Hey folks,
I sent the note below to the staff and board a few hours ago: sharing now with everyone :-)
Thanks, Sue
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org Date: 20 March 2012 19:17 Subject: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team! To: Staff All wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org
Hey folks,
A couple of changes at the Wikimedia Foundation that I want you to know about.
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia’s projects is our top priority. To make better progress, as of April 16 we're going to bring together resources from the Community and Engineering/Product departments into a new cross-functional team tasked specifically with conducting small, rapid experiments designed to improve editor retention. We already know some of the fixes that will solve the editor retention problem, and we're working to put them in place. The purpose of *this* team will be to identify the fixes we don't yet know about.
Separately, Zack has to move back to Missouri for family reasons. When Zack told me about that, we agreed that it’s an extra impetus for this new team to be launched now. This means that going forward, Zack’s department will focus solely on fundraising, and some members of his department will move permanently into other groups. There have been lots of conversations about this over the past few weeks, which have included everyone affected.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
FUNDRAISING:
Zack will manage fundraising remotely. He’ll continue to be part of the C-level team, but he’ll do it from Missouri. He’ll travel back to San Francisco frequently, and he’ll probably be here throughout the fundraising campaign every year and spend other longer chunks of time here when needed.
We don’t yet know what the title of Zack’s department will be, or what Zack’s title will be. Neither Zack nor I care very much about titles, and we are in the happy position of not particularly needing to impress anyone -- so, we do not need fancy euphemistic titles. It would be nice to have titles that are clear and direct and understandable, and also to have ones that reflect the creative/storytelling/community aspect of the fundraising team’s work. So, we are leaving this piece open for the time being, and we’ll just call the department “fundraising” until and unless we think of something better. Folks with suggestions should talk with Zack. :-)
EDITOR ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENTATION:
Reflecting the importance of editor engagement in the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy, we will have the following teams directly focused on it:
**the Visual Editor group (led by Trevor as lead developer, and by the soon-to-be hired Technical Product Analyst) which is making the visual editor; **the Editor Engagement group (led by Fabrice Florin as Product Manager and Ian Baker as ScrumMaster) which is working on medium-term projects improving Wikimedia’s handling of reputation/identity and of notifications; **the new team focused on rapid experimentation, led by Karyn as Product Manager and a to-be-hired engineering lead/ScrumMaster, tentatively titled something like Research & Experimentation, Editor Engagement Innovation Lab or the Rapid Experimentation Team.
Our thinking is basically this: we know the Visual Editor will help with editor retention. We know that improving notifications, messaging, identity and other core features of MediaWiki will help with editor retention. But there are a handful of other smaller projects --maybe just simple tweaks, maybe ideas that should become fully-fledged new features-- that will also help. The purpose of the new experimentation team will be to conduct many quick experiments, which will identify a handful of small changes that can either be accomplished by the team itself, or be queued up as part of our overall product backlog.
Staff moving from the Community Dept to Engineering and Product Development (AKA Tech) are: Karyn Gladstone, Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Ryan Faulkner. They will form a team tasked with rapid experimentation to find policy, product or other changes that will increase editor retention. Karyn will head product thinking and maintain the experimentation backlog, reporting to Howie. Alolita will hire and manage the engineers for this team, and will help interface them with the rest of the engineering organization. The important thing to know about this team is that they are being tasked with one of our absolutely most important objectives: to figure out new ways to increase editor engagement and retention.
Karyn will report to Howie. Maryana, Ryan Faulker, and Steven will report to Karyn. The group has never had engineering resources assigned to it, and it’s clear they need engineering resources. Therefore, Alolita will work in close partnership with Karyn to recruit an engineering team --mostly developers but also UI/design people-- to support the new group. If you have ideas for people we should be recruiting for this, please tell Alolita or Karyn!
Dario Taraborelli will join the editor engagement experimentation team as senior researcher and help design the roadmap and the individual experiments the team will run.
We don’t yet have a firm title for the experimentation team, nor do we know yet what Karyn’s title will be, or whether other people’s titles (like, Steven or Maryana’s) will change. The team will figure this out, and to that end they’re kicking it around with other staff and with some folks in the community.
FELLOWSHIPS:
As most of you know, Siko runs our fellowship program. The fellowship program has lots of similarities to Asaf’s work on the grants program -- they are both, at heart, about giving funding and other support to members of the Wikimedia community to enable people to do useful work. The community-building projects that fellows often take on line up with some of Global Dev’s work, particularly as the fellowship program expands its global reach. So as we’ve been talking through Zack’s move and the implications for the Community department, it makes sense to shift Siko to Global Development. Siko’s title remains Head of Community Fellowships for now and she will report to Barry. Fellows and fellowship projects are continuing as planned, and you are still highly encouraged to keep an eye peeled for community members with good fellowship ideas. :)
EDITOR RETENTION OVERALL:
Finally, I want to talk for a minute about editor retention overall. As you know, we started the year with two major goals: the increase the number of mobile pageviews to two billion, and to push up the number of active editors to 95K. We’re doing fine on mobile reach (yay!) but we are completely failing to move the needle on the number of active Wikimedia editors.
That doesn’t reflect poorly on the people who work on editor retention. It’s a complex problem that took a decade to develop, and the team doesn’t control all the variables affecting it. It makes sense that it will take time to fix.
But it does mean that we need to increase the resources focused on it, so we can get more done faster. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re reorganizing to focus our existing resources more tightly, and we’ll also be adding new resources -- starting now, and continuing through the 2012-13 financial planning process. And, we’re going to move many/most of the editor-retention related people up to the 6th floor by the collab space. I really love the model Zack developed for the annual campaign -- the war room in Yongle, work visible on the walls for everyone, the buzz of people working hard towards a common purpose. I want us to have that same energy and momentum and focus for the editor retention work.
Sorry for this long note, but I figure you will all be curious about this and have questions, so the goal here was to anticipate everything and get it answered up-front. This note was crafted collectively by many people :-) If questions remain, please feel free to ask them, or to talk with any of the individuals involved. And thanks to everyone who contributed to creating this plan: I very much appreciate everyone’s single-minded focus on attacking the editor retention problem, and I look forward to future success moving the needle on it.
Everything I talk about in this mail will take effect April 16. Once it’s in your in-box, it’s no longer confidential, and you can feel free to talk about it publicly. I will forward it to announce-l, after I give you a couple of hours to read it yourselves. And please join me in congratulating the folks who are going to work on this important new team :-)
Thanks, Sue
Q What’s the impetus behind these changes?
A Two things. Mainly, we want to redouble our focus on attacking the editor retention problem, and it makes sense for us therefore to consolidate our efforts into a single focused mega-team. Secondarily, Zack has decided he needs to relocate to Missouri. We had already been talking about whether consolidation made sense -- with Zack moving, that accelerated those conversations.
Q What’s happening to Zack?
A Zack will lead our fundraising remotely, as a C-level employee. His title and the title of his team will change to reflect that, but no final decisions have been made yet about what those titles will be. Ideally we’d like to have a title for that department, and for Zack, that reflects the storytelling aspect of their work, telling the community’s stories to the world. But in the end we may settle for just calling it Fundraising, if we don’t think of anything better.
Q What’s happening to the Community Department?
A We initially created a community department because it made sense to have focused resources dedicated to understanding the community and being a centre of expertise about it for the Wikimedia Foundation. At the time that was the right thing to do, because although some individual staff members had lots of community understanding, the organization as a whole did not -- which meant it made sense for us to focus our energy, for a time, on researching and documenting and analysing the community. But having a Community Department was never a perfect fit for the Wikimedia Foundation the way it is for other internet companies, because community is not a small subset or a single aspect of what we do at the Wikimedia Foundation --- all our departments have interactions with community members for multiple different purposes, and over time we have been growing specific community expertise and responsibilities in multiple departments throughout the organization. As expertise grew elsewhere, having a community department became a less-good fit for us. Basically: it made sense to have a Community Department at the time when we did it, and it makes less sense now as the organization has matured and evolved.
Q Why are you integrating the Karyn/Ryan/Steven/Maryana group into Engineering and Product Development?
A The goal is to create a better model for rapid experimentation/innovation, with minimal hindrance to the work of our active editors and maximal gain in new community members. That group is not necessarily a perfect fit with Engineering and Product Development, but we think that’s okay: it’s a good fit, and being in that department will enable the team to increase its impact overall, by giving it better access to UI/design and engineering resources.
Q How is the new product team different from Fabrice’s team?
A The new team won’t focus on critical major changes to the platform (like the Visual Editor) or critical but equally complex projects like improving the mechanisms by which editors communicate and collaborate on the projects. This team will be much more fast-paced and experimental, identifying small-scale interventions that might make an impact on editor retention and quickly iterating through them on a weekly (or even daily) basis. Unlike Fabrice’s team, which has a list of projects that are known to be important and impactful, this team will quickly cycle through a large number of ideas that have not yet been tested in order to identify what does and doesn’t work, and what can be integrated into existing product roadmaps.
Q Will this new team be building new features?
A No. Ideas for new features that come out of successful experiments will be handed off to Fabrice’s team or elsewhere in engineering/tech as is appropriate for the task.
Q What kinds of projects will this new team be working on?
A Some of our projects will be similar to the template A/B testing conducted by Steven, Maryana, and Ryan Faulkner: small tweaks to existing community-built systems like template messaging. Others will focus on more innovative ways to engage new and current editors, using notifications, task assignment, and different kinds of incentives to keep editing. All of the projects will be temporary tests, not permanent large-scale changes, and focus on measuring effects to inform further decisions.
Q How can volunteers give input on this work?
A Ping Steven or Maryana.
Q Who will be in charge of this work?
A The C-level in charge of this team is Erik Moeller. The team reports to Karyn Gladstone.
Q Where will fellowships live and how do fellows fit with other teams?
A The fellowships program will move to Global Development, but the structure and scope of current and planned fellowships will not change. Fellows will continue to be recruited from the community to work on their own projects, supported by Siko Bouterse, Head of the Fellowships Program.
Q Where will other community projects live (e.g., summer researchers/analytics, community convenings)?
A Current community department projects will be integrated into either the new team or other teams in the organization, depending on their purpose. Convenings of various kinds will be staged on an ad hoc basis by multiple groups, including this one.
Q What’s happening to fundraising and storytelling?
A The fundraising team, which includes storytelling, will be managed by Zack and will continue to operate as planned.
Q Why is this all so confusing? The Wikimedia Foundation changes people’s titles and reporting lines all the time!
A Yes, we do :-) The Wikimedia Foundation is a pretty young organization: it’s growing, and doing lots of experimentation. We learn new things all the time, and we want to be able to apply what we’re learning, which includes restructuring/reinventing ourselves. If we were a hundred-year-old organization, or if we had tens of thousands of employees, it would be hard for us to adapt and change, because there would be too many layers of people who would need to be involved, and the downstream implications of even small changes would be serious. That’s a problem for big/old organizations, because it limits their adaptability. Luckily, at this point the Wikimedia Foundation is still small enough and young enough that we can afford to be reasonably flexible. That said, we know that this kind of change can be confusing for people who aren’t involved (at a minimum, it’s one more long e-mail to read), so we appreciate everybody’s patience :-)
Q How can I join this team?
A We’re hiring! We’re looking for more experienced editors to help us design experiments, track results, and communicate what we’re doing. We are also looking for strong front-and back-end developers to deploy experiments. If you’re interested in working with us, please check out available positions on the Wikimedia Foundation jobs page: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings
-- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
_______________________________________________ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Thanks for sending this through to us Sue, It sounds like some very interesting and big changes to the structure of the departments, but I must admit I find it pretty confusing with all the names of people and groups! I think it would greatly help if we could have an updated organisation chart of who is reporting to whom, and what departments they are all in. There used to be such a diagram on the staff page but it's no longer there http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff As the structure gets larger and more complicated I think that such a diagram is more and more important to have this available.
-Liam
wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata
On 21 March 2012 05:24, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey folks,
I sent the note below to the staff and board a few hours ago: sharing now with everyone :-)
Thanks, Sue
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org Date: 20 March 2012 19:17 Subject: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team! To: Staff All wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org
Hey folks,
A couple of changes at the Wikimedia Foundation that I want you to know about.
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia’s projects is our top priority. To make better progress, as of April 16 we're going to bring together resources from the Community and Engineering/Product departments into a new cross-functional team tasked specifically with conducting small, rapid experiments designed to improve editor retention. We already know some of the fixes that will solve the editor retention problem, and we're working to put them in place. The purpose of *this* team will be to identify the fixes we don't yet know about.
Separately, Zack has to move back to Missouri for family reasons. When Zack told me about that, we agreed that it’s an extra impetus for this new team to be launched now. This means that going forward, Zack’s department will focus solely on fundraising, and some members of his department will move permanently into other groups. There have been lots of conversations about this over the past few weeks, which have included everyone affected.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
FUNDRAISING:
Zack will manage fundraising remotely. He’ll continue to be part of the C-level team, but he’ll do it from Missouri. He’ll travel back to San Francisco frequently, and he’ll probably be here throughout the fundraising campaign every year and spend other longer chunks of time here when needed.
