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#Accu…
[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