If anyone was wondering, I was not confusing power law with power dynamics, but Jan's original question talked about community health, redistribution of power and things like training, user friendliness and documentation as strategies, so I assumed power dynamics were in play in the conversation.
The power in Wikipedia is held by administrators and other functionaries, the loudest and most persistent (and most willing to canvass openly or off-wiki) in consensus building and, as I have already argued, in the latitude given to the *mass* of very occasional contributors (whether good faith or bad faith) to do bad or low quality edits which others have to deal with.
If you redefine power in other ways, such as impact (or influence) on readers (those who we serve), then of course the more active users do have the *potential* for that power provided their contributions are made to creating/expanding content rather than fiddling with existing content (most edits are "fiddling"). An occasional contributor has much more limited power wrt to impacting/influence the reader (probably disproportionately lower that their number of edits would suggest as they are more likely to be reverted).
But equally not all very active editors get to shape the reader view. If you look at the activities of the top editors by edit count, they tend to do a lot of very repetitive and arguably more administratively-focused edits with the reorganisation of category system being a major activity. Studies of readers show they don't look much beyond the References and hence aren't looking at the categories so if power is about reader impact/influence, then this group have very little power relative to their number of contributions.
If we talk about community health in Wikipedia (specifically English Wikipedia), we all know it's a massive problem and somewhat independent of power (by any definition). It's an abrasive environment with far more criticism than praise/appreciation across the board. Active contributors regularly burn-outand dealing with "the community" is often given as a reason. While there is always one final issue that is the straw that breaks the camel's back, it's rarely just about that issue but a level of frustration that develops over a long time. Good faith newcomers get turned off by bad initial experiences. Unfortunately this group mean well but often make bad edits. I do outreach to new good-faith contributors in my topic space, but it is a WikiProject Australia message delivered by Twinkle (nobody has time to write personal messages to new contributors each day) but I do try to ask them where they got their information from (failure to cite being a big problem with this group) but rarely do they reply or make further edits.
Jan mentioned training. I also do outreach which is mostly face-to-face edit training and supporting editathons (generally working with a library or university as the partner organisation) so I do a lot of work with new users in face-to-face situations, but for all my efforts (for which the feedback is always very positive), these new users rarely contribute again after these sessions and this experience is common to most people doing outreach work, leading to the belief that "Wikipedians are born not made". There are efforts already taking place to provide online training or on-boarding systems (currently being trialled in some other language Wikipedias) but, even if shown to be effective, I don't think there is much likelihood of mandating any of such things on English Wikipedia with its strong libertarian ideology and most new users are "on a mission" to make a particular change/addition to an article. I don't think most of them will voluntarily do some kind of training or on-boarding first (people on a mission are not easy to deflect in general). I like to believe training in some forms helps individuals but at that end of the power graph the effort/return on individuals is poor. To work with that mass of folk it must be scalable and that tends to rule out anything personal (like a buddy system).
As to user friendliness, there isn't a lot of it on Wikipedia. I recollect someone did a study to see if welcome messages helped improve newcomer retention and found they didn't. Indeed our watchlist/welcome system can easily be perceived by new users as stalking. While a welcome message is intended to be encouraging, it does at the same time send the message "I am watching you" which has been described by some new users who receive welcome messages during my training sessions as "creepy". As someone who sends such messages (via Twinkle, there aren't the hours in the day to welcome new users in a more personal way), some of the responses are "creepy" (clearly they looked at my user account and knew I was a woman and felt it was OK to make some inappropriate remark). There are friendships of course between some users, but you don't come to Wikipedia to make friends (join Facebook). To survive I think you either have to be pretty committed to free knowledge (strong mission alignment) or it rewards in some other way (stroking your ego through edit-count-itis, admin power over others, get to push your POV).
As to documentation, well, ours isn't great. It's hard to find and full of jargon and assumes you know wiki text. And people on a mission won't stop to read it anyway. And frankly as much as I don't like it, I believe my time is better spent researching and writing content than fixing the documentation. Wikipedia is a moving target for documentation in any case as the underlying software is in constant evolution as are various tools, templates, and other things contributors use.
So I think we don't have a healthy community but whether that's related to the power law graph, I am far less convinced. There are a number of quite deliberate choices made on en.WP that create and perpetuate our problems and the community is highly resistant to experiment with these choices. This suggests to me that there are people who get benefit from the current structures, possibly those who are nicknamed the Unblockables, a name that suggests a power dynamic in play!
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W Sent: Thursday, 23 January 2020 2:22 PM To: Wiki Research-l wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:
Hi Jan,
I think that we may have given you a lot more than you had in mind when you asked your question. I'm aware that you were thinking of "power law" in a way that can be very different than "power dynamics", but I have the latter more on my mind, partially because of recent discussions on Wikimedia-l related to strategy.
I remain interested in knowing what the goal of your research is.
I'll be busy with non-Wikimedia activities for the next few days, but I'll try to get back to the Wikiverse by this Saturday. If you don't hear back from me after about two weeks then please feel free to email me off list if you'd like me to follow up. In the meantime, Kerry and other capable people may be able to help with any further questions regarding your research interests.
Best wishes,
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l