I'm 100% with you both on this matter of having tried the obvious easy solutions. If I hear one more person to propose outreach as the solution to the gender gap or new editor retention, I think I will <insert threat of choice here>. I do a lot of outreach here in Australia and, yes, hand-holding works as long as you in the room with them but stops working once they are at the mercy of the community (who will "attack" even during the outreach). And also that kind of handholding is not scalable. We don't just need 10 new active editors; we need 10K or even 100K new active editors. It is indeed time to tackle the hard problem and that is changing the "crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere". The solution does not lie in training people to conform to that regime. Even if people are taught how to engage with it, if people don't enjoy the experience, of course they will walk away. Those of us still here are all probably as stubborn as mules and with the hides of rhinoceroses (or just enjoy being a bully safely hidden behind a pseudonym).

Although "academic standards of publication" appears to held up as the ideal behind some of the Wikipedia quality guidelines, I must say they are higher standards than I've seen enforced at most journals or in most conferences. And certainly I've never seen the rigid enforcement of the nit-picking rules in the Manual of Style. I do think we are operating our own version of the Stanford Prison Experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

only the difference is that they cancelled their experiment in about a week. Ours has been running for years ..

The Wikipedia article above says .

The results of the experiment have been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support.

"Quality control" is Wikipedia's legitimising ideology and our processes provide it with the social and institutional support. When did you ever see someone in an Article for Deletion discussion or similar say "let's look at the big picture here, the WMF have a strategic priority to reverse editor attrition or close the gender gap, let's consider our decision here with that in mind". No, it's always "we must decide this according to our rules", raising any other point is discouraged (you get slapped down for it). Of course, I question why WMF allows the community to make and enforce rules when the outcome appears to be working against their stated priorities. That's not strong governance, that's weakness. I don't think WMF needs to control everything top-down (and indeed it would not be scalable if they did) but they do need to set boundaries in some places in relation to the community's control over policy and process to ensure the success of the WMF strategic plan. For example, I would say that if a new editor creates a new article which isn't obviously spam/vandalism, does it really matter to let that article survive because it isn't notable enough according to the guidelines for that category of article. At the very least could we defer the discussion of deletion for a few months in the hope it is further developed to a better standard by then? Perhaps a two stage process, first communicate with the contributor(s) with *precise* concerns about how it needs to be improved and they have a month to do it, and that help is available (at the TeaHouse or wherever). (Feedback is often too vague, saying "not notable" is not helpful and saying WP:ANYTHING is not helpful either as it looks like a string of gibberish written like that and even if the link is clicked, the resulting page is full of jargon and often meaningless to the newbie).

Maybe we should introduce a karma system (like Slashdot). You can only do certain actions if you have high karma. So "positive emotional" actions like thanking, wikilove, writing nice sentiment messages, making uncontested contributions to articles, etc earn you karma and only high karma people can take "negative emotional" actions (undoing - other than vandalism), proposing for deletion, voting to delete, because they reduce your karma etc. This might at least slow down the out-and-out bullies who engage in lots of "emotionally negative" behaviours .

Kerry

_____

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Aaron Halfaker Sent: Tuesday, 21 October 2014 12:08 AM To: Pine W Cc: WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org; Editor Engagement; Rachel diCerbo; Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase theparticipation of women within Wikimedia projects.; Wiki Research-l; A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has aninterest in Wikipedia and analytics. Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research discussion: Visions for Wikipedia

Hey Pine,

Thanks for prod'ing the conversation. See also the discussion about Wikipedia's decreasing adaptability on the Wikimedia analytics mailing list here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/analytics/2014-October/002651.html

IMO, the critical piece of evidence that English Wikipedia is suffering from a lack of adaptive flexibility is the lack of any substantial change to the treatment of newcomers since the massive decline in retention of good-faith newcomers started in 2007[2]. A secondary piece of evidence is the increasing resistance to policy/guideline (formalized norm) changes for all editors, but especially newcomers[3].

We've seen some follow-up work that suggests that Wikipedia's complexity itself is a barrier for new editors[7] and that these issues extend to spaces specifically designed to support newcomers' work[6]. There have been some interesting efforts to address the symptoms of the problem. For example, see WP:Teahouse[4], WP:Snuggle[5] and Onboarding Research[8].

Personally, I think that the way forward is to recognize that hard problems are hard because others have tried the easy/intuitive solutions already. I think it is time to dig in and understand the fundamental, socio-technical nature of Wikipedia. To that end, I'm working on building data resources of strategic importance (see [9, 10, 11, 12]). I'm also working towards experimenting with the effects of increased reflexive power by surfacing a value-added measurement service[13]. And of course, I'm advertising our socio-technical problems at research showcase like the one Pine linked and when giving talks (e.g. [14]) so that we can grow our army of wiki researchers.

OMG WALL OF REFERENCES:

1. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2012). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia's reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764212469365. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfak er13rise-preprint.pdf

2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desirable_newcomer_survival_over_time.p ng from [1] Figure 4, pg. 12

3. Page 17, table 2 and the two pgs preceeding it. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfak er13rise-preprint.pdf

4. Morgan, J. T., Bouterse, S., Walls, H., & Stierch, S. (2013, February). Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 839-848). ACM. http://jtmorgan.net/jtmorgan/files/morgan_cscw2013_final.pdf

5. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., & Terveen, L. G. (2014, April). Snuggle: designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 311-320). ACM. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-p reprint.pdf

6. Schneider, J., Gelley, B. S., & Halfaker, A. (2014, August). Accept, decline, postpone: How newcomer productivity is reduced in English Wikipedia by pre-publication review. In Proceedings of The International Symposium on Open Collaboration (p. 26). ACM. http://cse.poly.edu/~gelley/acceptdecline.pdf

7. Ford, H., & Geiger, R. S. (2012, August). Writing up rather than writing down: Becoming wikipedia literate. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (p. 16). ACM. http://www.opensym.org/ws2012/p21wikisym2012.pdf

8. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedians

9. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Ideas/MediaWiki_events:_a_generaliz ed_public_event_datasource

10. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Editor_Interaction_Data_Extractio n_and_Visualization

11. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection

12. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service

13. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiCredit

14. https://www.si.umich.edu/events/201409/icos-lecture-aaron-halfaker

-Aaron

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 1:23 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:

Both of the presentations at the October Wikimedia Research Showcase were fascinating and I encourage everyone to watch them [1]. I would like to continue to discuss the themes from the showcase about Wikipedia's adaptability, viability, and diversity.

Aaron's discussion about Wikipedia's ongoing internal adaptations, and the slowing of those adaptations, reminded me of this statement from MIT Technology Review in 2013 (and I recommend reading the whole article [2]):

"The main source of those problems (with Wikipedia) is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase partipcipation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage."

I would like to contrast that vision of Wikipedia with the vision presented by User:CatherineMunro (formatting tweaks by me), which I re-read when I need encouragement:

"THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA One gateway to the wide garden of knowledge, where lies The deep rock of our past, in which we must delve The well of our future, The clear water we must leave untainted for those who come after us, The fertile earth, in which truth may grow in bright places, tended by many hands, And the broad fall of sunshine, warming our first steps toward knowing how much we do not know."

How can we align ouselves less with the former vision and more with the latter? [3]

I hope that we can continue to discuss these themes on the Research mailing list. Please contribute your thoughts and questions there.

Regards,

Pine

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw

[2] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedi a/

[3] Lest this at first seem to be impossible, I will borrow and tweak a quote from from George Bernard Shaw and later used by John F. Kennedy: "Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' Let us dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"