We don’t yet know what the title of Zack’s department will be, or what Zack’s title will be. Neither Zack nor I care very much about titles, and we are in the happy position of not particularly needing to impress anyone -- so, we do not need fancy euphemistic titles. It would be nice to have titles that are clear and direct and understandable, and also to have ones that reflect the creative/storytelling/community aspect of the fundraising team’s work. So, we are leaving this piece open for the time being, and we’ll just call the department “fundraising” until and unless we think of something better. Folks with suggestions should talk with Zack. :-)
EDITOR ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENTATION:
Reflecting the importance of editor engagement in the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy, we will have the following teams directly focused on it:
**the Visual Editor group (led by Trevor as lead developer, and by the soon-to-be hired Technical Product Analyst) which is making the visual editor; **the Editor Engagement group (led by Fabrice Florin as Product Manager and Ian Baker as ScrumMaster) which is working on medium-term projects improving Wikimedia’s handling of reputation/identity and of notifications; **the new team focused on rapid experimentation, led by Karyn as Product Manager and a to-be-hired engineering lead/ScrumMaster, tentatively titled something like Research & Experimentation, Editor Engagement Innovation Lab or the Rapid Experimentation Team.
Our thinking is basically this: we know the Visual Editor will help with editor retention. We know that improving notifications, messaging, identity and other core features of MediaWiki will help with editor retention. But there are a handful of other smaller projects --maybe just simple tweaks, maybe ideas that should become fully-fledged new features-- that will also help. The purpose of the new experimentation team will be to conduct many quick experiments, which will identify a handful of small changes that can either be accomplished by the team itself, or be queued up as part of our overall product backlog.
Staff moving from the Community Dept to Engineering and Product Development (AKA Tech) are: Karyn Gladstone, Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Ryan Faulkner. They will form a team tasked with rapid experimentation to find policy, product or other changes that will increase editor retention. Karyn will head product thinking and maintain the experimentation backlog, reporting to Howie. Alolita will hire and manage the engineers for this team, and will help interface them with the rest of the engineering organization. The important thing to know about this team is that they are being tasked with one of our absolutely most important objectives: to figure out new ways to increase editor engagement and retention.
Karyn will report to Howie. Maryana, Ryan Faulker, and Steven will report to Karyn. The group has never had engineering resources assigned to it, and it’s clear they need engineering resources. Therefore, Alolita will work in close partnership with Karyn to recruit an engineering team --mostly developers but also UI/design people-- to support the new group. If you have ideas for people we should be recruiting for this, please tell Alolita or Karyn!
Dario Taraborelli will join the editor engagement experimentation team as senior researcher and help design the roadmap and the individual experiments the team will run.
We don’t yet have a firm title for the experimentation team, nor do we know yet what Karyn’s title will be, or whether other people’s titles (like, Steven or Maryana’s) will change. The team will figure this out, and to that end they’re kicking it around with other staff and with some folks in the community.
FELLOWSHIPS:
As most of you know, Siko runs our fellowship program. The fellowship program has lots of similarities to Asaf’s work on the grants program -- they are both, at heart, about giving funding and other support to members of the Wikimedia community to enable people to do useful work. The community-building projects that fellows often take on line up with some of Global Dev’s work, particularly as the fellowship program expands its global reach. So as we’ve been talking through Zack’s move and the implications for the Community department, it makes sense to shift Siko to Global Development. Siko’s title remains Head of Community Fellowships for now and she will report to Barry. Fellows and fellowship projects are continuing as planned, and you are still highly encouraged to keep an eye peeled for community members with good fellowship ideas. :)
EDITOR RETENTION OVERALL:
Finally, I want to talk for a minute about editor retention overall. As you know, we started the year with two major goals: the increase the number of mobile pageviews to two billion, and to push up the number of active editors to 95K. We’re doing fine on mobile reach (yay!) but we are completely failing to move the needle on the number of active Wikimedia editors.
That doesn’t reflect poorly on the people who work on editor retention. It’s a complex problem that took a decade to develop, and the team doesn’t control all the variables affecting it. It makes sense that it will take time to fix.
But it does mean that we need to increase the resources focused on it, so we can get more done faster. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re reorganizing to focus our existing resources more tightly, and we’ll also be adding new resources -- starting now, and continuing through the 2012-13 financial planning process. And, we’re going to move many/most of the editor-retention related people up to the 6th floor by the collab space. I really love the model Zack developed for the annual campaign -- the war room in Yongle, work visible on the walls for everyone, the buzz of people working hard towards a common purpose. I want us to have that same energy and momentum and focus for the editor retention work.
Sorry for this long note, but I figure you will all be curious about this and have questions, so the goal here was to anticipate everything and get it answered up-front. This note was crafted collectively by many people :-) If questions remain, please feel free to ask them, or to talk with any of the individuals involved. And thanks to everyone who contributed to creating this plan: I very much appreciate everyone’s single-minded focus on attacking the editor retention problem, and I look forward to future success moving the needle on it.
Everything I talk about in this mail will take effect April 16. Once it’s in your in-box, it’s no longer confidential, and you can feel free to talk about it publicly. I will forward it to announce-l, after I give you a couple of hours to read it yourselves. And please join me in congratulating the folks who are going to work on this important new team :-)
Thanks, Sue
Q What’s the impetus behind these changes?
A Two things. Mainly, we want to redouble our focus on attacking the editor retention problem, and it makes sense for us therefore to consolidate our efforts into a single focused mega-team. Secondarily, Zack has decided he needs to relocate to Missouri. We had already been talking about whether consolidation made sense -- with Zack moving, that accelerated those conversations.
Q What’s happening to Zack?
A Zack will lead our fundraising remotely, as a C-level employee. His title and the title of his team will change to reflect that, but no final decisions have been made yet about what those titles will be. Ideally we’d like to have a title for that department, and for Zack, that reflects the storytelling aspect of their work, telling the community’s stories to the world. But in the end we may settle for just calling it Fundraising, if we don’t think of anything better.
Q What’s happening to the Community Department?
A We initially created a community department because it made sense to have focused resources dedicated to understanding the community and being a centre of expertise about it for the Wikimedia Foundation. At the time that was the right thing to do, because although some individual staff members had lots of community understanding, the organization as a whole did not -- which meant it made sense for us to focus our energy, for a time, on researching and documenting and analysing the community. But having a Community Department was never a perfect fit for the Wikimedia Foundation the way it is for other internet companies, because community is not a small subset or a single aspect of what we do at the Wikimedia Foundation --- all our departments have interactions with community members for multiple different purposes, and over time we have been growing specific community expertise and responsibilities in multiple departments throughout the organization. As expertise grew elsewhere, having a community department became a less-good fit for us. Basically: it made sense to have a Community Department at the time when we did it, and it makes less sense now as the organization has matured and evolved.
Q Why are you integrating the Karyn/Ryan/Steven/Maryana group into Engineering and Product Development?
A The goal is to create a better model for rapid experimentation/innovation, with minimal hindrance to the work of our active editors and maximal gain in new community members. That group is not necessarily a perfect fit with Engineering and Product Development, but we think that’s okay: it’s a good fit, and being in that department will enable the team to increase its impact overall, by giving it better access to UI/design and engineering resources.
Q How is the new product team different from Fabrice’s team?
A The new team won’t focus on critical major changes to the platform (like the Visual Editor) or critical but equally complex projects like improving the mechanisms by which editors communicate and collaborate on the projects. This team will be much more fast-paced and experimental, identifying small-scale interventions that might make an impact on editor retention and quickly iterating through them on a weekly (or even daily) basis. Unlike Fabrice’s team, which has a list of projects that are known to be important and impactful, this team will quickly cycle through a large number of ideas that have not yet been tested in order to identify what does and doesn’t work, and what can be integrated into existing product roadmaps.
Q Will this new team be building new features?
A No. Ideas for new features that come out of successful experiments will be handed off to Fabrice’s team or elsewhere in engineering/tech as is appropriate for the task.
Q What kinds of projects will this new team be working on?
A Some of our projects will be similar to the template A/B testing conducted by Steven, Maryana, and Ryan Faulkner: small tweaks to existing community-built systems like template messaging. Others will focus on more innovative ways to engage new and current editors, using notifications, task assignment, and different kinds of incentives to keep editing. All of the projects will be temporary tests, not permanent large-scale changes, and focus on measuring effects to inform further decisions.
Q How can volunteers give input on this work?
A Ping Steven or Maryana.
Q Who will be in charge of this work?
A The C-level in charge of this team is Erik Moeller. The team reports to Karyn Gladstone.
Q Where will fellowships live and how do fellows fit with other teams?
A The fellowships program will move to Global Development, but the structure and scope of current and planned fellowships will not change. Fellows will continue to be recruited from the community to work on their own projects, supported by Siko Bouterse, Head of the Fellowships Program.
Q Where will other community projects live (e.g., summer researchers/analytics, community convenings)?
A Current community department projects will be integrated into either the new team or other teams in the organization, depending on their purpose. Convenings of various kinds will be staged on an ad hoc basis by multiple groups, including this one.
Q What’s happening to fundraising and storytelling?
A The fundraising team, which includes storytelling, will be managed by Zack and will continue to operate as planned.
Q Why is this all so confusing? The Wikimedia Foundation changes people’s titles and reporting lines all the time!
A Yes, we do :-) The Wikimedia Foundation is a pretty young organization: it’s growing, and doing lots of experimentation. We learn new things all the time, and we want to be able to apply what we’re learning, which includes restructuring/reinventing ourselves. If we were a hundred-year-old organization, or if we had tens of thousands of employees, it would be hard for us to adapt and change, because there would be too many layers of people who would need to be involved, and the downstream implications of even small changes would be serious. That’s a problem for big/old organizations, because it limits their adaptability. Luckily, at this point the Wikimedia Foundation is still small enough and young enough that we can afford to be reasonably flexible. That said, we know that this kind of change can be confusing for people who aren’t involved (at a minimum, it’s one more long e-mail to read), so we appreciate everybody’s patience :-)
Q How can I join this team?
A We’re hiring! We’re looking for more experienced editors to help us design experiments, track results, and communicate what we’re doing. We are also looking for strong front-and back-end developers to deploy experiments. If you’re interested in working with us, please check out available positions on the Wikimedia Foundation jobs page: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings
-- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
I think it would greatly help if we could have an updated organisation chart of who is reporting to whom, and what departments they are all in.
The static graphics stopped being maintainable. We're exploring a couple of options for data-driven org chart generation and should have a publicly visible up-to-date org chart again soon.
Sue Gardner wrote:
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
Thank you for sharing this.
How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement).
Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
MZMcBride
A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect.
But realistically, when you look at the total numbers and combine that with manual, qualitative checking of small samples, it's difficult to hold too much hope for that. There is too much evidence that high quality contributors are quitting early in their careers (like in the first months, or weeks) at a much higher rate than they used to. That's why the perspective of most staff at the foundation and most contributors who have looked closely at the situation, is that we better assume we've got a serious problem and work to correct it.
Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of declining numbers.
Zack Exley wrote:
A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect.
I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org.
Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society.
I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is "my article was deleted, help!" when the article was never appropriate for an encyclopedia to begin with.
Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of declining numbers.
Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise. Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal. But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being driven in are the type we want?
And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit?
MZMcBride
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Zack Exley wrote:
A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or
the
quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis
of
contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect.
I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org.
Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society.
I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is "my article was deleted, help!" when the article was never appropriate for an encyclopedia to begin with.
Sorry, just want to jump in here and provide a citation for Zack's speculation on new user quality. We actually did this studyhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_quality#Conclusion:) (Props and shout-outs to Aaron Halfaker, who set this up.)
With all the usual caveats about small-scale one-time qualitative research studies in place... the conclusion appears to be that the quality of new editors hasn't really changed much over the years, and most new editors are still (and always have been) trying to help the encyclopedia. Perhaps when viewed from the perspective of new page patrollers, there appears to be a significant rise in spammers and SPAs, but it's important to remember that there are many non-article-creating newbies out there. The other important thing to note from this study is that the rate of rejection (deletion or reverts) of new users' edits is disproportionate to the number of poor quality contributions, which means there are just as many good new editors now as there always have been, but they're entering an environment that's increasingly suspicious and critical of their work and, predictably, they aren't sticking around.
So, personally, no, I'm not too worried that by opening the door a little wider for new contributors (and by holding it open long enough for them to learn all the social and technical nuances of editing), we're going to attract a flood of spammers and self-promoters. Those people will always be there, of course, but the community has developed pretty good methods of dealing with them, and ultimately they're a small part of a big community of people who just want to write a damn good encyclopedia :)
Maryana
Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions
of
declining numbers.
Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise. Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal. But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being driven in are the type we want?
And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit?
MZMcBride
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Zack Exley wrote:
A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or
the
quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis
of
contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect.
I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org.
Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society.
OK, don't know what you're talking about there... did moveon ever work on mandatory voting laws? but anyways...
I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is "my article was deleted, help!" when the article was never appropriate for an encyclopedia to begin with.
I agree that most new users are not high quality and many are spammers, PR people, band managers, etc... with little regard for the values of the projects. There are hundreds of thousands of such users each year. But the vast majority of new users have always been destined not to become great wikimedians. That's not new.
