Rachel diCerbo wrote:
... as the new Director of Community Engagement in Product I'm looking forward to getting to know you and others within this community.
Welcome, Rachel! I am so glad they hired you to do [1].
which as I'm sure most people reading this know, is the engineering effort with the most agile story points, or, as we used to say before statisticians became data scientists, has the maximum utility function for critical path goals, those being the only Foundation strategic objectives which have not been satisfactorily met, namely attracting additional editors. I have been trying to measure the ways Wikimedians think we can best meet those goals, and my preliminary results are promising but I wish your team would do the task because the last time I tried something like this, the outcome was unsatisfactory. I will gladly let you take my survey if you want to. Its is at [2]. The evolution of the ranking of its components over time never fails to amuse me, so please forgive me if it does not interest you.
If you step back and ask why attracting additional editors is important, then if your logic is anything like mine, and I believe correct logic is objective essentially for the same reason that 1+1 always equals 2, you will quickly come to the conclusion that [3] needs to be done the most. So, trying to automate general accuracy review is what was called "truth maintenance" around Boston in the late 1980s, and there are still "truth maintenance systems" associated with automatic theorem proving because of a functional isomorphism not unlike the isomorphism between reading and pronunciation tutors, but I digress. The point is that automating accuracy review is a lot more like negotiation of requirements in the agile scrum methodology than truth maintenance of even second order predicate calculus, because humans are involved.[4]
Please let me know your thoughts on whether a survey or accuracy review system would engage the community more. I believe that both would go further towards meeting the previously unresolved goals of the Foundation more than any other engineering effort undertaken so far to improve community engagement.
Best regards, James Salsman
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Community_...
[2] http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft
[3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Accur...
[4] Khan, U.Z., Wahab, F., & Saeed, S. (2014). Integration of Scrum with Win-Win requirements negotiation model, Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research, 19(1), 101–104. doi:10.5829/idosi.mejsr.2014.19.1.11770. http://www.idosi.org/mejsr/mejsr19(1)14/18.pdf