Re: [Wiki-research-l] Retention of Wikimedians for the long term

Hi Kerry, Thanks for the ideas. Jonathan Morgan, Aaron Halfaker, and I have had more than one conversation about wikiprojects as a way to engage with new editors. Unfortunately, there are a lot of derelict wikiprojects. I have some ideas about how to improve the training system for ENWP and Commons in particular. But that's different from the motivation issue, which I think is more challenging. With enough money and time, the training system can be upgraded. I'm not sure if the same is true for motivation. I have the impression that student Wikimedians are mostly motivated by grades (hence the precipitous decline in their participation after their Wikipedia Education Program class ends), and many other people are motivated by money or PR (hence we get a lot of people engaging in promotionalism or PR management.) It's not clear to me how someone goes from being wiki-curious to feeling motivated enough to contribute for years. There are many other hobbies that are lower stress, healthier, offer more opportunities for socializing, and offer a friendlier environment. I think that some Wikimedians are motivated by desire to promote or share their interest in a particular topic, which might keep content creators interested and engaged for years, particularly if they meet people with similar interests. But it's a phase change to go from being a content creator or curator, to taking on roles that benefit other individual Wikimedians, or broad cross-sections of the Wikimedia community. We could use all of those kinds of good-faith long-term contributors. Perhaps we should include information in our training about "career paths" for Wikimedians who would like to develop their skills and/or move into new roles? I'm not sure what else to suggest. I find it challenging to figure out how to motivate people to want to contribute productively for years, and there are some roles for which lengthy experience is an informal but significant prerequisite for acceptance and/or success. I'd like to see more people make that journey. Pine On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 2:10 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com > wrote: Pine, It sounds to me that there are two separate parts to your question. One relates to the survival of such editors to being ongoing active editors. The second seems to relate to recruiting them and perhaps upskilling them for specific purposes, eg administration, guild of copy editors, and whatever initiatives you have in mind. The first question probably relates to being able to get them better informed about the policies of Wikipedia at least in relation to the area of their contributions and how to engage with the community because it is the abrasive interaction with the community that seems to drive people away. The second probably relates to raising awareness of WikiProjects and other collaborative initiatives. (Obviously all of WP is collaborative, but some things require higher levels of coordination and I think this might be what you are referring to). I think probably needs some analysis of the nature of their contributions and/or their topics of interest in order to introduce them to targetted WikiProjects etc that seem logical trajectories for them. The mistake we make constantly in onboarding newbies is overwhelming them with information (think of the standard Twinkle welcome templates) because "THEY NEED TO KNOW THIS" instead of what they want to know "how do I do this current thing I am trying to do". For similar reasons I think any attempts to draw them into particular projects/initiatives should be highly targeted, not too frequent, and based on what their interests seem to be rather where someone else would like them to work. (I think we should avoid the mindset of "I need to recruit some cannon fodder"). Having got their attention, someone probably has to hold their hand through whatever upskilling is needed to get them productive. Just pointing people at a Project page isn't helpful, there needs to be some human outreach and shepherding. In some idealised universe, we should see Wikipedians as being on a learning journey, where (through analysis of past contributions and interactions) we are tracking them against a series of learning objectives (as we do with coursework curriculum "they have passed this unit, let's offer them some new units that build on that"). So, using newbies as an example, we look for some threshold of surviving-edits that demonstrate skills like "add text", "format text", "add list element", "make links", "make piped links", "add citation", "add templated citations", "use a template", "edit an infobox", "add an infobox", write on their talk page, write on an article talk page, write on another user's talk page, add to their own user page, etc. The idea being to suggest as various competencies are attained how to add a new skill to their repertoire. Once they have acquired the basic how-to skills, we could look at the suggestions of where they might apply these skills and how to specialise their skills in various ways. Kerry Sent from my iPad On 21 Feb 2017, at 2:49 am, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: Hi Research-l, A human resources problem that I am experiencing is a shortage of human resources of community members who are willing, available, and have the skills to work on a variety of useful initiatives. Is anyone on this list aware of research that talks about motivations of long-term contributors? In particular, I'd be interested in research that suggests ways to convert productive, relatively new editors (say, 50-500 edits) into long-term community members who are likely to develop into long-term, productive Wikimedians. Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ 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