Hoi,

I respectfully disagree. There are two issues here. The most important one is that marketing may have multiple objectives and gaining more people as editors is not restricted to any of our projects. Secondly it is not restricted to editors it also applies to readers. It should be glaringly obvious that both Commons and Wikisource are a treasure trove of material that is hardly used.

We should not be beholden to "commercial partners" for our marketing. We have our own objective; sharing in the sum of all knowledge and we could do so much better. Commercial partners do not necessarily share our objectives and it is therefore silly to suggest their cooperation. Also yes, we need more competent editors but in many of our projects we need editors first and make them competent later.

We do need marketing because we mostly suck at reaching out and giving proper attention to the people we so desperately need. One obvious point is that in order to grow the "other" projects and languages we need to realise that Wikipedia is English oriented. I am only heard, if at all, on meta matters when I use English.

Thanks,

GerardM

On 28 August 2016 at 12:03, Stuart A. Yeates <syeates@gmail.com> wrote:

I completely disagree with this criticism of the WMF.

It seems to me that the main barriers to getting gamification happening in relation to en.wiki are cultural / organisational issues not marketing ones.

If the editing communities genuinely wanted huge influxes of complete newbie editors, I have no doubt that the commercial partners who benefit from wikipedia could send them our way pretty trivially. What the editing communities want / need is new minimally-competent editors, and crafting them from complete newbies (typically called on-boarding) is very costly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onboarding for an overview of the complexities.

cheers
stuart

--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
You are absolutely right. Both approaches have promise. It is however a marketing job, not a research job to realise their potential. Marketing is where the WMF sucks.
Thanks,
GerardM

On 27 August 2016 at 22:49, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Nice, thought-provoking post, Pine.

Here's my take on two ways to attract a population of good-faith contributors 1 or 2 orders of magnitude larger than the current one, based on what I've seen over the last couple of years:

Gamified interfaces for microcontributions à la Wikidata game.
(per GerardM) there's absolutely no doubt this model is effective at creating a large volume of high-quality edits, and value to the project and communities. So far these tools have been primarily targeted at an existing (and relatively small) population of core contributors and the only attempt at expanding this to a much broader contributor base (WikiGrok) were too premature. I do expect we will see more and more of lightweight distributed curation in the next 5-10 years. In my opinion Wikidata is ready to experiment with a much larger number of single-purpose contributory interfaces (around missing images, translations, label evaluation, referencing etc)

Ubiquitous outreach, supported by dedicated technology.
I called out in my Wikimania 2014 talk the fact that the single, most effective initiative ever run to attract new contributors has been WLM (I am intentionally not including initiatives like WP in the classroom as they target a pre-defined population such as students, but they are probably the most advanced example in this category). Creating tools such as recommender systems and todo lists tailored to the interests of particular, intrinsically motivated contributors as well as the analytics dashboards to measure the relative impact and best design of these programs, is the most promising venue to expand the Wikimedia contributor population.

My 2 cents. How making the edit button 10x larger is not a solution to this problem is a topic I'll reserve to a separate thread.

Thanks for starting this thread.

Dario

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 5:32 AM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
The English Wikipedia alone has hundreds of thousands of items to fix - missing references, misspellings, etc. The problems are nicely sorted at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog . There are millions of other things to fix in other projects. So quality is getting higher in many ways, but the amount of stuff to fix is still enormous.

What we don't have is an easy way for new people to start eliminating items from the backlogs. The Wikidata games are a nice step in the right direction, but their appeal to new participants is non-existent.

there is a backlog? after 15 years contributing you tell that on the research mailing list :) i used wikidata games for a couple of minutes and great pleasure when i see the link flying by in an email. but i am never able to find that link again in my life. maybe that is the problem? rename the "donate" link to "contribute" and then have "money" and "time" which links to code and content. just my 2c ...

rupert

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Dario Taraborelli Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter

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