I am a bit more optimistic than Kerry, although I agree that wider support
for VE and more publicity for the "thanks" feature would be good.
I agree with Kerry's concern about our labor supply being too small for the
demand. Related to this is the difficult situation with our diversity
statistics for content contributors; I would hope that if we could improve
our diversity that we could do so in a way that created a net positive for
the labor supply.
I would not trade down transparency for other possible benefits, and I
believe that *off-wiki* WMF and its associates like AffCom should be more
transparent about problematic situations and bad news.
I'm not sure that I'd agree that vandalism on ENWP is a huge problem. It's
a problem, but I don't think that it's going to overwhelm the encyclopedia
soon. However, I do think that it's a nontrivial timesink for experienced
users and ambitious users who want to protect the quality of the
encyclopedia. It would be interesting if there was research that estimated
the amount of time that good-faith editors on ENWP spend on cleaning up
vandalism and handing out blocks.
Pine
(
)
On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 11:56 PM Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
It comes as no great surprise to me to see these
survey results show very
little change in matters of some concern (e.g. diversity, community
health). Quite simply, if you don't change the system, then don't expect
the outcomes to change. I can't speak about most projects but I don't see
any change on en.WP in terms of how it operates since the last WMF
strategic plan published in 2011. We had a non-diverse toxic culture then;
nothing changes; culture remained the same. Our active editor numbers go
down, the number of articles to be maintained goes up, do the maths and see
the long-term problem. Admin numbers are also declining.
One big potentially positive change was the Visual Editor. WMF built the
Visual Editor specifically to open up editing to a wider ground of users
and, as someone who does training for new users, it is a game changer for
making it easier for new users. However, en.WP didn't change. VE is not the
default for new editors on en.WP. It is not enabled for en.WP talk pages,
project pages, or even the Teahouse, or any forum where new users might
report problems or harassment etc. Almost any how-to help page gives
information only for source editor users. Commons has blocked new users
from using the VE to upload own-work photos (and no useful error message is
provided to tell them what to do - just something generic like "server
error" is returned because Commons just "fails" the upload and doesn't
pass
back a reason to the VE).
The old adage "praise in public, criticise in private" remains inverted in
the world of Wikipedia. Everyone can see reverted edits and the criticisms
on User Talk pages. Meanwhile "Thanks" (our lightest weight way to praise)
is effectively private (yeah, I know there is a public log, but at most it
tells you who likes who). And what the public log does show is that most
people never thank anyone anyway, which again speaks volume about our
culture. We are all for transparency except curiously when thanking for a
particular edit. Transparency leads to a lack of privacy that comes with it
is a turn-off to some new users. I know from training some new users don't
think it's OK that everyone can read their User Talk page or that their
entire contribution history is visible to all. They generally believe that
if they were to misbehave, then of course someone in authority (admins in
our world) should be able to look at such things for the purposes of
keeping the place safe and functioning effectively, but they don't see why
just anyone should be able to monitor them, which is a means by which you
can stalk someone or wikihound them on Wikipedia. Interestingly pretty
much all of those who raise these concerns are women, who are, in real
life, the most common victims of privacy invasions (think "up-skirt-ing" vs
"up-trouser-ing", think Peeping Tom vs Peeping Tomasina) and stalking. So
should we look at trading off some transparency in order to get more
diversity?
Vandalism. Many years ago, when I questioned our very soft policy on
vandalism (it takes 4 to allow you to request to block an account), I was
told that "yeah, there is a lot of vandalism now but Wikipedia is new and
once people realise its value and that vandals get blocked, it will stop
happening over time". Sadly nobody told the vandals this, as, based on my
watchlist, they are still very active and still mostly IPs. I note we have
not changed our IP policy or our pseudonym account policy; editors remain
as non-real-world accountable as always. As many online newspapers and
other forums are turning off comments as they have learned that
anonymous/pseudo accounts lead to completely unproductive name calling,
defamatory comments, and not the constructive civil debate envisaged, yet
at en.WP we persist in believing that the same approach can create a
positive collaborative culture, which clearly it has not.
There's no willingness even to experiment with anything that might change
the culture and I see little likelihood that en.WP's culture will change of
its own accord.
However, there is one easy win for diversity at WMF. Start diversifying
the WMF livestream times. Every WMF livestream is usually between 2-4am
here in Australia so I'd like to see a bit of support for the Global East
diversity by shifting the livestreams so everyone gets a chance to
participate live. One small step that WMF could take ...
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Saturday, 15 September 2018 1:52 PM
To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey
are published!
Hi Edward,
Thanks for this publication. This research is likely to be of interest to
the WikimediaAnnounce-l (and by extension, Wikimedia-l) and Wikitech-l
subscribers, so I suggest that you cross-post this publication to those
lists.
After reading this report, I have a question which may be challenging to
answer: what should we do to improve our diversity? Many of us, inside and
outside of WMF, have wanted to see progress on diversity metrics for years,
and I get the impression that while significant attention and resources are
being given to diversity, our progress has been disappointing. Perhaps
that's a subject that can be discussed further during the video
presentation, but I'd also be interested in hearing your comments here on
Research-l.
Have a good weekend,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 11:07 PM Edward Galvez <egalvez(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm excited to share that our annual survey about Wikimedia
communities is now published!
This survey included 170 questions and reaches over 4,000 community
members across four audiences: Contributors, Affiliate organizers,
Program Organizers, and Volunteer Developers. This survey helps us
hear from the experience of Wikimedians from across the movement so
that teams are able to use community feedback in their planning and
their work. This survey also helps us learn about long term changes in
communities, such as community health or demographics.
The report is available on meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_Insights/2018_Rep
ort
For this survey, we worked with 11 teams to develop the questions.
Once the results were analyzed, we spent time with each team to help
them understand their results. Most teams have already identified how
they will use the results to help improve their work to support you.
The report could be useful for your work in the Wikimedia movement as
well!
What are you learning from the data? Take some
time to read the report
and share your feedback on the talk pages. We have also published a
blog that you can read.[1]
We are hosting a livestream presentation[2] on September 20 at 1600 UTC.
Hope to see you there!
Feel free to email me directly with any questions.
All the best,
Edward
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/09/13/what-we-learned-surveying-4
000-community-members/ [2]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGQtWFP9Cjc
--
Edward Galvez
Evaluation Strategist, Surveys
Learning & Evaluation
Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Edward Galvez
Evaluation Strategist, Surveys
Learning & Evaluation
Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l