On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
Many, if not most, companies, major non-profit organizations and virtually all government agencies have a Human Resources department...
Would this be a possibility for the Wikipedia Project?
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tl;dr version of the below ~ possibly, but perhaps a shower of wikilove is adequate. ___________________________________________________________________
No doubt *some* form of group could be set up to address such issues, the big question is whether it would be staffed.
At Wikimania a chap from .de gave a talk on mentoring schemes. They appear to have quite a successful one. Our "adopt a user" programme [1] is much less so. Without care and diligence being given to the HR idea it may well lay fallow.
What would probably be better is for people to just be more encouraging of each other in general, more supportive and more recognition given to editors (which was another point raised at Wikimania). In this way at least when someone is getting frustrated there's a counter-balancing atmosphere of positivity.
I find that I spend hardly any time feeling part of a social atmosphere on Wikipedia. This will be in part because the community is so vast that I don't bump into the same people very often. Joining a Wikiproject would help, but I change my interests all the time and won't commit to a subject area. My editing activities often feel like floating on a vast ocean in a raft without companionship. For me, that's OK, I'm a misanthrope anyway and I get my social buzz from another site.
It is easy to make enemies on Wikipedia and far less easy to make friends. It appears to me that most Wikipedia friendships arise in the real world with meet-ups and 'Manias. But I was one of the people writing proposals for the strategy wiki about adding social features [2] which, one would hope, could bond people together a bit more.
It is correct to be concerned, however, that people might start spending too much time socialising and not enough time doing work :O)
I read something recently about Facebook using our articles as some kind of seeding facility for their groups structure. I can't find any stories about this now (anyone?) [3]. Perhaps if we were to embrace that, and actively collaborate with Facebook, people who have accounts on each could socialise on the Facebook/Wikipedia mash-up leaving WP much as it is; ie work-focused.
I'm digressing a little; to return to cases where long-term, valued users reach the end of their tether perhaps something quite simple like a page for people to log that they have left the project and asking them to give their reason would give us an opportunity to get in touch with them and try to persuade them to return (perhaps after a wikibreak). There was a survey done recently though (also covered at Wikimania), sent to users who had left the project and it turned out most of them described themselves as not having left, despite not having edited for 3 months.
The idea of a survey of former admins, to establish reasons for leaving the project, appears to have started up in May and looks like it's still in the planning stage [4]. Perhaps we can return to these issues when the results are in?
In this specific case I suggest anyone that knows the user to go and show some Wikilove. _________________________________________
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADOPT
[2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_features
[3] ???
[4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Community_Health/Former_admini... _________________________________________
en.User:Bodnotbod