But each year there has also been a large number (in the low thousands -- just guestimating) of new users who really want to be part of creating a great project and are fully aligned with the values of the project they're trying to join.
When we look back at user-to-user interactions in 2001-2004, we see that established users had very high standards and were often unwelcoming or even rude, but they were putting effort into finding the needles in haystacks who would be great Wikimedians. They were saying over and over, "It's really hard to do what we do, but we're doing something amazing, if you stick around and learn the ropes, we could really use you."
Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing a personal note about a specific edit. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. But I'm just trying to make clear (since you didn't hear it the first time I said it) that I wasn't arguing for coddling spammers or even investing time into encouraging all good faith users.
There are a ton of amazing new users who make their 10th -- or 100th, or 1000th -- high quality edit every week. We just need to encourage them (instead of merely blanketing their talk pages with impersonal warnings).
Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions
of
declining numbers.
Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise. Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal. But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being driven in are the type we want?
And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit?
MZMcBride
On 21 March 2012 22:32, Zack Exley zexley@wikimedia.org wrote:
Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing a personal note about a specific edit.
And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are completely bot-generated.
That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test.
I know the solution is not to just stop using templates.
I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not the sort of gamification that is useful.
That said, anyone who's ever done Special:Newpages will deeply empathise with ax-crazy newpages patrollers, because Special:Newpages is a firehose of *shit*. How's the article wizard's output looking?
- d.
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:49 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are completely bot-generated.
That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test.
I know the solution is not to just stop using templates.
I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not the sort of gamification that is useful.
If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't want to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human.
Steven
----- Original Message ----- From: "Steven Walling" steven.walling@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 10:57 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:49 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are completely bot-generated.
That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test.
I know the solution is not to just stop using templates.
I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not the sort of gamification that is useful.
If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't want to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human.
Steven
I don't know what you're doing, or where, but it seems to me that templates often seem to be trying to do too much. One solution might be to have some generics for particular issues with a mandatory freetext field, in which the templater would be required to explain exactly what is wrong with the templatee's edit, in the templater's opinion. I realise this might be a hostage to fortune in possibly amplifying discord, but good templaters should be happy to help and explain their reversions, and it would focus the minds of those others who issue templates willy-nilly.
I think the above comment about Twinkle and Huggle is perfectly valid; after all, if you can push a button rather than engage and educate an editor, those tools make it all to easy so to do.
If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't want to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human.
Steven
Well, just to prohibit or strongly discourage templating articles unless really necessary and try to shift people back to the fix-it culture.
To strongly discourage templating users pages with a few exceptions such as vandalism and copyvio templates. To greet users manually and only then give the hello template.
So, yes, I am letting you know as requested.
Cheers Yaroslav
Zack Exley wrote:
MZMcBride wrote:
I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org.
Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society.
OK, don't know what you're talking about there... did moveon ever work on mandatory voting laws? but anyways...
The comparison was a focus on trying to engage people to participate who were too apathetic or ignorant to get engaged themselves. MoveOn.org has done a lot of voter registration work, but for them, just as for Wikimedia, it's a numbers game more than anything else. The focus isn't adding 1,000 new voters who are well-versed in (or even familiar with) politics, it's about adding 1,000 new voters. Similarly, Wikimedia's goal isn't to increase the amount of quality content-producing contributors, it's to increase the number of contributors.
You seem to be arguing that the goal _really is_ to add quality contributors and that this goal simply isn't being communicated effectively when the subject is raised, but is there evidence of what you're saying? There's plenty of evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase participation (both of us agree on this point). Is there evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase quality participation? Is there evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase quality content? If so, can you share? :-)
When we look back at user-to-user interactions in 2001-2004, we see that established users had very high standards and were often unwelcoming or even rude, but they were putting effort into finding the needles in haystacks who would be great Wikimedians. They were saying over and over, "It's really hard to do what we do, but we're doing something amazing, if you stick around and learn the ropes, we could really use you."
I wasn't around in this period (and I don't think you were either?), but if you ask nearly anyone from that period whether Wikimedia wikis are more friendly and collegial now than they were then, what do you think their responses would be?
Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing a personal note about a specific edit. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. But I'm just trying to make clear (since you didn't hear it the first time I said it) that I wasn't arguing for coddling spammers or even investing time into encouraging all good faith users.
What are you arguing for? It's still unclear to me.
How much editing work have you personally engaged in? I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Zackexley, but I assume that's just your staff account, right? You speak with an authority about templates and user talk pages and such, so I can't imagine you've never personally engaged with the subject. What have your experiences been?
There are a ton of amazing new users who make their 10th -- or 100th, or 1000th -- high quality edit every week. We just need to encourage them (instead of merely blanketing their talk pages with impersonal warnings).
Can you show an example of a user making his or her 10th, 100th, or 1000th high quality edit who's being blanketed with impersonal warnings? I don't understand this phenomenon, though it sounds fascinating.
MZMcBride
On 22 March 2012 00:11, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Can you show an example of a user making his or her 10th, 100th, or 1000th high quality edit who's being blanketed with impersonal warnings? I don't understand this phenomenon, though it sounds fascinating.
I'm around the hundred thousands and I still get 'em. Templates are fundamentally a way to insulate yourself from dealing with others.
- d.
On 21 March 2012 13:53, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
Thank you for sharing this.
How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
One key issue is that targets need to be measurable, or they don't work. It is very easy to measure the number of people contributing. It is much harder to measure the quality of what they produce.
The Foundation's strategy plan is here:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_StrategicPlan2011_spreads.pdf
See pages 10 and 11 for the bit on improving quality. A lot of it is focused on measuring quality, because that is a real challenge (and, in fact, simply measuring something can be enough to prompt a significant improvement).
The Foundation's 2011-12 annual plan is here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foun...
The targets for the year are on page 28 and don't specifically mention quality. I would like to hear an explanation for that from someone at the Foundation. I'm guessing there isn't a target for actually improving quality because we aren't yet at the stage where we can measure it effectively, but wouldn't a target to produce a good quality measuring system have been good?
On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
Thank you for sharing this.
How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement).
Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
MZMcBride
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed?
BirgitteSB
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a
crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed?
BirgitteSB
I am not sure whether I want to dispute this but let me put it in this way: This statement is not obvious and should be proven by research. Moreover, it could be true for some areas and false for other areas. Whereas, not to offend anybody, the quality of articles on football players of major clubs (I guess) are proportional to the quantity of editors, the quality of an article on Landauer formula (which I am going to create now) is probably not a such simple function of a number of contributors. And on top of this, the conclusions may change with time.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:35 AM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed?
An astute observation.
I do believe the end goal is increasing the size of the collected wisdom, whether it is achieved by merely increasing the size of the crowd so the mean is more accurate or some other approach entirely. There isn't a lot of experiments or past projects to base this on, but I don't believe that the same numbers approach is the right way to proceed.
What the concern should be, in this particular case, is the almost myopic focus on the statistical rise and fall in the number of contributors. And that too, focused on one language of one project. Regardless of which side of the argument one is on, you can not overlook the importance of getting a complete picture.
I suppose it is revealing that some of the earlier criticism already on this thread, is about the impersonal nature of interactions and usage of automated tools and templates. Individualism is usually the first casualty of collectivist constructs. Collectivism replaces the individual nature for a more linear, modular, yet parsimonious approach to interaction. As it should, I suppose, since the sole focus is on increasing the collective and nothing more. They are both very related, you will have more usage of templates, and automated tools, and less personal interactions, as the size grows and only new, possibly temporary contributors join on an hourly basis.
Templates or automated tools do not directly cause any rise or fall in the number of contributors, they and their increased usage, is merely the symptom of the underlying issue.
Regards Theo
There are many good reasons to attract new contributors - from countering systemic bias to higher quality over time to new forms of collective wisdom that emerge as people currently overwhelmed with admin work have time to reflect and find better ways to work.
Technically, we could attract raw contributors with the flick of a finger: by encouraging editing via sitenotices. But attracting people who won't contribute well, or will have a bad experience -- or doing so when there is no good way to integrate them into the project -- could simply waste everyone's time. That's a reason to try lots of small experiments and see what works and what might scale.
So even the simplest 'editor retention' or 'editor recruitment' project starts from the assumption that quality contributions, and solid contributors, are wanted. That doesn't mean mistakes aren't sometimes made.
As others noted, new contributors questions are more interesting in languages other than the largest ones. Sometimes research and experiments 'cluster under lampposts' where other work has already been done. But I believe there is better multilingual and multiproject data now than we were last year.
@Theo: Yes, more human interactions rather than bots and templates are valuable to building a lasting community. Human interaction and a friendly welcome are also things that many newbies can do well with a little practice. So the right framework for new contributors could in theory cover many of its own scaling costs. We simply haven't found such a framework yet.
SJ
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:17 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:35 AM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed?
An astute observation.
I do believe the end goal is increasing the size of the collected wisdom, whether it is achieved by merely increasing the size of the crowd so the mean is more accurate or some other approach entirely. There isn't a lot of experiments or past projects to base this on, but I don't believe that the same numbers approach is the right way to proceed.
What the concern should be, in this particular case, is the almost myopic focus on the statistical rise and fall in the number of contributors. And that too, focused on one language of one project. Regardless of which side of the argument one is on, you can not overlook the importance of getting a complete picture.
I suppose it is revealing that some of the earlier criticism already on this thread, is about the impersonal nature of interactions and usage of automated tools and templates. Individualism is usually the first casualty of collectivist constructs. Collectivism replaces the individual nature for a more linear, modular, yet parsimonious approach to interaction. As it should, I suppose, since the sole focus is on increasing the collective and nothing more. They are both very related, you will have more usage of templates, and automated tools, and less personal interactions, as the size grows and only new, possibly temporary contributors join on an hourly basis.
Templates or automated tools do not directly cause any rise or fall in the number of contributors, they and their increased usage, is merely the symptom of the underlying issue.
Regards Theo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
.. Technically, we could attract raw contributors with the flick of a finger: by encouraging editing via sitenotices. But attracting people who won't contribute well...
That sounds like a great idea for projects where the readership and/or editorship is low. On those projects, it is very likely that a reader with even a tiny interest in editing can be converted to a good editor, and they are worth the effort because they have a few rare qualities: they can read the language and they have found the project.
Has there been any investigations in how we should use sitenotices (and landing pages) to maximise the chance that a reader is converted, where this is sensible?
... But I believe there is better multilingual and multiproject data now than we were last year.
Is there any WMF funded research in this area? Is the data available?
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 7:36 AM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
That sounds like a great idea for projects where the readership and/or editorship is low. On those projects, it is very likely that a reader with even a tiny interest in editing can be converted to a good editor, and they are worth the effort because they have a few rare qualities: they can read the language and they have found the project.
Has there been any investigations in how we should use sitenotices (and landing pages) to maximise the chance that a reader is converted, where this is sensible?
We did try this on a couple of occasions, I believe with the Indic language projects.
In the 2010 fundraiser, when central notice was still new, I was tasked with trying this out with the Indic projects. We had a contribute banner Geo-located to Indian visitors that lead to a page directing visitors to local projects[1]. This approach might have been considered again by the WMF India programs at a later juncture, I'm not sure what data might be available on this. I found out the infrastructure on the small Indic language projects was not up to par; directing visitors to help pages in local languages, and policy pages, was much harder than English Wikipedia, they didn't exist in some cases.
Anyway, we did not receive any positive feedback or saw any measurable impact on the projects when this was undertaken. There might be data to analyze related to this, but I'm only speaking from my own perspective.
I'm curious to see this approach tried on other English language projects, as well as more languages of Wikipedia in the 100,000 article range. If anyone is interested in investigating, this can be easily set-up on Meta.
Getting back a bit to the earlier topic, and what Sj said, I agree human interactions are indeed valuable to building communities, but the community is getting too large. The ratio of experienced editors vs. new editors, enthusiasts is not proportionate, add to that the vandals, clean-up and regular editorial work, there is only a finite amount of time that can go towards forming personal bonds. I agree, welcoming users and having friendly interactions is something any new user can do, but most are not directed towards those things. While ideal, it might not even be necessary to have such interactions in order to support the commons goal. Incidentally, Facebook relies on automated tools, and notifications, to engage and retain its user-base.
Regards Theo
[1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/IN/Welcome
Samuel Klein wrote:
Technically, we could attract raw contributors with the flick of a finger: by encouraging editing via sitenotices. But attracting people who won't contribute well, or will have a bad experience -- or doing so when there is no good way to integrate them into the project -- could simply waste everyone's time. That's a reason to try lots of small experiments and see what works and what might scale.
Did you read http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-March/072776.html?
Experiments are acceptable... sometimes. They come with a cost. I think both sides (the Wikimedia Foundation staff and Wikimedians) acknowledge that the past experiments have failed or haven't done as well as everyone hoped. I don't think both sides acknowledge the cost of performing these types of experiments. _That's_ an issue.
There are many good reasons to attract new contributors - from countering systemic bias to higher quality over time to new forms of collective wisdom that emerge as people currently overwhelmed with admin work have time to reflect and find better ways to work.
Right, but going back to my opening reply, my questions still seem to sit unanswered. I think everyone agrees that you're going to need people to do the work. But the larger issue is that not everyone seems to have the same mission right now.
Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational content. At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and there's a huge focus on "building the movement." But my question was (and is): how much discussion has there been internally about this (the focus on simply boosting the number of contributors) being the wrong approach? And is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
There seems to be a fundamental difference of opinion about what Wikimedia's mission actually is (and how to best achieve it). For the Wikimedia Foundation, the goalposts seem to have shifted and it's now all about adding people to build a movement. Is this the right approach, though?
MZMcBride
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Experiments are acceptable... sometimes.
MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism!
I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow 'optional' or new. Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project build around being bold and low barriers to participation. We should simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops, and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once.
Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational content.
It's funny, you've said this three times so far this thread :-) But if you read the mission again, I think you'll find you are mistaken.
Wikimedia's mission is to *empower and engage people* to develop content. There's nothing about quality, unless you assume that an empowered and engaged society will produce high quality materials. (As it turns out, in practice if not in theory, we do.)
Our goal is global engagement of creators; and providing infrastructure to empower their work.
At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and there's a huge focus on "building the movement."
See above; this isn't new.
We are a community dedicated to organizing and sharing knowledge; not the knowledge itself. That's what 'movement' means for us.
We have produced some great collections over time, yes; who doesn't love Wikispecies, now the most thorough collection of its kind? But we have also produced translation networks, global citation standards, new social norms and standards for sharing, proposed national policy in countries everywhere; and have inspired a new generation of creators and sharers. We aren't replicating what high-quality publishing houses have done for centuries, just under a free license... We are doing something fundamentally different in scale, decentralization, motivation, and flexibility.
There are many things we can learn from old models of collaboration; but giving up ease of experimentation and warning off newbies aren't among them.
the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
I do support those who focus on the quality of our existing content. But other priorities -- from expanding content scope and formats, to expanding the editing community -- also deserve support.
SJ
There are so many potential ways of recruiting new high-quality editors. However, at the moment almost all of them founder (at least on the English Wikipedia) on the likely reception of peoples' first edits.
Take, for the sake of argument, Wikimedia UK's donor list. There are 50,000 people who care enough about Wikipedia to have put their hands in their pockets to donate to it, and who are on the whole very well-educated - in short, just what you want for "high-quality" contributors. (If someone has given money to support Wikipedia, it's unlikely that if they tried to edit it, they would be consciously trying to damage it).
It would be relatively easy to get 1% - maybe 10% - of them to try editing with a well-written email or two. However, at the moment, most of them probably wouldn't find it a positive experience if they did, which is a shame...
Chris
Samuel Klein wrote:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Experiments are acceptable... sometimes.
MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism!
I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow 'optional' or new. Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project build around being bold and low barriers to participation. We should simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops, and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once.
You seem to continue to ignore the cost of experimentation. When you unleash a classroom full of people on Wikipedia who start messing up articles and performing other actions that need to be reverted, is it Wikimedia Foundation staff who will be cleaning up the mess? It becomes a whole different issue when it's not random people messing up articles, but instead it's Wikimedia Foundation-sponsored contributors. You're far too smart to not realize this already; why are you ignoring or side-stepping these and other costs of experimentation?
Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational content.
It's funny, you've said this three times so far this thread :-) But if you read the mission again, I think you'll find you are mistaken.
Wikimedia's mission is to *empower and engage people* to develop content. There's nothing about quality, unless you assume that an empowered and engaged society will produce high quality materials. (As it turns out, in practice if not in theory, we do.)
Imagine a world in which there's a global movement with only mediocre content to show for it. That should go on a bumper sticker. If the Wikimedia Foundation is allowed to add "movement" jargon, I think I'm entitled to say that the goal is to make something high-quality. Fair's fair.
Our goal is global engagement of creators; and providing infrastructure to empower their work.
This sounds great. Is that what's actually happening? Providing infrastructure that empowers people is fantastic. Build better software and other tools that allow people to create beautiful and creative and interesting content.
What you're saying nearly anyone on this list would have difficulty disagreeing with (which is, I believe, partially why you're saying it). But "snap back to reality": what's happening right now is a hawkeyed focus on a boost of the number of contributors. Increasing participation for statistics' sake. And the associated infrastructure (tool development, staff allocation, etc.) is equally focused on this goal. And this doesn't even get into the issue of sister projects (or any project other than the English Wikipedia, really), which have received no support.
At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and there's a huge focus on "building the movement."
See above; this isn't new.
The word "movement" is not new. Its prevalence is.
I do support those who focus on the quality of our existing content. But other priorities -- from expanding content scope and formats, to expanding the editing community -- also deserve support.
For me and for the people that Wikimedia serves (its readers), it's never been about the community. I'm reminded of this quote from Risker's user page on the English Wikipedia: "Our readers do not care one whit who adds information to articles; they care only that the information is correct."
Your suggestion that there is something more important than the content simply seems wrong to me. The content is what people come for. The content is what people return for. The content is king. As iridescent once said, "without content, Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people."
Obviously _a_ focus on the human component is important. Bots aren't writing articles or writing dictionary definitions or taking and uploading images (yet!), but content has to be _the_ focus. The primary focus cannot simply be adding more people to the pile to build a movement. We are not trying to Occupy Wikipedia; we are trying to build something of educational value for the future. The idea has always been that even if the movement disappeared (and with it the Wikimedia Foundation), the content would remain. It has to be treated with respect and be given due deference in resource allocation and in the goals that the Wikimedia Foundation makes a priority.
MZMcBride
I feel compelled to express my agreement with MZMcBride. I find his questioning pertinent. I wish the quality of content were at the core of the WMF. I feel disappointed by the direction it is choosing, and by the elusiveness of Samuel Klein whose wisdom I used to respect greatly. What happened, Samuel?
Le 24/03/2012 12:52, MZMcBride a écrit :
Samuel Klein wrote:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Experiments are acceptable... sometimes.
MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism!
I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow 'optional' or new. Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project build around being bold and low barriers to participation. We should simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops, and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once.
You seem to continue to ignore the cost of experimentation. When you unleash a classroom full of people on Wikipedia who start messing up articles and performing other actions that need to be reverted, is it Wikimedia Foundation staff who will be cleaning up the mess? It becomes a whole different issue when it's not random people messing up articles, but instead it's Wikimedia Foundation-sponsored contributors. You're far too smart to not realize this already; why are you ignoring or side-stepping these and other costs of experimentation?
Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational content.
It's funny, you've said this three times so far this thread :-) But if you read the mission again, I think you'll find you are mistaken.
Wikimedia's mission is to *empower and engage people* to develop content. There's nothing about quality, unless you assume that an empowered and engaged society will produce high quality materials. (As it turns out, in practice if not in theory, we do.)
Imagine a world in which there's a global movement with only mediocre content to show for it. That should go on a bumper sticker. If the Wikimedia Foundation is allowed to add "movement" jargon, I think I'm entitled to say that the goal is to make something high-quality. Fair's fair.
Our goal is global engagement of creators; and providing infrastructure to empower their work.
This sounds great. Is that what's actually happening? Providing infrastructure that empowers people is fantastic. Build better software and other tools that allow people to create beautiful and creative and interesting content.
What you're saying nearly anyone on this list would have difficulty disagreeing with (which is, I believe, partially why you're saying it). But "snap back to reality": what's happening right now is a hawkeyed focus on a boost of the number of contributors. Increasing participation for statistics' sake. And the associated infrastructure (tool development, staff allocation, etc.) is equally focused on this goal. And this doesn't even get into the issue of sister projects (or any project other than the English Wikipedia, really), which have received no support.
At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and there's a huge focus on "building the movement."
See above; this isn't new.
The word "movement" is not new. Its prevalence is.
I do support those who focus on the quality of our existing content. But other priorities -- from expanding content scope and formats, to expanding the editing community -- also deserve support.
For me and for the people that Wikimedia serves (its readers), it's never been about the community. I'm reminded of this quote from Risker's user page on the English Wikipedia: "Our readers do not care one whit who adds information to articles; they care only that the information is correct."
Your suggestion that there is something more important than the content simply seems wrong to me. The content is what people come for. The content is what people return for. The content is king. As iridescent once said, "without content, Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people."
Obviously _a_ focus on the human component is important. Bots aren't writing articles or writing dictionary definitions or taking and uploading images (yet!), but content has to be _the_ focus. The primary focus cannot simply be adding more people to the pile to build a movement. We are not trying to Occupy Wikipedia; we are trying to build something of educational value for the future. The idea has always been that even if the movement disappeared (and with it the Wikimedia Foundation), the content would remain. It has to be treated with respect and be given due deference in resource allocation and in the goals that the Wikimedia Foundation makes a priority.
MZMcBride
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Oh come on people - this is yet another Foundation-l discussion that has gone off the rails.."the elusiveness of Samuel Klein"? sounds like a thriller novel.. I'm not sure we need to be attacking other volunteers here. :/
There are dozens of ways to approach new editor engagement. I respect that we should allow equal space for each of those ideas. However, once a decision has been made, and you re-voiced your ideas and concerns..do we have to do it over and over and over again after that? I think everyone on this list understands where folks stand, but can we have a more productive conversation about how to move forward and not get into long philosophical discussions on the way we wish things were...
This decision has been made. I haven't read any new ideas or bits of information in this thread for a few days. What are some concrete things folks would like done now that this decision has been made? Other than SJ being less elusiveness (whatever that means) and for WMF to once again contemplate content quality in decision making. Although it's not clear to me that it wasn't considered here - there's just a basic disagreement on the value of types of editors..which has been ongoing for years and is not going to be resolved in this thread.
Personally, I think this is fantastic direction for WMF to be taking (I know that's a shock). I would rather invest in teaching a classroom of students how to become Wikipedia editors rather than hope that the existing pool of editors remains alive forever. This all seems like rather basic and fundamental volunteer recruitment strategies. Maybe not if this were an academic research institute run by Harvard...but it's not...tolerating people's mistakes along the way to molding them into a growing team of great editors seems well worth the investment of other volunteers time. If you disagree - don't engage in cleaning up their mess. I'd sacrifice one obnoxious A+ quality editor for ten committed, enthusiastic and community oriented B+ quality editors any day. History has shown repeatedly that the work of the ten will outshine the work of that one person. Many nonprofits have to sacrifice hostile and highly productive volunteers to attract more volunteers for future growth - there's always concern it will backfire (usually coming from the hostile volunteers on their way out) and it almost always works out..given Wikipedia's size..I'm not losing much sleep over it..I'd be surprised if the board, staff, developers or others were.. It seems if Wikipedia didn't follow this strategy we'd still be using Nupedia. Focusing on recruitment of just the experts over the masses didn't win out then - doubt it will now.
-greg aka varnent
On Mar 24, 2012, at 11:44 AM, cyrano cyrano.fawkes@gmail.com wrote:
I feel compelled to express my agreement with MZMcBride. I find his questioning pertinent. I wish the quality of content were at the core of the WMF. I feel disappointed by the direction it is choosing, and by the elusiveness of Samuel Klein whose wisdom I used to respect greatly. What happened, Samuel?
Le 24/03/2012 12:52, MZMcBride a écrit :
Samuel Klein wrote:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Experiments are acceptable... sometimes.
MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism!
I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow 'optional' or new. Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project build around being bold and low barriers to participation. We should simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops, and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once.
You seem to continue to ignore the cost of experimentation. When you unleash a classroom full of people on Wikipedia who start messing up articles and performing other actions that need to be reverted, is it Wikimedia Foundation staff who will be cleaning up the mess? It becomes a whole different issue when it's not random people messing up articles, but instead it's Wikimedia Foundation-sponsored contributors. You're far too smart to not realize this already; why are you ignoring or side-stepping these and other costs of experimentation?
Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational content.
It's funny, you've said this three times so far this thread :-) But if you read the mission again, I think you'll find you are mistaken.
Wikimedia's mission is to *empower and engage people* to develop content. There's nothing about quality, unless you assume that an empowered and engaged society will produce high quality materials. (As it turns out, in practice if not in theory, we do.)
Imagine a world in which there's a global movement with only mediocre content to show for it. That should go on a bumper sticker. If the Wikimedia Foundation is allowed to add "movement" jargon, I think I'm entitled to say that the goal is to make something high-quality. Fair's fair.
Our goal is global engagement of creators; and providing infrastructure to empower their work.
This sounds great. Is that what's actually happening? Providing infrastructure that empowers people is fantastic. Build better software and other tools that allow people to create beautiful and creative and interesting content.
What you're saying nearly anyone on this list would have difficulty disagreeing with (which is, I believe, partially why you're saying it). But "snap back to reality": what's happening right now is a hawkeyed focus on a boost of the number of contributors. Increasing participation for statistics' sake. And the associated infrastructure (tool development, staff allocation, etc.) is equally focused on this goal. And this doesn't even get into the issue of sister projects (or any project other than the English Wikipedia, really), which have received no support.
At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and there's a huge focus on "building the movement."
See above; this isn't new.
The word "movement" is not new. Its prevalence is.
I do support those who focus on the quality of our existing content. But other priorities -- from expanding content scope and formats, to expanding the editing community -- also deserve support.
