Ori said:
I would like us to consider the contribution that
modifications to the user experience make to the
interpersonal climate on the wikis.
I think that this is important. Our social experience in computer
mediated spaces
is intertwined with the technologies that manage our
interactions. This is certainly true to Wikipedia[1] and I think it is
true generally[2]. While we may find it easy to discuss the technology and
social things separately, it is very important that we don't interpret this
as a real separation. Our social patterns affect how we choose and design
our digital technologies and our digital technologies -- in turn -- affect
our social patterns(for more discussion, see [3]).
J-Mo said:
If WMF ever supports any additional Teahouse-related
development, it should
be focused on giving more new editors, on more Wikis, access to Teahouses
and Teahouse-like tools and resources—rather than doing anything to the
Enwiki Teahouse itself, which is doing just fine.
But J-Mo, we're literally planning to explore supporting the Teahouse with
more
digital technologies right now -- you and I! E.g. using ORES
<https://ores.wmflabs.org/> to identify more good-faith newcomers to route
to the Teahouse & building a search interface to help newcomers explore
past questions. Maybe it's OK because we don't plan to do anything *to*
the Teahouse, but rather to work *with* the hosts to figure out how to
build up capacity. I suspect that, if the technologies we develop are
able to make the positive social interactions that the Teahouse excels in
available to more newcomers -- we'll succeed. And hopefully, if our
technological investments into the Teahouse fail and somehow make positive,
human interactions more difficult or otherwise less common, we'll have the
insight to not deploy them beyond an experiment.
This thread started out as a harmless (and humorous!) joke and it has
turned into a debate around our values with regards to technologies that we
intentionally integrate with social behaviors. I think this is a
conversation we ought to have, but I'd really like to see us move beyond
platitudes. Technology isn't good or bad. It certainly isn't easy to get
right, but I believe we can co-evolve our tech and our social structures.
In a computer mediated environments such as ours, this socio-technical
co-evolution is our only hope to actually making real progress.
1.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_Rise_and_Decline
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system
3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw#t=34m04s (my "Paramecium
talk")
-Aaron
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 7:30 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On 04/02/2016 09:37 PM, Ori Livneh wrote:
Why am I going on about this? I guess I'm a
bit bummed out that the idea
of
designing user interfaces that seek to improve the emotional environment
by
making it easier to be warm and personal to one another is a joke.
For what it's worth, as someone who wasn't involved in that April Fools's
"feature", but joke-reviewed it, I did not intend to to discourage any
serious efforts to encourage a warm and productive editor community.
Matt
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