The "retention problem" isn't just relevant to new editors. Retaining experienced Wikipedians is an equally substantial term in the equation.

Back to Laura's question: I don't know about any research of Wiki meetups, but there's been research of everything2 meetups and potential effects on participation (from WikiSym'11). See cite and free(ish) link below.

Wyl McCully, Cliff Lampe, Chandan Sarkar, Alcides Velasquez, and Akshaya Sreevinasan. 2011. Online and offline interactions in online communities. In *Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration* (WikiSym '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 39-48. http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/_media/proceedings:p39-mccully.pdf

-Aaron

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.comwrote:

I suspect that its only fairly well-entrenched editors who attend meetups, but I agree it would be interesting data. I rather suspect that meetups are advertised in ways unlikely to reach newer editors.

Sent from my iPad

On 19/11/2012, at 10:16 AM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any research on Wikimedia meetups and the effects on editor retention?

Sincerely, Laura Hale

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Very true. The longer you hang around Wikipedia, the more people you encounter who really piss you off. It's a very negative culture.

I think the lack of physicality is part of the problem. Having worked in international standards and other similar battlegrounds, I know that the most important thing you can do to make the group work well together is to get them to eat and drink together. It seems to build trust and an appreciation that the other people aren't stupid because they don't understand what you are trying to achieve; it leads to mutual respect and consensus building back in the meeting room.

In WP, I think the lack of physicality contributes to the culture. But I don't know if local meetups can solve the problem as the people who you are interacting with on articles are often not from your home town - indeed often you have no clue who they are, where they are from, are they young/old, is English their first language, what's their background etc.

Now some might say "why does that matter, shouldn't you treat all people equally?". And my answer is that it does matter because you are communicating. To communicate, you have to operate in a shared universe of discourse. When we go about our lives every day, we automatically adjust our communication to what we perceive to be the shared universe of discourse with the other person. You don't discuss your pension fund with children, because children don't understand pension funds. You don't swear when you talk to your grandmother, because nice old ladies don't like that kind of language. You simplify your language if you think you are dealing with someone who doesn't speak English very well. In en.WP, how you respond to a "low-quality edit" might be very different if you knew you were dealing with a 12 year old or a person who didn't speak English very well or your grandmother.

In WP, you are denied just about every clue that you rely on in interacting with other people, so very piece of "emotional intelligence" goes out the window. If you look at most social media sites, you are encouraged to create a profile with a photo, your job/interests etc, your colleagues/friends etc (the specifics vary with the intended purpose of the site - LinkedIn is different to Facebook, but the general principles are similar). Interacting with strangers on such sites is much easier because you are supplied with the information that you also get when you eat and drink with people (you chat about your work, your family, your interests) etc. Sure, WP is not a "social media" site, but I think it could learn a few things from them about facilitating human interaction which underpins collaboration.

If, as someone mentioned, people are refused administrator privileges on the grounds of "I don't know this guy", I think it speaks volumes about the importance of human interaction and that WP fails to facilitate it by either physical or electronic means.

Kerry

_____

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Aaron Halfaker Sent: Tuesday, 20 November 2012 1:07 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Editor retention and meetups?

The "retention problem" isn't just relevant to new editors. Retaining experienced Wikipedians is an equally substantial term in the equation.

Back to Laura's question: I don't know about any research of Wiki meetups, but there's been research of everything2 meetups and potential effects on participation (from WikiSym'11). See cite and free(ish) link below.

Wyl McCully, Cliff Lampe, Chandan Sarkar, Alcides Velasquez, and Akshaya Sreevinasan. 2011. Online and offline interactions in online communities. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 39-48. http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/_media/proceedings:p39-mccully.pdf

-Aaron

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:

I suspect that its only fairly well-entrenched editors who attend meetups, but I agree it would be interesting data. I rather suspect that meetups are advertised in ways unlikely to reach newer editors.

Sent from my iPad

On 19/11/2012, at 10:16 AM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any research on Wikimedia meetups and the effects on editor retention?

Sincerely, Laura Hale

I agree with Kerry that computer text offers a narrow pipe through which we can barely come to know and trust other. That is why in developing Extreme Programming (a kind of Agile) we asked that the whole team, including clients and management, meet daily in person, preferably working together in the same room. I didn't believe it was strictly required but it sure did simplify other changes we were making.

