Re:
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:13 AM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that many WikiProjects are moribund, but I was only thinking of those which are active as you need someone willing to assist in on-boarding. I think you could do it more frequently than annually, maybe around #edit milestones or my "developmental or interest" milestones. "Wow, Wilma, you've participated in 20 Article for Deletion votes, have you thought of becoming an administrator who closes these votes" (or some such). Or "Hey, Fred, you've edited 50 articles from WikiProject Architecture, are you interested to get more involved with this group?"
Maybe just giving the project recruiters the tools to easily identify users with the desired characteristics would be enough (although some guidelines so they don't over-pester would probably be in order). They can then reach out and onboard folks however they like.
The same tool could also be used just to praise the users for various milestones to motivate them. "Hey, Barney, congrats on 100 geology edits, would you like to have a progress bar on your user page so you can set a target and track how many geology edits you're making?". That is, try to motivate them by setting a goal which seems to reflect what topics they like to work on (could be based on categories and/or project tagging).
Kerry
and
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:40 PM, David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com wrote:
what mattered to me was personal appreciation of my work--just as it did in my primary career. Not form notices, but individual public comments that from people who showed that they understood. There is no way of automating that. The virtues of wikiprojects (and local meetups) is of extending that appreciation more broadly and more intensely.
I think both can be motivational.
Personalized appreciation is obviously a much stronger motivator, but there are inevitable (and large) coverage-gaps if we just rely on goodwill and randomness to reach all editors deserving of feedback.
Automated feedback won't appeal to all editors (and will even annoy a few), but the quantity of userboxes, and editcountitis statistics, and page-creation-lists, and user-group-powers that appear on thousands of userpages, suggests that Wikimedians can enjoy displaying their statistics and affiliations and access-permissions and expertise-areas, and knowing when they've hit a large-round-number-of-edits-milestone, or page-creations, or deletion-discussion-resolutions. Many of us might want to know more of these kinds of details about ourselves!
At the far end of the automation-spectrum, but still within the realm of serious-knowledge-communities, the StackOverflow system has a variety of automated statistics and 'badges'. We wouldn't want (or be able) to do most of that, for a variety of technical and social reasons, but there's still some interesting ideas. Check out some userpages in here: * https://physics.stackexchange.com/users * https://english.stackexchange.com/users * https://math.stackexchange.com/users etc. These really are "our kind of people"! (It's near the top of "If I could clone myself..." list of places I'd also like to spend more time...)