whoops, last sentence of paragraph #5 should read "You *CAN* have higher walls and easier quality control, but you can't have higher walls and higher newcomer retention (or diversity)."
On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 9:45 AM Jonathan Morgan jmorgan@wikimedia.org wrote:
Kerry,
I like this a lot except for one small, but critical, distinction. I want to get your take on it (yours specifically, in this case, because of your background and the thought you've put into this issue).
I think that explicitly forbidding newcomers from performing certain kinds of actions, or editing certain pages, is a mistake. This was a mistake with ACTRIAL, and it would be a mistake with any other newcomer quality-control or harm-mitigation strategies--however well intentioned.
It's a mistake for two reasons, First, it runs counter to the spirit of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has become more 'closed' over time in both formal and informal ways. This is a common patterns for social movements as well as organizations--it's not unexpected, and to a certain extent it may be necessary, but in *Wikipedia's *case it directly violates the fundamental values and goals of the project. That means creeping bureaucracy and "in-group" mentalities are inherently more damaging to Wikipedia than it would be to, say, Microsoft, or Facebook, or even Stackexchange.
Second, being explicitly denied the opportunity to make particular kinds of contributions (as opposed to being nudged towards other options, explained to why something is a bad idea, or shown the likely outcomes of certain actions) is an even bigger motivation-killer, long term, than having bad experiences due to stumbling onto the "freeway" (nice metaphor!).
Especially considering that both the current EnWiki community and the current content embed major biases and gaps, we can't afford to make it harder for the new people who have the expertise, the perspective, and the passion to correct those biases and fill those gaps from participating as full-fledged members of the community. Full stop. You can't have higher walls and easier quality control, but you can't have higher walls and higher newcomer retention (or diversity).
Wikipedia (esp. EnWiki) has basically two options at this point, with maybe some narrow-ish middle ways between them:
- Continue to make it harder and harder for new people to contribute,
through political and technological means, thus preserving the current content to a great degree, but diminishing the relevance of the project as a whole as it becomes increasingly incomplete, out of date, and limited in scope.
- Try to make it easy as possible for newcomers (with their new
knowledge, sometimes different values, and yes, sometimes *mixed motivations*) to contribute, and try to make the project feel as exciting for them as it was for people who joined in 2004; accept that taking this track will lead to a degree of vandalism and COI (although probably not different in scale than current or historical levels), and invest heavily in algorithmic quality control, streamlined onboarding and socialization, diversity-friendly policy change, expansive and public offline initiatives, and all the other "suite" of methods intended to scale the ability of the current community to handle additional growth and diversity in content and contributors.
#1 involves no great risk to the "community" besides gradual obsolescence; Wikipedia will go the way of many other social institutions that failed to adapt. But it will do so slowly, and continue to provide value in the process. It just won't ever be the world's encyclopedia.
#2 involves risk because the intention behind it is that the community will look different, the content will look different, the mechanisms for contributing will look different, and the policies will look different in 10 years vs. today. But it is the only shot at continuing to meaningfully pursue the original mission at this point. I personally would love to see this happen--as a contributor, as a scholar, as a world citizen who believes in Wikipedia--but it involves risk because it means that people who have power will need to give it up. That's never easy.
(Opinions my own, not those of WMF)
- J
On Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 1:54 AM Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
Stripping out a long email trail ...
I am not advocating lowering the BLP bar as there are genuine legal needs to prevent libel.
What I am advocating is not letting new users do their first edits in “high risk” articles. When I do training, I pick exercises for the group which deliberately take place in quiet backwaters of Wikipedia, eg add schools to local suburb articles. Such articles have low readership and low levels of watchers and no BLP considerations, i.e. low risk articles. If the newbie first edit is a bit of a mess, probably no reader will see it before it is fixed by a subsequent edit. They will be able to get help from me to fix it before anyone is harmed by it and before anyone reverts them.
The “organic” newbie can dive into any article. It would be a very interesting research question to look at reverts and see if we can develop risk models that predict which articles are at higher risks of reverted edits (e.g. quality rating, length, type of article eg BLP, level of readership, number of active watchers, etc) and there might be separate models specifically for newbies revert risk and female newbie revert risk.
Or we just simply calculate the proportion of reverted edits and just use declare anything over some threshold as “high risk” and not bother finding out what the article characteristics are. We could also calculate what is the newbie revert rate.
Then we have something actionable. We could treat the high risk articles (by predictive model or straight stats) as semi-protected and divert newbies from making direct edits. Or at least warn them before letting them loose. For that matter, warn any user if they are entering into a high conflict zone.
When you learn to drive a car, you normally start in the quiet streets, not a busy high speed freeway, not narrow winding roads without guard rails up a mountain. Why shouldn’t we take the same attitude to Wikipedia? Start where it is safe.
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-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)