As I've come to know more about successful open-source communities I'm struck by how similar our basic values are (read the code, for example) while our attitude towards physical presence couldn't be more opposite. Do not, I was told, ever make a decision while meeting in person. To do so would disenfranchise most of the earth. Even when one came to some insight in a personal conversation they have the obligation to recapitulate the discussion online in text. Wow. That's real work.

The agile and open source movements now share many practices. One commonly repeated observation is that distributed teams work, even for agile, but remote workers trying to keep up with a co-located team doesn't.

I suspect that a fruitful inquiry into editor retention and meetups will need to analyze the nature of decisions made during meetups and the degree that this disenfranchises new and remote contributors.

Aside: When I ran off-site retrospectives I made 10-minute videos which I sent to the team members who couldn't be present. At every break I asked a different person to say in a minute or two what had been discussed and what decisions made. I tightened these up over night and sent out video the next morning. I had no way to assess the value to our remote teams but I will say that we really enjoyed watching the videos together with our new employees at subsequent retrospective.

On Nov 19, 2012, at 2:31 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:

In WP, you are denied just about every clue that you rely on in interacting with other people, so very piece of “emotional intelligence” goes out the window.

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:38:07 +0000, WereSpielChequers wrote:

Ive been attending London Meetups for over three years, and anecdotally Id say there was a high correlation between repeat or even regular attendance at meetups and editor retention. Of course it is possible there are some editors who spot us, leave the pub and stop editing..... I also think that the "typical wiki career = 18 months" myth that was quoted a few years ago is long gone.

What I dont know is whether meetups are more attractive to the older editors who have settled on editing as a hobby and have a very high retention rate and less attractive to the younger editors with their shorter retention rate. Though obviously pub based meetups do exclude those who are clearly below the legal drinking age.

As for advertising meetups in ways unlikely to reach newer editors, nowadays all UK meetups are advertised on peoples watchlists via geo lookup. So we get a mix, and some of the editors we get are quite new. But Id agree back in the days when it was only advertised on Meta and invitations to people with London userboxes the London Meetup was far more cliquey. In some of my first meetups I was in minority as being a non-admin, nowadays most attendees are not admins.

WSC

At least from my impression, Wiki meetups are also used for those who want to establish themselves in the community and use their real life connections to get more editors voting for them or supporting them in certain situations. As an example, this does not seem to be a coincidence that four highly successful RFAs this year on English Wikipedia came right after Wikimania, whereas we were generally struggling this year with reasonably good editors having their RFA rejected.

I know users who did not manage to pass an RFA with many comments of the type "I do not know this guy". Then they started to show up at the meetups, and the second RFA was successfull.

As an anecdotal case, I know a highly successful Russian Wikipedia editor who used a wikimeetup to physically assault another editor she disagreed with. She was fully supported by the organizers and apologized barely a year later.

Cheers Yaroslav

I met some of the Georgian editors last time I was in Tbilisi. They seem to have a very tight community, there aren't many of them but that means they are few enough that they can all work together on their "topic of the month ". Which couldn't be more different from the London meetups where some of the participants almost never interact on wiki.

As well as meetups we've also run editathon and other content focussed things in London as part of our GLAM and outreach programs. Articles like Hoxne Hoard certainly did get a lot of people editing together who had met in real life. Their retention effects will probably be different, and you can't measure that against non-participants as a base because there is also bound to be a halo effect amongst the people we invite. I know from another organisation that there are lots of people who feel happier about continued membership of an organisation that sends them interesting looking invites, even if they are currently too busy to take up those invites. So the total impact of say a backstage pass at a prestigious museum is much more than the obvious benefit to articles and retention of participants, as there will be people who feel very differently about their or indeed their partner's hobby if it involves such invitations.

As for the idea that people attend meetups to do well in elections, in 2010/11 I was one of the active nominators at RFA, and I can assure you there are several editors who I've met at meetups but who have decided not to run for adminship. So not everyone attends to boost their wiki career. Only two of my seven successful nominations have been London meetup regulars (though I think there've been times when London generated similar clusters of nominations to the Wikimania one you observed). So the verdict has to be that many don't attend to boost their wiki career, and don't assume that those who do run attended a meetup in order to boost their chances of winning. It sometimes just happens that I or others take the opportunity to persuade them to volunteer to be an admin.

WSC

On 19 November 2012 19:44, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 6:33 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:

...

Making a correlation between IRL meetings and activity is difficult unless you do it by hand. And then there's the question of what you might use as a control group as a basis for comparison.

I'd assume local culture plays a role and that any group looked at would not necessarily be usable beyond that... but for action type research, very usable. :)

-- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com

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