On Mon, Dec 28 2015, Oliver Keyes wrote:
My big question is how these pedagogic maps factor in the negatives of peer production communities - harassment, toxicity - and route around or solve for them.
Hi Oliver,
Thanks for the speedy and thought-provoking reply!
The question above is a good one. We did have a basic collection of "antipatterns", but didn't develop them in this paper, because thinking about antipatterns adds some complexity and we wanted to get the "positive" vision more firmly in mind first. With that accomplished, I'd love to write a sequel sometime about "Antipatterns of Peeragogy"!
Still, the current catalog should definitely help surface and do something about concerns. The strategy would be something like: start with the Scrapbook pattern and existing critiques, develop a short list of criticisms into A specific project, and build a Roadmap that involves others in addressing the issue that was identified.
A recent thread kicked off by Pine seems to be an example along those lines: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2015-December/004927.h...
I do wonder about the generalisability of some of the examples; in particular while Wikiprojects are _ideally_ a good starting point for a lot of newcomers I don't have the data to hand about whether, in practice, it is the starting point for a large proportion of users, and I don't see citations to that effect in your paper (although I do see the claim). It would be good if someone more informed about this particular question than I could chip in with what they've measured/observed in detail (I know some people have been studying Wikiprojects specifically, particularly James Hare)
I've been impressed with some of my own earlier common-sensical guesswork that turned out not to hold water, and accordingly have tried to be careful to cite or footnote the Wikimedia evidence, but indeed that is one of the intuitive claims that is ^[citation needed]. Even though there are "many" users involved with Wikiprojects, the population might be oldtimers rather than new users. I'll look around a bit more, and/or adjust the claim to focus on current population of Wikiproject contributors rather than on the hypothesis that the projects are used for wiki onramping.
Joe