For me and for the people that Wikimedia serves (its readers), it's never been about the community. I'm reminded of this quote from Risker's user page on the English Wikipedia: "Our readers do not care one whit who adds information to articles; they care only that the information is correct."
Your suggestion that there is something more important than the content simply seems wrong to me. The content is what people come for. The content is what people return for. The content is king. As iridescent once said, "without content, Wikipedia is just Facebook for ugly people."
Obviously _a_ focus on the human component is important. Bots aren't writing articles or writing dictionary definitions or taking and uploading images (yet!), but content has to be _the_ focus. The primary focus cannot simply be adding more people to the pile to build a movement. We are not trying to Occupy Wikipedia; we are trying to build something of educational value for the future. The idea has always been that even if the movement disappeared (and with it the Wikimedia Foundation), the content would remain. It has to be treated with respect and be given due deference in resource allocation and in the goals that the Wikimedia Foundation makes a priority.
MZMcBride
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
Oh come on people - this is yet another Foundation-l discussion that has gone off the rails.."the elusiveness of Samuel Klein"? sounds like a thriller novel.. I'm not sure we need to be attacking other volunteers here. :/
That's the *other* Sam Klein. http://thrillingdetective.com/eyes/sam_klein.html
Cyrano writes:
I feel compelled to express my agreement with MZMcBride. I find his questioning pertinent.
The questions are pertinent; in particular, everyone should be aware of the cost of experiments (and should wrap that into any proposals or evaluations).
I wish the quality of content were at the core of the WMF. I feel disappointed by the direction it is choosing
You mean specifically the focus on editor retention and new editor engagement over the past year?
We all care a lot about quality; the question is whether that is a driving force or a symptom of pursuing our mission well.
Personally, I'd guess that basic improvements to how many account-creators make their first edit, and how many months the average new editor stays on the projects, will directly impact our quality in a good way. (I would also love to see focused experiments that target improving article quality. We've certainly had success stories, with wikiproject assessments and contests.)
What are some concrete things folks would like done now that this decision has been made?
Thanks for keeping the thread on topic, Greg. There have been a few concrete suggestions already; MZM's suggestion to thoughtfully assess the cost of any experiments beforehand is a good one.
Personally, I think this is fantastic direction for WMF to be taking (I know that's a shock). It seems if Wikipedia didn't follow this strategy we'd still be using Nupedia. Focusing on recruitment of just the experts over the masses didn't win out then - doubt it will now.
Good to hear! Wikipedia itself was a big, low-expectation experiment back in the nupedia days. But it was designed not to interfere with the existing nupedia process, so it didn't antagonize those who were committed to what was already in place.
SJ
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:13 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Experiments are acceptable... sometimes.
MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism!
I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow 'optional' or new. Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project build around being bold and low barriers to participation. We should simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops, and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once.
Does anyone know what kind of experiments we're talking about?
Sarah
On 24 March 2012 23:16, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Does anyone know what kind of experiments we're talking about?
Only those who read to the top of the thread. (Article feedback tool, new article wizard, etc.)
- d.
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Does anyone know what kind of experiments we're talking about?
I can partially clarify here...
- These will not be "pilot projects" resembling the Global Education Program in any particular country. (Which is why it's very strange to be using it as an example in the context of this announcement and the ensuing discussion.) We won't be doing offline outreach to thousands of students or any other particular group. - These will not be large-scale new features that move quickly to permanent deployment, such as the Article Feedback Tool or PendingChanges.
The best example I can give now is the A/B testing of user talk templates that Maryana and I have done. Since we'll have design and developer resources for these new experiments however, they will be different in regards to how quickly the tests happen and how tech-heavy they are. Another decent example was the Account Creation Improvement Project which happened last year, though that was another example which took longer than the timeframe we want to work on.
We're still in the beginning of working on our list of experiments (we don't actually officially start until April ~16th), but by then we'll have a list of possibilities to share. Since these won't be English Wikipedia only, the documentation will be on a wiki like MediaWiki.org and Meta. If you have any strong feelings about how you'd like updates to happen or have experiment ideas, we'd be happy to hear them.
Steven
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 02:26, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Technically, we could attract raw contributors with the flick of a finger: by encouraging editing via sitenotices. But attracting people who won't contribute well, or will have a bad experience -- or doing so when there is no good way to integrate them into the project -- could simply waste everyone's time.
wise words, indeed. very, very important when going forward, at least imo. i can tell you why as well. i tried to be a new editor for a couple of weeks now. let me give the most striking examples out of this experience:
1. mediawiki buggy changing user preferences resulted in a very helpful "... problems with some of your input". there is no way to click through to "bug report" and follow further. unfortunately i cannot remember which ones i changed :( but coding something which tells you what was wrong should be state of the art.
2. article feedback is surveyed sometimes, but it ends in a "black hole" on article feedback the feedback privacy statement (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Feedback_policy) popped up. i found it somehow inappropriate, because it was foundation centered, but i wanted to contribute to wikipedia. to my big surprise, somebody really read the article feedback and asked details. but - this person then was unable to follow through. the privacy statement is still the same.
3. edits are reverted with unhelpful comments i added a paragraph to an article where it might have not been completely right. it got reverted with a comment "not like that". no further help where it could fit better, no suggestion of improvement, no edit help as well.
4. new articles are deleted immediately i tried to create a new article with wikibasha, which did not do its job and i ended up with an empty new article. so i put "wikibasha" in it, saved, to try again. seconds later the article was marked for speedy deletion. there is obviously no tool to quickly traverse "articles created three days ago not yet marked as good enough". so patrols revert to what is most easy with the current software, namely for newly created articles, with disastrous effects on new editors.
5. should one be lucky and know the right template, a threat follows now i used knowledge a new editor does not have and put a "currently beeing edited" template. this gives you 24 hours time to edit the article on your own. a very heartwarming comment "if there is not immediately some useful addition, this nonsense will be deleted" was the result.
in all five cases i had no possibility to give feedback using mediawiki which then would result in something which somebody takes care of until it is solved. in my highly biased opinion this is an indication that the editor retention investments were not yet successful (enough). there seems to be some deviation between "identify a challenge" and "act to relieve the pain". neither the technical, nor the organizational challenge seems to be addressed.
rupert.
Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
Thank you for sharing this.
How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement).
Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed?
How do you draw that correlation? It seems like you're missing a very important "may." Surely it depends on what kind of contributors you're pulling in and why. It would be trivial to add a lot of contributors through gimmicky incentives ("make ten edits, win a prize!"), but are those the type of editors we want?
Content is king. People visit Wikimedia wikis for their content and the Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is to "... empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content ...." The hawkeyed focus on simply bumping up the number of contributors doesn't necessarily improve the content. It may. But if the focus is purely on the numbers (and not the quality of the contributors being added), it may also make the content worse.
It isn't the Wikimedia Foundation's stated vision or mission to build a movement; the idea is to find ways to create and disseminate free, high quality, educational content. So I continue to wonder: is the current focus of adding more and more people overshadowing the arguably more important focus of producing something of value? There are finite resources (as with nearly any project), but they're being used to develop tools and technologies that focus on one project (Wikipedia) and that often have questionable value (MoodBar, ArticleFeedback, etc.). ArticleFeedback has gone through five major iterations; FlaggedRevs was dropped after one. Doesn't that seem emblematic of a larger problem to you?
Commons needs more support. Wikisource needs more support. Wiktionary needs more support. And it goes on. But the focus is about adding more people to Wikipedia. It isn't about making it possible to easily add music notation to articles. Or making it easier to transcribe articles. Or making it easier to re-use the vast content within contained within Wiktionary. Or ...
The focus on solely increasing participation for statistics' sake comes with a real cost.
MZMcBride
On Mar 21, 2012, at 10:07 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
Thank you for sharing this.
How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement).
Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed?
How do you draw that correlation? It seems like you're missing a very important "may." Surely it depends on what kind of contributors you're pulling in and why. It would be trivial to add a lot of contributors through gimmicky incentives ("make ten edits, win a prize!"), but are those the type of editors we want?
On the content level it doesn't really matter what what kind of contributors you are pulling in. Given increased contributors over time (given they stick around after the contests you find distasteful end) quality of content improves. This is the model assumption wikis are based upon. Which why I find your stated objection so odd. Now that said, I must admit there one and only one kind of contributor I find to have a significant negative impact on the quality of Wikipedia (and I imagine perhaps Wikinews as well): the "true-believer". But I do not see this being a practical concern of the sort project under discussion. True-believer's seem to be one of the kinds of people that begin contributing without any encouragement.
Content is king. People visit Wikimedia wikis for their content and the Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is to "... empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content ...." The hawkeyed focus on simply bumping up the number of contributors doesn't necessarily improve the content. It may. But if the focus is purely on the numbers (and not the quality of the contributors being added), it may also make the content worse.
I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I truly believe the only ways to bring about a significant improvement in the quality of content on a project as mature as the English or German Wikipedia are A) increase the numbers of contributors, or B) increase the average life-span of activity for contributors. Every other sort project I can imagine, while possibly leading to a net improvement in quality, would only amount to dumping a bucket of water into the ocean.
Seriously, and with all due respect, do you really believe it likely the content will actually become less accurate, less comprehensive, less neutral, and/or less understandable because of WMF inadvertently encouraging the wrong "kind" of people to join in?
I cannot imagine this happening.
It isn't the Wikimedia Foundation's stated vision or mission to build a movement; the idea is to find ways to create and disseminate free, high quality, educational content. So I continue to wonder: is the current focus of adding more and more people overshadowing the arguably more important focus of producing something of value? There are finite resources (as with nearly any project), but they're being used to develop tools and technologies that focus on one project (Wikipedia) and that often have questionable value (MoodBar, ArticleFeedback, etc.). ArticleFeedback has gone through five major iterations; FlaggedRevs was dropped after one. Doesn't that seem emblematic of a larger problem to you?
No it really isn't a convincing concern for me. But I do understand this objection a great deal better. Still I would rather see WMF put full effort into what it believes most worthwhile, than to be grudgingly addressing what I might think to be somewhat more worthwhile. If I could convince the people at WMF heart and soul to agree with me, that would be different. However I don't wish anyone to start acting as I might suggest without actually becoming convinced through my message. I am no kind of prophet and I am as capable of being mistaken as anyone. The two most basic lessons I have learned exclusively from my participation in the projects over the years is how immensely much passion counts and how easy it is to find myself absolutely mistaken even when I have taken care to throughly account for all that I could imagine.
I am not certain that WMF will be successful with this program, but neither do I find them to be clearly heading for failure. As I said above, I do believe the objective worthwhile. Increasing contributions, through both new people and longer careers, is the most significant impact that I believe can be made towards improving content quality. My own uncertainty is mostly whether WMF can actually manage to increase either of these numbers.
I certainly cannot imagine bringing this program to a halt would actually result in the resources involved being re-directed to a non-Wikipediacentric objective!
Commons needs more support. Wikisource needs more support. Wiktionary needs more support. And it goes on. But the focus is about adding more people to Wikipedia. It isn't about making it possible to easily add music notation to articles. Or making it easier to transcribe articles. Or making it easier to re-use the vast content within contained within Wiktionary. Or ...
The focus on solely increasing participation for statistics' sake comes with a real cost.
You are an excellent politician, and if I were interested in such things you would have won my support. However, I am really much more interested in addressing accuracy for it's own sake while improving my own understanding of things. I can't see how this endeavor can be accurately described as "increasing participation for statistic's sake", when I see that significant improvements in quality would be the end result (if successful). Nor I do not understand how discouraging this program would lead to any practical support for those other things which you mention.
BirgitteSB
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 5:10 AM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
On Mar 21, 2012, at 10:07 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sue Gardner wrote:
Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
Thank you for sharing this.
How much discussion has there been internally about this being the
wrong
approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is
also
trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but
doesn't
seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or
the
quality of the new contributors, for that matter).
The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not
about
trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement).
Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the
numbers (a
focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a
crowd-sourcing
project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this
really
disputed?
How do you draw that correlation? It seems like you're missing a very important "may." Surely it depends on what kind of contributors you're pulling in and why. It would be trivial to add a lot of contributors
through
gimmicky incentives ("make ten edits, win a prize!"), but are those the
type
of editors we want?
On the content level it doesn't really matter what what kind of contributors you are pulling in. Given increased contributors over time (given they stick around after the contests you find distasteful end) quality of content improves. This is the model assumption wikis are based upon. Which why I find your stated objection so odd. Now that said, I must admit there one and only one kind of contributor I find to have a significant negative impact on the quality of Wikipedia (and I imagine perhaps Wikinews as well): the "true-believer". But I do not see this being a practical concern of the sort project under discussion. True-believer's seem to be one of the kinds of people that begin contributing without any encouragement.
Content is king. People visit Wikimedia wikis for their content and the Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is to "... empower and engage
people
around the world to collect and develop educational content ...." The hawkeyed focus on simply bumping up the number of contributors doesn't necessarily improve the content. It may. But if the focus is purely on
the
numbers (and not the quality of the contributors being added), it may
also
make the content worse.
I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I truly believe the only ways to bring about a significant improvement in the quality of content on a project as mature as the English or German Wikipedia are A) increase the numbers of contributors, or B) increase the average life-span of activity for contributors. Every other sort project I can imagine, while possibly leading to a net improvement in quality, would only amount to dumping a bucket of water into the ocean.
