On 11/20/2013 9:20 AM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
That's actually an interesting question that has
been lurking beneath
all the "editing is going down" nervousness.
How much of that 'editing' was, in fact, busy work made immaterial by
technical advantage (bots, extensions, abusefilter)? The number of
antivandalism edits a /human/ has to do in a day has most certainly come
down a *lot* since c. 2006; this no doubt contributed to a large - now
diminishing - fraction of total edits.
It's not clear to me that the number of *productive* edits has been
going down all that much (if at all) in the past several years; the
proportion of edits that were tedious and repetitive clearly has.
Are you arguing that there is *value* in volunteers spending time on
work that could be automated? Except for artificially driving up edit
counts, that is time (and effort) that would be better spent pretty much
anywhere else!
A lot of work that gets automated is not necessarily difficult for
humans, just time-consuming. But volunteer time is not a resource we get
to allocate or control; the volunteers do. Simple tasks can help recruit
or retain contributors--providing a way to ease people into
participation, or a break to prevent burnout between tackling more
challenging projects. And while that time and effort might appear more
"valuable" if spent on other tasks, there's no guarantee that it in fact
would be.
For tasks that most contributors find unpleasant (dealing with certain
types of vandalism, perhaps), automation is clearly the way to go. But
repetition does not necessarily equal tedium in all circumstances or for
all people. Nor do we need to apply some business-type evaluation of
what constitutes "productive" effort, at least in the context of
volunteer work. If a task simply makes someone feel productive, their
own evaluation is what matters, and it can help them feel more engaged
and part of the community.
My general point is that opportunities for automation are best
considered with our overall mission in mind, not just the speed or
efficiency of a particular workflow. In certain situations, automation
that creates more work rather than removing it (such as by identifying
potential tasks and feeding them to editors) might be preferable. And
some of our tools already use such an approach, which is a good thing.
--Michael Snow