For those who are interested in quantitative studies on the subject of editor motivation,
I suggest looking at the list of academic papers at
http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Motivations. I learned about that list from a recent
post to research-l. I assume that Steven Walling and the other WMF staff are aware of this
list but it might be new and interesting to other contributors.
That list doesn’t include
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Editors_Survey_2011 and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011/S…
which are likely more familiar to the readers of foundation-l.
I think that some of the concerns that have been expressed in this thread are well founded
while others are overblown.
An effort to improve the retention of editors who take their time to register seems
unlikely to produce a wave of vandals because vandalizing Wikipedia is easy already and
doesn’t require registration.
It’s true that we don’t want experiments to unleash significant technical problems or
massive amounts of copyvio content into Wikipedia. I believe that the official failure
analysis of the IEP was, if anything, too kind in its conclusions. It is my understanding
from Steven Walling’s posts that the possible projects for editor retention will be much
smaller in scale and that the community will be notified in advance about the specifics of
these experiments.
I doubt that we need to worry about the possibility of attracting more PR manipulators and
POV pushers who abuse editing privileges because those people seem to be strongly
motivated already, and anyone who doesn’t know how to do it themselves can hire someone to
do it or recruit volunteers to do it for them. My understanding is that the focus of these
outreach efforts will be to retain editors whose motivation to edit is sufficiently
marginal that they’re likely to leave if the status quo continues.
Steven, is there a place on Meta or Outreach where editors can go to propose ideas for
editor retention? Maybe a link was already posted but I don’t recall seeing one.
Also, Steven, could you send the link to the place where we can look at your
“not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human”? I’m not
clear on which page is the main one,
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing
or
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Template_testing. Is
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Template_testing the main page and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing the list of past tests? There’s also
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Engagement which looks like it’s a coordinating
page for multiple projects but some of the information is a bit outdated. I think it would
be helpful for all three of these pages to articulate their relationships with each other
more clearly and be updated to reflect current information, including clearly stating
which staff members are the appropriate contacts for each page.
Thanks,
Pine