>>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PEREN#Share_pages_on_Facebook.2C_Tw…
>>> .
>>>
>>> English Wikinews already has some, but there's a much smaller
>>> community there who can decide which services we wish to integrate
>>> with.
>>>
>>> If we're going to have social "features" (and I use that word with
>>> deliberate scare quotes around it) mandated by the Foundation, I do
>>> hope we are going to worry about privacy. A former co-worker of mine
>>> discovered that NHS Direct, the health information website provided
>>> the UK's National Health Service, had Facebook share this links that
>>> were transmitting every page you went to on NHS Direct to Facebook,
>>> which could be matched to your Facebook profile if you are logged in.
>>> Which is kind of shocking given that people use NHS Direct to look up
>>> information on health conditions they think they might have, as well
>>> as all sorts of other personal issues (sexual health, gender identity,
>>> advice on fixing lifestyle health issues like smoking and drinking). I
>>> wouldn't want the clickstream of people visiting Wikipedia articles
>>> shared on Facebook without them pretty explicitly choosing to share
>>> that information. We've already seen one kid in Britain who has
>>> allegedly been thrown out of his house by fundamentalist parents after
>>> Facebook algorithmically outed him as gay. [1]
>>>
>>> I do also hope we'd decide on what basis we'd choose these social
>>> services. Okay, yes, Facebook is pretty popular in the West. And
>>> Twitter. And maybe G+. But what about in China: do we want to support
>>> sharing to sites that are being censored by the Chinese government?
>>> Does the Foundation have the expertise to know what the popular social
>>> networking sites are in every country and language in the world? And
>>> we'd then become a commercial player: if we had done this years ago
>>> and had added MySpace integration, the moment MySpace stops being so
>>> popular and Wikipedia (whether that's the community or the Foundation)
>>> de-emphasizes the MySpace sharing/social functionality, there'd be a
>>> big stack of headlines about how Wikipedia is pulling out of MySpace.
>>> We really ought to be neutral in this market, and there's only one way
>>> to be neutral: try as hard as possible not to participate.
>>>
>>> You know, there might be an easier solution here: people who are into
>>> the whole social networking thing, their browsers ought to improve
>>> sharing with their social networks. Social plugins for browsers like
>>> Firefox and Chrome are opt-in for the user, and can give a better
>>> experience than Wikipedia pages being turned into NASCAR-esque branded
>>> adverts for dozens of social sites. I know Mozilla people have been
>>> discussing coming up with better ways of doing social sharing at the
>>> browser level.
>>>
>>> [1]
>>>
>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/11/facebook-targeted-advertising-gay-…
>>>
>>> --
>>> Tom Morris
>>> <http://tommorris.org/>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>>> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikimedia-l mailing list
>> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Oliver Keyes
> Community Liaison, Product Development
> Wikimedia Foundation
Hi everyone!
I will be holding the next round of Wikidata office hours next week.
You're all invited to ask questions and discuss. If you can't attend
there will be logs.
* 30. April, English, 12:00 UTC (see
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=12&min=00&sec=0&d…
for different time zones)
* 30. April, German, 4:30pm UTC (see
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=16&min=30&sec=0&d…
for different time zones)
They will happen in #wikimedia-wikidata on freenode.
My (virtual) door is open outside these office hours as well of course ;-)
Cheers
Lydia
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Obentrautstr. 72
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
My message is inspired by discussion in this thread
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Loss_o…)
on Englush Wikipedia. Whereas the thread itself is not relevant to this
list, and the points get re-iterated on a regular basis, there were
statements made there which contain quantitative estimates (for instance
that 90% established users who leave do it because they get a new job or
have their external life changed in some other way, and not because of
harassment etc). Most probably these numbers are not really justified,
but then I wanted to know what real numbers are. I am an Rcom member,
but I can not recollect such research being accomplished (I might be
wrong of course). I could not find data easily either (I spent half an
hour because I remembered we had a Community Health initiative group
which somehow evolved into the Movement Roles, but the Movement Roles
pages on Meta do not talk about community health at all, and I could not
even find an appropriate page to ask the question).
After this long introduction, does somebody know / can point out the
answers to the questions:
1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the
one with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years,
but I am pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it
depend on the number of contributions?
2. What are the main reasons why these editors stop editing? Is this
correct, for instance, that external reasons are much more important
than internal (on-wiki troubles and wiki-related harassment) reasons?
The same for say those above 10000 edits?
Thanks in advance
Cheers
Yaroslav
Hi everyone,
I thought that participants on this list might like to know that the April “Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting” will be Monday, April 23, at 20:00 UTC / 13:00 (1 pm) PST.
The meeting should be under one hour long and will happen over Webex.
Information is at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program_Metrics_and… including notes from past meetings and information on how to get into the Webex meeting.
I’ll be chairing the April meeting. Several WMF staff will be present.
Agenda:
* Welcome
* Country updates: U.S., Canada, Egypt, Brazil, and possibly others
* U.S./Canada student survey results from fall 2010
* Working Group information
* Q&A
For those who haven’t heard about the new Working Group, you can find more info about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group. A good place for questions about the Working Group appears to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Education_Working_Group. Hopefully we’ll also learn useful information at this meeting and have sufficient time for questions during the Q&A.
Regards,
Pine
All,
We'll be webcasting the interesting bits of today's Monmouth WMUK Board
Meeting. You can watch by going to
http://monmouthpedia.wordpress.com/webcast/.
All the best,
Richard Symonds
Office & Development Manager
Wikimedia UK
0207 065 0992
07885 764 613
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Company Limited by
Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827.
Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development
House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom.
Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who
operate Wikipedia,
amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit organization with
no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.
Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk