Hi Birgitte
I greatly respect your opinion, and rarely found myself disagreeing with
you. I didn't want to reply in-line because I believe majority of your
opinions stem from the wisdom of the crowd model, which might best describe
the wiki model and the assumption that, it will continue to
prevail indefinitely. There have been several good points made by you and
others so far, but I have a direct question for you based on the assumption
that increased contributors will eventually increase quality of articles.
What if we add 50,000 vandals tomorrow? What if we also add 20,000 PR
agents/marketers bent on promoting their client?
What if they make 10 or 20 edits each for the next
month, it will satisfy
the statistical criteria for increase in contributors for WMF, it will also
satisfy your criteria for increasing the size of the crowd. What will
happen to the quality of articles, the work-load on admins and veteran
editors?
I snipped previous emails because your summary is accurate and this ended up being
massive. Fair warning.
Let's say this doesn't happen. Things stay exactly as they are now. No increase
in vandals nor PR agents nor anything other kind contributor for the rest of the year. Do
you imagine the workload for admins and veteran editors to be acceptable? Do you imagine
the quality of articles to be acceptable? They are not. I and am not talking about
award-winning levels of quality. I am speaking articles right now that were tagged as
being inaccurate, contradictory, or biased many months ago yet still are unaddressed. I
am thinking of known contributor's of copyright problems whose edits are cataloged and
are waiting for someone willing to tediously review them. I suspect a large factor in the
attrition of veteran editors is the current workload as it stands. It is hard to stay
motivated when you can't hardly notice your work has made any dent in the backlog.
I suppose I simply see the bigger concern to be: What if we don't add 1,000 new
curators who care to learn how to interpret copyright law and 3,000 new contributors who
are willing respond to RfCs and participate in peer review? The vandals will come as
inevitably as 8 year-olds transform into 12 year-olds. The PR agents are equally likely to
remain consistent. I don't really understand the basis of the concern that this
outreach is expected to add more vandals and PR agents. Why is it so suspect that this
project could add sincere and useful people which are, perhaps in some aspects of their
personality and/or circles of interest, simply a different kind of person than you and I
who self-selected to contribute without any such an overt program? But truthfully while
there are certainly tasks I selected to work on my own, because I find them inherently
captivating (poetry) or because I am inherently driven to understand and make sense out
what is presented as arbitrary and seeming senseless to me (copyright law), there are many
contributions of significance I have made only because an overt effort was made asking me
to contribute personally (peer review Evolution pre-FA) or by a generalized campaign
(Proofreads of the Month). So perhaps, the people brought in by such outreach won't
be such a different kind of contributor after all.
If the underlying concern is that there are not enough veteran editors willing to educate
them, or that these newcomers won't conform to our ways sufficently. Well then maybe
the newcomers can educate us instead. We are great at some things we have done, but we are
crap at a whole bunch of other things. And was all trial and error to begin with! If new
people come and want to do things differently, I can only imagine they will be trying to
change the crap things not the great ones.
The Wisdom of the crowd model is based on the notion that average of
assumptions will improve as the sample size increases. As the size of the
crowd increases, the mean of its aggregate estimates will keep improving.
For that purpose of the crowd, there is no distinction between any two
members of the said crowd, they are homogeneous. Real world rarely has such
a group, not to mention, there is no distinction made between the
motivation of why someone joined that crowd. Whether a member chose to be
there or was given a temporary incentive. The crowds model discounts both
these real world problems.
I disagree with this summary. In fact, the wisdom of crowds is considered wiser because
it assumes the members are *not* homogeneous. The model, however, does not give more
weight to members with qualities that normally would earn them weight in more traditional
models, which the point most people find counter-intuitive. The reason a larger crowd is
supposed to be wiser is because a larger crowd is assumed to be more diverse. I do not
see see why a diversity of motivations to participate should be any less desirable than
other forms of diversity.
The model works to a certain extent, I would guess
that there would be
direct correlation between most edited articles and highest rated ones. The
more eyes that see it, the more refined the article would be. I might be
wrong on this, but I recall someone mentioning a study done by IBM (not
certain if it was IBM) a couple of years ago, that found this exact
relation between articles and the number of edits. (If anyone knows what I
am referring to, then please mention the study or link me to it.)
There is no wiki model, it is something that just came to be. The
underlying software just promotes cooperation, but no one ever consciously
planned a model to base this on. It just came to be, and there is nothing
to base where it goes from here.
I agree I was speaking of the wisdom of crowds model more than the wiki model. I do think
there is a wiki-model which has emerged by happenstance and in fleshing it out below
realized that the wisdom of crowds is not really inherent to it. For the record, I
believe the key facets of a working wiki are as follows:
*Low barriers to participation
*Self-Governance by participants
*Participation is transparent
*Critical mass of participation is maintained
These are what seem to separate wikis which flourish from wikis which whither. But why
use a wiki if you do not want to form the wisdom of crowds? Looking up the key factors for
wisdom of the crowds are (these I am not just throwing out there like the above which I
really did write before looking this up!):
*Diversity of opinion
*Independence
*Decentralization
*Aggregation of output
So you can so see why wiki's are such a good model for forming the wisdom of the
crowds. Critical mass will often naturally grant a diversity of opinion. Self-Governance
inherently grants independence and often leads to decentralization (although I can imagine
wiki participants choosing a centralized governance model and losing that one).
Transparency means records which preserves all the raw data needed for aggregation. So the
two models are a natural fit and tend to feed into one another. After all, it is hard to
imagine a critical mass of participants governing themselves in any way at all familiar to
our experience without forming the wisdom of the crowds.