Seriously, and with all due respect, do you really believe it likely the content will actually become less accurate, less comprehensive, less neutral, and/or less understandable because of WMF inadvertently encouraging the wrong "kind" of people to join in?
I cannot imagine this happening.
It isn't the Wikimedia Foundation's stated vision or mission to build a movement; the idea is to find ways to create and disseminate free, high quality, educational content. So I continue to wonder: is the current
focus
of adding more and more people overshadowing the arguably more important focus of producing something of value? There are finite resources (as
with
nearly any project), but they're being used to develop tools and technologies that focus on one project (Wikipedia) and that often have questionable value (MoodBar, ArticleFeedback, etc.). ArticleFeedback has gone through five major iterations; FlaggedRevs was dropped after one. Doesn't that seem emblematic of a larger problem to you?
No it really isn't a convincing concern for me. But I do understand this objection a great deal better. Still I would rather see WMF put full effort into what it believes most worthwhile, than to be grudgingly addressing what I might think to be somewhat more worthwhile. If I could convince the people at WMF heart and soul to agree with me, that would be different. However I don't wish anyone to start acting as I might suggest without actually becoming convinced through my message. I am no kind of prophet and I am as capable of being mistaken as anyone. The two most basic lessons I have learned exclusively from my participation in the projects over the years is how immensely much passion counts and how easy it is to find myself absolutely mistaken even when I have taken care to throughly account for all that I could imagine.
I am not certain that WMF will be successful with this program, but neither do I find them to be clearly heading for failure. As I said above, I do believe the objective worthwhile. Increasing contributions, through both new people and longer careers, is the most significant impact that I believe can be made towards improving content quality. My own uncertainty is mostly whether WMF can actually manage to increase either of these numbers.
I certainly cannot imagine bringing this program to a halt would actually result in the resources involved being re-directed to a non-Wikipediacentric objective!
Commons needs more support. Wikisource needs more support. Wiktionary
needs
more support. And it goes on. But the focus is about adding more people
to
Wikipedia. It isn't about making it possible to easily add music
notation to
articles. Or making it easier to transcribe articles. Or making it
easier to
re-use the vast content within contained within Wiktionary. Or ...
The focus on solely increasing participation for statistics' sake comes
with
a real cost.
You are an excellent politician, and if I were interested in such things you would have won my support. However, I am really much more interested in addressing accuracy for it's own sake while improving my own understanding of things. I can't see how this endeavor can be accurately described as "increasing participation for statistic's sake", when I see that significant improvements in quality would be the end result (if successful). Nor I do not understand how discouraging this program would lead to any practical support for those other things which you mention.
BirgitteSB _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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?
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.
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.
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 seems 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 interactions 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 need, anyone can place an incentive, it can not replace motivation.
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.
Regards Theo
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
Birgitte, I have greatly enjoyed all of your replies in this thread; this one in particular. Thank you for sharing.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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?
Yes.
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!
Yes!
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... Along these lines, I personally find community to be supremely motivating.
< < 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.
Right. Good faith collaboration, mentorship and inspiration are essential to many contributors and many parts of the projects.
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.
I just printed this out and taped it to my monitor.
SJ
Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it gives insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who I have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion.
This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives on this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are headed towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make a correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now.
It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation.
Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
Yes, there is a difference between the actual workload, generated by inaccuracies, copyright violations, policies, plain old vandalism, and the one brought in artificially to address a trend. One side is already having a hard time with regular tasks, veteran editors are facing attrition, new editors are sometimes adding to the backlog instead of lowering it.
Temporarily Incentivizing and bringing in a large number of unmotivated editors for the sake of numbers, only exasperates the problem. I believe this is the cost of experimentation MZMcBride and others were referring to. It only increases the workload over the normal, by temporarily recruiting one side of the crowd from which only a minority will continue editing.
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.
We can not easily recruit curators. We can make it a part of someone's curriculum, provide workshops and teach classes, but it can not motivate someone to do so beyond what is required. Curators of content, would indisputably have to be self-motivated. New contributors might not understand what an RfC is, how to do peer review, our job could only be to educated them to the best of our abilities. A job, we haven't been doing too well to begin with.
There is also something to be said about the costs. These experiments monetarily costs a good deal, not to mention the workload it requires from volunteers. All of which pales in comparison to the cost of making new editors on English Wikipedia, a priority; the focus for WMF remains those new editors. It is in my mind a travesty to focus on them and overlook the existing veteran editors and curators. They are deserving of more attention than what they receive, this problem only compounds to an abject proportion, when you start moving away from English Wikipedia, to sister projects and other languages. Curators are not easy to recruit, while veteran editors face attrition, our measures completely ignore this core group that basically power the projects everyday, for something that might affect the statistics and the conversion rates for tomorrow.
I am not suspect that we can not add well meaning and sincere individuals willing to contribute, I, like others, am only basing it on the past experiments. It is not an easy task, past attempts to engineer the community and contributors have not yielded the expected results, it does not mean that future experiments will not succeed. The priority there should be containing any such fallout from the existing ecosystem.
Disproportionate work load, is another issue. The automated tools and their proliferate usage is symptomatic that the existing community does not have the time to deal with the workload under normal circumstances. This is in a closed environment of its own, the tools are community made and used; a reaction to the disproportionate distribution. Add to it attempts to engineer the community and incentivize individuals who don't have the patience to commit, this would get far too disproportionate, you would have more attrition than ever before. And sadly, those attrition statistics aren't followed as closely as the new editors.
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.
Perhaps. But I have rarely seen a large, functional, existing communities change to accommodate new members. From an example already cited on this thread, there might be more credence to this claim already.
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.
There is probably truth in that statement. But I still believe that motivation separates the crowd, when half the contributors are trying to work in good faith and be productive, the other half might be consciously trying to sabotage the wisdom. No statistical method of analysis can take this into account. If people intentionally promote lies and falsehood within a group, it only distorts the end results.
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.
I agree with that summarization.
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.
Ok there is a distinction here. You were part of the community first, you *chose* at some point to work on something in this ecosystem without any incentive. The community aspect came in later, to retain and constantly engage you. There are different approaches to this. I hope you will agree that there are several prolific editors who are even less social than anyone. They can continue to contribute year after year without so much as a single community-oriented interaction. There are those who remain near-anonymous, not revealing a single facet about their personality or engaging any other editor. It used to be once that they were not in the minority, as it may be now, but their work is not affected by lack of the community aspect that might drive others. In my opinion, community aspect is more important to retention and engagement, than recruitment.
It takes most new editors months until their first direct interaction on-wiki. I have known editors who said they went for an year before they had a direct interaction with another editor. It was usually limited to warnings and corrections, some have spent even longer without it. It rarely affects their work, it does affect their own motivation if they continue editing in vacuum.
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.
And this is the part I am most grateful to you for writing. I have nothing more to say about this then, Thank you. I see my own self in more than half of what you are describing.(I hope Sj and a couple of other board members can see the similarities in the part about being perceived angry, warning when I see rocks, and sharing my strong convictions.)
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.
There is still some requirement to contribute I suppose, just as it would be to reading a newspaper or writing a letter - Not everyone is cut out to be an editor. I don't believe that those are the same skill sets that entail pressing "Like" to something, and editing an article. The distinction again, is editing not performing simplified task that would only require someone to press a button. I would reiterate that Facebook is a social networking platforms, after all the "Likes", status updates and "lol"s, there would be nothing left of value. In our case, what we are left with in the end, is the goal, the other aspects of a community might only be incidental in the end. No one is stopping anyone from relieving their boredom on Wikipedia, the person just has to choose. Maybe we can find incremental tasks and setup ways to make certain tasks as easy as playing a game on FB, but then again, isn't that one of the criticism about automated tools and turning patrolling into a game.
Regards Theo
It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a "Wikipedia class project" without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status.
I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach.
It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into "us" and "them." I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not "us".
Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups.
Birgitte SB
On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion.
This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives o this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now.
It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation.
Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
Yes, there is a difference between the actual workload, generated by inaccuracies, copyright violations, policies, plain old vandalism, and the one brought in artificially to address a trend. One side is already having a hard time with regular tasks, veteran editors are facing attrition, new editors are sometimes adding to the backlog instead of lowering it.
Temporarily Incentivizing and bringing in a large number of unmotivated editors for the sake of numbers, only exasperates the problem. I believe this is the cost of experimentation MZMcBride and others were referring to. It only increases the workload over the normal, by temporarily recruiting one side of the crowd from which only a minority will continue editing.
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.
We can not easily recruit curators. We can make it a part of someone's curriculum, provide workshops and teach classes, but it can not motivate someone to do so beyond what is required. Curators of content, would indisputably have to be self-motivated. New contributors might not understand what an RfC is, how to do peer review, our job could only be to educated them to the best of our abilities. A job, we haven't been doing too well to begin with.
There is also something to be said about the costs. These experiments monetarily costs a good deal, not to mention the workload it requires from volunteers. All of which pales in comparison to the cost of making new editors on English Wikipedia, a priority; the focus for WMF remains those new editors. It is in my mind a travesty to focus on them and overlook the existing veteran editors and curators. They are deserving of more attention than what they receive, this problem only compounds to an abject proportion, when you start moving away from English Wikipedia, to sister projects and other languages. Curators are not easy to recruit, while veteran editors face attrition, our measures completely ignore this core group that basically power the projects everyday, for something that might affect the statistics and the conversion rates for tomorrow.
I am not suspect that we can not add well meaning and sincere individuals willing to contribute, I, like others, am only basing it on the past experiments. It is not an easy task, past attempts to engineer the community and contributors have not yielded the expected results, it does not mean that future experiments will not succeed. The priority there should be containing any such fallout from the existing ecosystem.
Disproportionate work load, is another issue. The automated tools and their proliferate usage is symptomatic that the existing community does not have the time to deal with the workload under normal circumstances. This is in a closed environment of its own, the tools are community made and used; a reaction to the disproportionate distribution. Add to it attempts to engineer the community and incentivize individuals who don't have the patience to commit, this would get far too disproportionate, you would have more attrition than ever before. And sadly, those attrition statistics aren't followed as closely as the new editors.
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.
Perhaps. But I have rarely seen a large, functional, existing communities change to accommodate new members. From an example already cited on this thread, there might be more credence to this claim already.
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.
There is probably truth in that statement. But I still believe that motivation separates the crowd, when half the contributors are trying to work in good faith and be productive, the other half might be consciously trying to sabotage the wisdom. No statistical method of analysis can take this into account. If people intentionally promote lies and falsehood within a group, it only distorts the end results.
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.
I agree with that summarization.
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.
Ok there is a distinction here. You were part of the community first, you *chose* at some point to work on something in this ecosystem without any incentive. The community aspect came in later, to retain and constantly engage you. There are different approaches to this. I hope you will agree that there are several prolific editors who are even less social than anyone. They can continue to contribute year after year without so much as a single community-oriented interaction. There are those who remain near-anonymous, not revealing a single facet about their personality or engaging any other editor. It used to be once that they were not in the minority, as it may be now, but their work is not affected by lack of the community aspect that might drive others. In my opinion, community aspect is more important to retention and engagement, than recruitment.
It takes most new editors months until their first direct interaction on-wiki. I have known editors who said they went for an year before they had a direct interaction with another editor. It was usually limited to warnings and corrections, some have spent even longer without it. It rarely affects their work, it does affect their own motivation if they continue editing in vacuum.
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.
And this is the part I am most grateful to you for writing. I have nothing more to say about this then, Thank you. I see my own self in more than half of what you are describing.(I hope Sj and a couple of other board members can see the similarities in the part about being perceived angry, warning when I see rocks, and sharing my strong convictions.)
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.
There is still some requirement to contribute I suppose, just as it would be to reading a newspaper or writing a letter - Not everyone is cut out to be an editor. I don't believe that those are the same skill sets that entail pressing "Like" to something, and editing an article. The distinction again, is editing not performing simplified task that would only require someone to press a button. I would reiterate that Facebook is a social networking platforms, after all the "Likes", status updates and "lol"s, there would be nothing left of value. In our case, what we are left with in the end, is the goal, the other aspects of a community might only be incidental in the end. No one is stopping anyone from relieving their boredom on Wikipedia, the person just has to choose. Maybe we can find incremental tasks and setup ways to make certain tasks as easy as playing a game on FB, but then again, isn't that one of the criticism about automated tools and turning patrolling into a game.
Regards Theo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead...
2012/3/28 Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:
It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a "Wikipedia class project" without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status.
I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach.
It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into "us" and "them." I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not "us".
Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups.
Birgitte SB
On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion.
This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives o this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now.
It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation.
Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
Yes, there is a difference between the actual workload, generated by inaccuracies, copyright violations, policies, plain old vandalism, and the one brought in artificially to address a trend. One side is already having a hard time with regular tasks, veteran editors are facing attrition, new editors are sometimes adding to the backlog instead of lowering it.
Temporarily Incentivizing and bringing in a large number of unmotivated editors for the sake of numbers, only exasperates the problem. I believe this is the cost of experimentation MZMcBride and others were referring to. It only increases the workload over the normal, by temporarily recruiting one side of the crowd from which only a minority will continue editing.
