[teampractices] Notes on Spolsky talk from 2015-11-06

[Joel Aufrecht]

Hi,

I had a few notes from Joel Spolsky's talk that I thought might be
interesting or at least that I wanted to write down somewhere:

1) On his specific advice on how to increase editor participation: If there
is a perception that everything is done, all possible articles have been
written, then marketing is the appropriate tool to change this perception.

2) On addressing the gender gap: his experience at a One Direction concert
was that having nobody else around like him continuously off-putting (even
though there were no apparent negative consequences).  How can WP change
the perception of being alone, encouraging/making it safer for women to be
visible in some way?

3) Spolsky talked in detail about interacting with difficult participants,
and designing systems to minimize negative impacts.  Any system with
thousands of participants will have, even at 1% or less, a meaningful
number of difficult participants. He talked primarily in terms of observing
behavior and identifying mental illnesses and then managing his
interactions within that assumption.  He said something about a great
moderator being able to deal with a full day of interacting with only
people behaving badly and still treat the 99% as human.

This made me think of two different things:

3a) I've read (and agree with) objections to categorizing all harmful
behavior as mental illness, as unfair both to people with mental illnesses
and without.  If you assume someone who is behaving (in your opinion) badly
is mentally ill, the next logical step is to assume they are functioning
differently from you (i.e., not "human", in Spolsky's language).  This is
incompatible with assuming good faith, I think.

3b) How do you balance that issue with the reality that people behave badly
for a variety of reasons, one of which is mental illness?  Does that fact
have any place in strategies to manage large public communities?



*--Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation
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