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.…
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