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.
We can not easily recruit curators. We can make it a part of someone's curriculum, provide workshops and teach classes, but it can not motivate someone to do so beyond what is required. Curators of content, would indisputably have to be self-motivated. New contributors might not understand what an RfC is, how to do peer review, our job could only be to educated them to the best of our abilities. A job, we haven't been doing too well to begin with.
There is also something to be said about the costs. These experiments monetarily costs a good deal, not to mention the workload it requires from volunteers. All of which pales in comparison to the cost of making new editors on English Wikipedia, a priority; the focus for WMF remains those new editors. It is in my mind a travesty to focus on them and overlook the existing veteran editors and curators. They are deserving of more attention than what they receive, this problem only compounds to an abject proportion, when you start moving away from English Wikipedia, to sister projects and other languages. Curators are not easy to recruit, while veteran editors face attrition, our measures completely ignore this core group that basically power the projects everyday, for something that might affect the statistics and the conversion rates for tomorrow.
I am not suspect that we can not add well meaning and sincere individuals willing to contribute, I, like others, am only basing it on the past experiments. It is not an easy task, past attempts to engineer the community and contributors have not yielded the expected results, it does not mean that future experiments will not succeed. The priority there should be containing any such fallout from the existing ecosystem.
Disproportionate work load, is another issue. The automated tools and their proliferate usage is symptomatic that the existing community does not have the time to deal with the workload under normal circumstances. This is in a closed environment of its own, the tools are community made and used; a reaction to the disproportionate distribution. Add to it attempts to engineer the community and incentivize individuals who don't have the patience to commit, this would get far too disproportionate, you would have more attrition than ever before. And sadly, those attrition statistics aren't followed as closely as the new editors.
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.
Perhaps. But I have rarely seen a large, functional, existing communities change to accommodate new members. From an example already cited on this thread, there might be more credence to this claim already.
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.
There is probably truth in that statement. But I still believe that motivation separates the crowd, when half the contributors are trying to work in good faith and be productive, the other half might be consciously trying to sabotage the wisdom. No statistical method of analysis can take this into account. If people intentionally promote lies and falsehood within a group, it only distorts the end results.
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.
I agree with that summarization.
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.
Ok there is a distinction here. You were part of the community first, you *chose* at some point to work on something in this ecosystem without any incentive. The community aspect came in later, to retain and constantly engage you. There are different approaches to this. I hope you will agree that there are several prolific editors who are even less social than anyone. They can continue to contribute year after year without so much as a single community-oriented interaction. There are those who remain near-anonymous, not revealing a single facet about their personality or engaging any other editor. It used to be once that they were not in the minority, as it may be now, but their work is not affected by lack of the community aspect that might drive others. In my opinion, community aspect is more important to retention and engagement, than recruitment.
It takes most new editors months until their first direct interaction on-wiki. I have known editors who said they went for an year before they had a direct interaction with another editor. It was usually limited to warnings and corrections, some have spent even longer without it. It rarely affects their work, it does affect their own motivation if they continue editing in vacuum.
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.
And this is the part I am most grateful to you for writing. I have nothing more to say about this then, Thank you. I see my own self in more than half of what you are describing.(I hope Sj and a couple of other board members can see the similarities in the part about being perceived angry, warning when I see rocks, and sharing my strong convictions.)
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.
There is still some requirement to contribute I suppose, just as it would be to reading a newspaper or writing a letter - Not everyone is cut out to be an editor. I don't believe that those are the same skill sets that entail pressing "Like" to something, and editing an article. The distinction again, is editing not performing simplified task that would only require someone to press a button. I would reiterate that Facebook is a social networking platforms, after all the "Likes", status updates and "lol"s, there would be nothing left of value. In our case, what we are left with in the end, is the goal, the other aspects of a community might only be incidental in the end. No one is stopping anyone from relieving their boredom on Wikipedia, the person just has to choose. Maybe we can find incremental tasks and setup ways to make certain tasks as easy as playing a game on FB, but then again, isn't that one of the criticism about automated tools and turning patrolling into a game.
Regards Theo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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On 5 April 2012 22:42, Jan Kučera kozuch82@gmail.com wrote:
You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead...
Well, I've been working remotely since I took this job 6 months ago, and plan to keep doing so :). Looking at the staff page, I see 18 other remote workers, and that's just the ones I know of! They're distributed throughout Europe, other bits of the Americas, and the Indian subcontinent. And we do have a grants programme: check out http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant :).
On Apr 5, 2012 2:42 PM, "Jan Kučera" kozuch82@gmail.com wrote:
You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead...
I think your understanding is outdated. The Foundation has quite a few remote workers. I can count 20-30 people not based in San Francisco just by scanning the staff and contractors page.
2012/3/28 Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:
It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to
booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a "Wikipedia class project" without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status.
I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your
belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach.
It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a
complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into "us" and "them." I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not "us".
Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point
for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups.
Birgitte SB
On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others
who
have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as
well.
This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart
from
the ongoing discussion.
This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives
o
this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an
editor
and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can
become an
editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are
both
referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few
actual
editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of
proportion for
some time now.
It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to
here, not
the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the
crowd,
they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the
crowd.
The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own,
and
the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation.
Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past
measures
have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by
temporarily
bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
Yes, there is a difference between the actual workload, generated by inaccuracies, copyright violations, policies, plain old vandalism, and
the
one brought in artificially to address a trend. One side is already
having
a hard time with regular tasks, veteran editors are facing attrition,
new
editors are sometimes adding to the backlog instead of lowering it.
Temporarily Incentivizing and bringing in a large number of unmotivated editors for the sake of numbers, only exasperates the problem. I
believe
this is the cost of experimentation MZMcBride and others were
referring to.
It only increases the workload over the normal, by temporarily
recruiting
one side of the crowd from which only a minority will continue editing.
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.
We can not easily recruit curators. We can make it a part of someone's curriculum, provide workshops and teach classes, but it can not
motivate
someone to do so beyond what is required. Curators of content, would indisputably have to be self-motivated. New contributors might
not
understand what an RfC is, how to do peer review, our job could only
be to
educated them to the best of our abilities. A job, we haven't been
doing
too well to begin with.
There is also something to be said about the costs. These experiments monetarily costs a good deal, not to mention the workload it requires
from
volunteers. All of which pales in comparison to the cost of making new editors on English Wikipedia, a priority; the focus for WMF remains
those
new editors. It is in my mind a travesty to focus on them and overlook
the
existing veteran editors and curators. They are deserving of more
attention
than what they receive, this problem only compounds to an abject proportion, when you start moving away from English Wikipedia, to
sister
projects and other languages. Curators are not easy to recruit, while veteran editors face attrition, our measures completely ignore this
core
group that basically power the projects everyday, for something that
might
affect the statistics and the conversion rates for tomorrow.
I am not suspect that we can not add well meaning and sincere
individuals
willing to contribute, I, like others, am only basing it on the past experiments. It is not an easy task, past attempts to engineer the community and contributors have not yielded the expected results, it
does
not mean that future experiments will not succeed. The priority there should be containing any such fallout from the existing ecosystem.
Disproportionate work load, is another issue. The automated tools and
their
proliferate usage is symptomatic that the existing community does not
have
the time to deal with the workload under normal circumstances. This is
in a
closed environment of its own, the tools are community made and used; a reaction to the disproportionate distribution. Add to it attempts to engineer the community and incentivize individuals who don't have the patience to commit, this would get far too disproportionate, you would
have
more attrition than ever before. And sadly, those attrition statistics aren't followed as closely as the new editors.
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.
Perhaps. But I have rarely seen a large, functional, existing
communities
change to accommodate new members. From an example already cited on
this
thread, there might be more credence to this claim already.
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.
There is probably truth in that statement. But I still believe that motivation separates the crowd, when half the contributors are trying
to
work in good faith and be productive, the other half might be
consciously
trying to sabotage the wisdom. No statistical method of analysis can
take
this into account. If people intentionally promote lies and falsehood within a group, it only distorts the end results.
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.
I agree with that summarization.
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.
Ok there is a distinction here. You were part of the community first,
you
*chose* at some point to work on something in this ecosystem without
any
incentive. The community aspect came in later, to retain and constantly engage you. There are different approaches to this. I hope you will
agree
that there are several prolific editors who are even less social than anyone. They can continue to contribute year after year without so
much as
a single community-oriented interaction. There are those who remain near-anonymous, not revealing a single facet about their personality or engaging any other editor. It used to be once that they were not in the minority, as it may be now, but their work is not affected by lack of
the
community aspect that might drive others. In my opinion, community
aspect
is more important to retention and engagement, than recruitment.
It takes most new editors months until their first direct interaction on-wiki. I have known editors who said they went for an year before
they
had a direct interaction with another editor. It was usually limited to warnings and corrections, some have spent even longer without it. It
rarely
affects their work, it does affect their own motivation if they
continue
editing in vacuum.
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.
And this is the part I am most grateful to you for writing. I have
nothing
more to say about this then, Thank you. I see my own self in more than
half
of what you are describing.(I hope Sj and a couple of other board
members
can see the similarities in the part about being perceived angry,
warning
when I see rocks, and sharing my strong convictions.)
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.
There is still some requirement to contribute I suppose, just as it
would
be to reading a newspaper or writing a letter - Not everyone is cut
out to
be an editor. I don't believe that those are the same skill sets that entail pressing "Like" to something, and editing an article. The distinction again, is editing not performing simplified task that would only require someone to press a button. I would reiterate that
Facebook is
a social networking platforms, after all the "Likes", status updates
and
"lol"s, there would be nothing left of value. In our case, what we are
left
with in the end, is the goal, the other aspects of a community might
only
be incidental in the end. No one is stopping anyone from relieving
their
boredom on Wikipedia, the person just has to choose. Maybe we can find incremental tasks and setup ways to make certain tasks as easy as
playing a
game on FB, but then again, isn't that one of the criticism about
automated
tools and turning patrolling into a game.
Regards Theo _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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Please don't assume I disagree with all objections that could possibly be made, just because I disagree that the one's which had been presented so far are very significant. I sincerely hope this program is more decentralized then any other program being run right now. It seems to be in rather early stages, to declare that it has failed to achieve this. But knowing SF, if the program were be half as well-distributed as needed for optimal performance (in a more perfect WMF); they will be white-knuckled, nauseous, and grasping for reasons to reel it in (figuratively speaking). So I hope the program isn't actually designed to be "ideally" decentralized. We don't operate in an ideal world. I hope it just one step further towards decentralization than SF has made thus far. Then it may serve to deliver two good outcomes, in it's stated purpose as well building confidence for decentralization in SF.
Which is not to say I don't think your underlying objection is not the number one, most serious, concern I have with SF. If you asked me to explain what believed was the largest, most fundamental error SF is making. I would answer along your lines of thinking. If I could magically change one opinion regarding WMF, I would make everyone forget they had ever heard it was a good idea to have all the employees working face-to-face so they might more efficiently come to the wrong conclusions and more quickly be able to produce fait accompli [1]
But one has to walk before they can run. Still if you are correct the end editor engagement program is meant to be entire run out of SF, they shouldn't bother wasting their time. There is a good reason politicians do not run their "listening tours" from within their capitol cities. It is impossible for them to really gauge how things are going in the communities when the folks at the cafeteria are so much more engaging!
BirgitteSB
[1] An accomplished fact; an action which is completed before those affected by it are in a position to query or reverse it. (I know English can difficult enough even when don't decide to rob other languages for concepts we are lacking. For all I know this might mean something slightly different in French!)
On Apr 5, 2012, at 4:42 PM, Jan Kučera kozuch82@gmail.com wrote:
You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead...
2012/3/28 Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:
It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a "Wikipedia class project" without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status.
I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach.
It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into "us" and "them." I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not "us".
Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups.
Birgitte SB
On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion.
This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives o this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now.
It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation.
Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
Yes, there is a difference between the actual workload, generated by inaccuracies, copyright violations, policies, plain old vandalism, and the one brought in artificially to address a trend. One side is already having a hard time with regular tasks, veteran editors are facing attrition, new editors are sometimes adding to the backlog instead of lowering it.
Temporarily Incentivizing and bringing in a large number of unmotivated editors for the sake of numbers, only exasperates the problem. I believe this is the cost of experimentation MZMcBride and others were referring to. It only increases the workload over the normal, by temporarily recruiting one side of the crowd from which only a minority will continue editing.
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.
We can not easily recruit curators. We can make it a part of someone's curriculum, provide workshops and teach classes, but it can not motivate someone to do so beyond what is required. Curators of content, would indisputably have to be self-motivated. New contributors might not understand what an RfC is, how to do peer review, our job could only be to educated them to the best of our abilities. A job, we haven't been doing too well to begin with.
There is also something to be said about the costs. These experiments monetarily costs a good deal, not to mention the workload it requires from volunteers. All of which pales in comparison to the cost of making new editors on English Wikipedia, a priority; the focus for WMF remains those new editors. It is in my mind a travesty to focus on them and overlook the existing veteran editors and curators. They are deserving of more attention than what they receive, this problem only compounds to an abject proportion, when you start moving away from English Wikipedia, to sister projects and other languages. Curators are not easy to recruit, while veteran editors face attrition, our measures completely ignore this core group that basically power the projects everyday, for something that might affect the statistics and the conversion rates for tomorrow.