There have been several good points made already. We
rarely talk about the
quality of articles, number of featured articles, external collaborations,
projects, events, even milestones crossed by the sister projects. It see
mostly focused on the number of contributors, it leaves a lot out of the
view. Sj mentioned aspects of community building as important to retaining
editors, but is that really necessary? I don't believe social interaction
have a direct correlation with encyclopedia quality. A vibrant,
diversified, healthy community can still be inept at producing any good
content. Did any experienced editor need a community building exercise or
tool to start editing? The* condicio sine qua non* for what brought us here
is motivation of editors, self-motivation to be exact. No one directed this
crowd, incentivized, or socially engineered it to be here, we chose. No
amount of outreach can replace this primary ingredient for what we
anyone can place an incentive, it can not replace motivation.
I addressed some of this above and I hope the inline replies do not annoy you, it easier
for me to think of it in pieces. I am probably less "social" than the average
contributors, but still I feel the community aspect is truly necessary. Especially, with
regard to the more tedious chores of curation. If all we needed was people to share their
writings on subjects they are passionate about, I would hold your opinion. But community
is the power driving much necessary and tedious work (copyvio!). Honestly I burned out on
copyright years ago. But I remember thinking myself once upon a time thinking to myself
"I cannot leave all of this work for Moonriddengirl to do, no one else helping her!
I' ll at least fix X before calling it a night." I do not believe I had any
purely social interaction with her at the time of that experience (or ever!), but just
receiving some explanation from her and seeing her doing so much good work made me feel an
obligation to pitch in. I am certain SJ means community building as working together on a
common objective and necessary education of any contributors new to some area of the wiki,
rather than socializing for it's own sake. Proofread of the month at Wikisource is
probably a good example, but he can correct me if I have misunderstood. Along these lines,
I personally find community to be supremely motivating.
Truthfully I am highly self motivated to explore and understand things, the community,
however, is what motivates me to share my understanding. If I didn't feel community
engagement, I imagine I would have merely lurked till I got busy and forgot I had been
fascinated by the place. I am sure I would still consult Wikipedia and Wikisource, even if
I hadn't ever belonged to the community but I would rarely remember to pull back the
curtain and lurk. I have lurked in scores of places over the years, sometimes one thing in
particular will really motivate to comment. Mostly I begin to comment and find the barrier
to participating troublesome and change my mind, less often I actually leave a comment on
the topic that motivated me. Nowhere else have I stuck around more than three months. And
I am not even sure how you guys laid a claim on me. And it is not the overall project,
although I really still find the whole idea as marvelous as ever, it the people that I
bound to more than the idea. As I said I really don't have the strong individual
social ties that I see among others here. So I mean the collective of people, the
collective which also sees this Marvelous Possibility which barely resembles the feeble
attempts we have managed so far. I feel this collective belongs a little bit to me and
owns a little bit of me in return. That it would be irresponsible of me, no, worse
dishonorable of me, not to tell you guys that I see rocks ahead when I happen to see rocks
ahead. Or to stay quiet when people are talking about the sky falling and it all seems
rather normal to me. I know people can perceive me as angry sometimes (often?), but
really I am not so attached to what is finally decided out of my line of sight. However,
I do feel this obligation with you guys that I feel no where else outside of my employer,
with those things sent for public consumption. That I have share any strong convictions
with you, even when I find it unpleasant, in order to sleep in good conscience. It matters
much less to me whether or not my opinion prevails than that I offered it, that I
discharged my duty. So this is all rather anecdotal, but I believe community engagement is
really the only thing that has ever driven my participation past the curious stage. I
wanted to help the hard-working and helpful *people* I observed on the wikis long before I
understood the full implications of the project. And then at some point, which I
can't pin down, it had become my community where I was obligated to share myself,
which is an even stranger thing in my experience. This part is probably incomprehensible,
but I cannot articulate these thoughts any clearer. I tried not to use the word community
to steer clear of begging the question in describing community engagement, but substitute
community for any of that if makes more sense.
There is something unique about the editors, what they
gravitate towards.
It is not as simple as joining Facebook or twitter to share what someone
ate, or what they think of the new Lady Gaga song. Facebook can look at raw
figures, fall and rise in users and take steps to promote accordingly. The
basic idea is promoting communication, interaction and building a
community, and absolutely nothing more. Anyone with an internet connection
is a potential user in their case. We however, have a common purpose, the
communication and the community aspects are incidental to the common goal.
There is a barrier of entry, tomes of policies and guidelines to comply,
requirements to conform to standards. No matter how easy these are made,
they will always appeal to a limited subset of the Facebook audience.
Maybe my non-article writing background is influencing me here, but there really are
simple tasks anyone on Facebook could do (Proofread of the month). There are things that
can be done entirely individually without *needing* to understand a single policy tome
(peer review). I also imagine a lot of potential for breaking down existing backlogs into
some incremental tasks which could used as introduction to more complex issues. I am sure
there is all kinds of other stuff I haven't been exposed as well. And really do you
think people on Facebook really care that much about some song or what they ate? Those
people are just sitting in front of a computer feeling bored. They are being directly
prompted to "post your status" while eating a plate of food and the radio
playing in the background. They could equally satisfy their boredom being asked to do
something useful on a wiki. I don't imagine Facebook really appeals to them any more
than it appeals to me. It probably just appeals to them more than nothing at all.
BirgitteSB