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
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/halfaker13rise-preprint.pdf
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desirable_newcomer_survival_over_time.png
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/halfaker13rise-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-preprint.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
-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-wikipedia/
[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?'"