I am not suspect that we can not add well meaning and sincere individuals willing to contribute, I, like others, am only basing it on the past experiments. It is not an easy task, past attempts to engineer the community and contributors have not yielded the expected results, it does not mean that future experiments will not succeed. The priority there should be containing any such fallout from the existing ecosystem.
Disproportionate work load, is another issue. The automated tools and their proliferate usage is symptomatic that the existing community does not have the time to deal with the workload under normal circumstances. This is in a closed environment of its own, the tools are community made and used; a reaction to the disproportionate distribution. Add to it attempts to engineer the community and incentivize individuals who don't have the patience to commit, this would get far too disproportionate, you would have more attrition than ever before. And sadly, those attrition statistics aren't followed as closely as the new editors.
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.
Perhaps. But I have rarely seen a large, functional, existing communities change to accommodate new members. From an example already cited on this thread, there might be more credence to this claim already.
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.
There is probably truth in that statement. But I still believe that motivation separates the crowd, when half the contributors are trying to work in good faith and be productive, the other half might be consciously trying to sabotage the wisdom. No statistical method of analysis can take this into account. If people intentionally promote lies and falsehood within a group, it only distorts the end results.
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.
I agree with that summarization.
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.
Ok there is a distinction here. You were part of the community first, you *chose* at some point to work on something in this ecosystem without any incentive. The community aspect came in later, to retain and constantly engage you. There are different approaches to this. I hope you will agree that there are several prolific editors who are even less social than anyone. They can continue to contribute year after year without so much as a single community-oriented interaction. There are those who remain near-anonymous, not revealing a single facet about their personality or engaging any other editor. It used to be once that they were not in the minority, as it may be now, but their work is not affected by lack of the community aspect that might drive others. In my opinion, community aspect is more important to retention and engagement, than recruitment.
It takes most new editors months until their first direct interaction on-wiki. I have known editors who said they went for an year before they had a direct interaction with another editor. It was usually limited to warnings and corrections, some have spent even longer without it. It rarely affects their work, it does affect their own motivation if they continue editing in vacuum.
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.
And this is the part I am most grateful to you for writing. I have nothing more to say about this then, Thank you. I see my own self in more than half of what you are describing.(I hope Sj and a couple of other board members can see the similarities in the part about being perceived angry, warning when I see rocks, and sharing my strong convictions.)
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.
There is still some requirement to contribute I suppose, just as it would be to reading a newspaper or writing a letter - Not everyone is cut out to be an editor. I don't believe that those are the same skill sets that entail pressing "Like" to something, and editing an article. The distinction again, is editing not performing simplified task that would only require someone to press a button. I would reiterate that Facebook is a social networking platforms, after all the "Likes", status updates and "lol"s, there would be nothing left of value. In our case, what we are left with in the end, is the goal, the other aspects of a community might only be incidental in the end. No one is stopping anyone from relieving their boredom on Wikipedia, the person just has to choose. Maybe we can find incremental tasks and setup ways to make certain tasks as easy as playing a game on FB, but then again, isn't that one of the criticism about automated tools and turning patrolling into a game.
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Yes we might be on the same page, but I think in general the employment policy of WFM is one big disaster. I would rather not make a research on productivity among the employees... which from a POV of an outsider seems to be a tragedy looking at the site usability and editing stats... I have no idea what all the administrative staff is doing... a non-profit like WMF should be employing only developers (+an accountant), while crowdsourcing assighments for them for free from the community. Now we loose great money on running programs that have little or no impact on the strategic goals defined recently. There simply have to be indicators of productivity and somebody really has to evaluate if current strategy is the right direction to the goals currently set... I not sure this is even about to happen soon.
2012/4/6 Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:
Please don't assume I disagree with all objections that could possibly be made, just because I disagree that the one's which had been presented so far are very significant. I sincerely hope this program is more decentralized then any other program being run right now. It seems to be in rather early stages, to declare that it has failed to achieve this. But knowing SF, if the program were be half as well-distributed as needed for optimal performance (in a more perfect WMF); they will be white-knuckled, nauseous, and grasping for reasons to reel it in (figuratively speaking). So I hope the program isn't actually designed to be "ideally" decentralized. We don't operate in an ideal world. I hope it just one step further towards decentralization than SF has made thus far. Then it may serve to deliver two good outcomes, in it's stated purpose as well building confidence for decentralization in SF.
Which is not to say I don't think your underlying objection is not the number one, most serious, concern I have with SF. If you asked me to explain what believed was the largest, most fundamental error SF is making. I would answer along your lines of thinking. If I could magically change one opinion regarding WMF, I would make everyone forget they had ever heard it was a good idea to have all the employees working face-to-face so they might more efficiently come to the wrong conclusions and more quickly be able to produce fait accompli [1]
But one has to walk before they can run. Still if you are correct the end editor engagement program is meant to be entire run out of SF, they shouldn't bother wasting their time. There is a good reason politicians do not run their "listening tours" from within their capitol cities. It is impossible for them to really gauge how things are going in the communities when the folks at the cafeteria are so much more engaging!
BirgitteSB
[1] An accomplished fact; an action which is completed before those affected by it are in a position to query or reverse it. (I know English can difficult enough even when don't decide to rob other languages for concepts we are lacking. For all I know this might mean something slightly different in French!)
On Apr 5, 2012, at 4:42 PM, Jan Kučera kozuch82@gmail.com wrote:
You are still doomed as WMF with your new job probram unless you allow remote work or start a reasonable grant-program to general public... you will never find the best talents in a limited space... (mainly US now) go to the full globe instead...
2012/3/28 Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:
It seems to me that there has been a quite a variety of results to booster activities, and that the poorest results have come from random educators who decide to make a "Wikipedia class project" without consulting any veteran editors rather than from people more thoroughly exposed to the sausage factory nature of wikis. I don't doubt that outreach can be done very poorly, I just don't really expect future programs, especially ones with old hats on board, to make the same mistakes past programs have already discovered for us. As far I can determine, contributors fall along a full spectrum without any sort clear way to claim at what point an individual has become an official editor, nor when one might have forfeited such a status.
I think that biggest difference in our viewpoints stems from your belief that there ever has been some sort of natural ecosystem of contributor motivations and that activities not intended to promote a specific viewpoint are somehow artificial. In a way, all of it was always artificial, or else it is really all quite natural given the nature of the system. I can't manage to find those labels meaningful. Nor can I find any objective criteria that would make sense to populate two categories of contributors in the way you speak of one side being boosted over the other by outreach.
It is however the most natural thing in all of humanity to transform a complex system down into some sort of false dichotomy. To transform a truly varied world into "us" and "them." I dislike the necessity of suggesting that your position may be partially supported by a failure of critical thinking. However I am at a loss as to what your other side could be, besides that they are not "us".
Also while I understand that the last bit is a sort of talking point for your position, I cannot see why the statistical goals are not understood as indicative of significant qualities. It is like complaining a sports team signed a big contract with star player just for the sake of statistics. Statistics are how you take measure of meaning over time or across groups.
Birgitte SB
On Mar 25, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for this email Birgitte. I greatly enjoyed reading it, it give insight in not just your own motivation, but mine and several others who have come to know. I apologize for my following lengthy response as well. This is a well-articulated, reasoned response, that should stand apart from the ongoing discussion.
This does not mean I don't disagree with some of your points in the discussion. I believe we have two fundamentally different perspectives o this. It shapes our opinion of where we are and where we are heading towards. The central difference resides on the difference between an editor and a member of the crowd. I do not believe every individuals can become an editor. I should make a clear distinction here that I am referring to active editors, not just every reader who can incidentally make as correction to never repeat again. The edits stand on their own, the individuals might not. That is where we differ on, the crowd we are both referring to is composed of a large majority of those, and very few actual editors. The conversion rate between the two has been out of proportion for some time now.
It may be that collected edits might be what you are referring to here, not the individual contributor. Collected edits form the wisdom of the crowd, they are irrespective of who they came from. Editors, curators, new contributors, vandals, PR agents, occupy the entire spectrum of the crowd. The issue is between the normal ecosystem that came to be on its own, and the artificial albeit temporary addition to the equation.
Activities undertaken to artificially boost one side, by incentives and outreach effort, have not yielded positive results. We are having this discussion because there is a trend that has developed. The past measures have not yielded favorable results. It has contrarily, in some cases, increased the already heavy burden on one side, the backlogs have only increased through them, so have copyright violations and so on. These attempts artificially inflate and unbalance the ecosystem, by temporarily bringing in an unmotivated crowd for the sake of statistics.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
Yes, there is a difference between the actual workload, generated by inaccuracies, copyright violations, policies, plain old vandalism, and the one brought in artificially to address a trend. One side is already having a hard time with regular tasks, veteran editors are facing attrition, new editors are sometimes adding to the backlog instead of lowering it.
Temporarily Incentivizing and bringing in a large number of unmotivated editors for the sake of numbers, only exasperates the problem. I believe this is the cost of experimentation MZMcBride and others were referring to. It only increases the workload over the normal, by temporarily recruiting one side of the crowd from which only a minority will continue editing.
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.
We can not easily recruit curators. We can make it a part of someone's curriculum, provide workshops and teach classes, but it can not motivate someone to do so beyond what is required. Curators of content, would indisputably have to be self-motivated. New contributors might not understand what an RfC is, how to do peer review, our job could only be to educated them to the best of our abilities. A job, we haven't been doing too well to begin with.
There is also something to be said about the costs. These experiments monetarily costs a good deal, not to mention the workload it requires from volunteers. All of which pales in comparison to the cost of making new editors on English Wikipedia, a priority; the focus for WMF remains those new editors. It is in my mind a travesty to focus on them and overlook the existing veteran editors and curators. They are deserving of more attention than what they receive, this problem only compounds to an abject proportion, when you start moving away from English Wikipedia, to sister projects and other languages. Curators are not easy to recruit, while veteran editors face attrition, our measures completely ignore this core group that basically power the projects everyday, for something that might affect the statistics and the conversion rates for tomorrow.
I am not suspect that we can not add well meaning and sincere individuals willing to contribute, I, like others, am only basing it on the past experiments. It is not an easy task, past attempts to engineer the community and contributors have not yielded the expected results, it does not mean that future experiments will not succeed. The priority there should be containing any such fallout from the existing ecosystem.
Disproportionate work load, is another issue. The automated tools and their proliferate usage is symptomatic that the existing community does not have the time to deal with the workload under normal circumstances. This is in a closed environment of its own, the tools are community made and used; a reaction to the disproportionate distribution. Add to it attempts to engineer the community and incentivize individuals who don't have the patience to commit, this would get far too disproportionate, you would have more attrition than ever before. And sadly, those attrition statistics aren't followed as closely as the new editors.
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.
Perhaps. But I have rarely seen a large, functional, existing communities change to accommodate new members. From an example already cited on this thread, there might be more credence to this claim already.
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.
There is probably truth in that statement. But I still believe that motivation separates the crowd, when half the contributors are trying to work in good faith and be productive, the other half might be consciously trying to sabotage the wisdom. No statistical method of analysis can take this into account. If people intentionally promote lies and falsehood within a group, it only distorts the end results.
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.
I agree with that summarization.
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.
Ok there is a distinction here. You were part of the community first, you *chose* at some point to work on something in this ecosystem without any incentive. The community aspect came in later, to retain and constantly engage you. There are different approaches to this. I hope you will agree that there are several prolific editors who are even less social than anyone. They can continue to contribute year after year without so much as a single community-oriented interaction. There are those who remain near-anonymous, not revealing a single facet about their personality or engaging any other editor. It used to be once that they were not in the minority, as it may be now, but their work is not affected by lack of the community aspect that might drive others. In my opinion, community aspect is more important to retention and engagement, than recruitment.
It takes most new editors months until their first direct interaction on-wiki. I have known editors who said they went for an year before they had a direct interaction with another editor. It was usually limited to warnings and corrections, some have spent even longer without it. It rarely affects their work, it does affect their own motivation if they continue editing in vacuum.
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.
And this is the part I am most grateful to you for writing. I have nothing more to say about this then, Thank you. I see my own self in more than half of what you are describing.(I hope Sj and a couple of other board members can see the similarities in the part about being perceived angry, warning when I see rocks, and sharing my strong convictions.)
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.
There is still some requirement to contribute I suppose, just as it would be to reading a newspaper or writing a letter - Not everyone is cut out to be an editor. I don't believe that those are the same skill sets that entail pressing "Like" to something, and editing an article. The distinction again, is editing not performing simplified task that would only require someone to press a button. I would reiterate that Facebook is a social networking platforms, after all the "Likes", status updates and "lol"s, there would be nothing left of value. In our case, what we are left with in the end, is the goal, the other aspects of a community might only be incidental in the end. No one is stopping anyone from relieving their boredom on Wikipedia, the person just has to choose. Maybe we can find incremental tasks and setup ways to make certain tasks as easy as playing a game on FB, but then again, isn't that one of the criticism about automated tools and turning patrolling into a game.
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