Here's a thoughtful suggestion on this topic from a journalist who emailed me today
about our editor engagement challenges at Wikipedia.
I generally agree with his observations that Wikipedia needs to be more social. And one of
the ways we can do this is to encourage more positive feedback for editors, both from
within Wikipedia -- and from the broader community outside Wikipedia.
To be continued ...
Fabrice
______________________
Subject: Re: GIFT ECONOMY -- suggestion for Fabrice
Here's my 2-cent suggestion for Wikimedia:
The value that a user gets in making gratis contributions to any site
including Wikipedia is in the feedback from your fellow users. No feedback,
or negative feedback, and you don't hang around.
...
On Wikipedia, there is very little in the way of positive feedback if you
do something good, and a ton of negative feedback for everything from a
style/format error to those "this article needs more whatever" boxes. Yes,
those things are necessary to maintaining quality, but if you contribute
content (which I've only done a little of) they wear you down. It's like
being in a course where the professor fills your papers with criticism and
never once says, "good job".
So I think the answer is that Wikipedia needs to be more social. It needs a
different kind of moderation. And it needs more mechanisms for positive
feedback.
__________________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager,
Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6827 work
fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
On Apr 22, 2012, at 2:51 PM, wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:34:34 -0700
From: Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features
Message-ID:
<CAAUQgdCH9wAurhERb_Yb1KvbY2g1oSb20bCaKMV_DSMLfMOYaw(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Just to chip in here; Privacy, with *any* feature we introduce, is a top
priority. When Product Development was coming out with the features
engineering plan, anything that looked like it could screw with individual
privacy was very, very quickly nipped in the bud.
Now, if by "social" you mean "features purely dedicated to
recreational/sharing activities", the answer is no: we're not currently
planning any. From my (personal) perspective, it is very very hard to do
these things and integrate into other services without putting our users at
risk. And putting our users at risk is not what we're about. We're not
doing what Facebook does because we're *not Facebook*.
If, on the other hand, you just mean "features to promote greater
communication and networking between editors", that's a clear priority -
I'm happy to talk to people about the work we're doing, and to hear any
suggestions along the way :).
On 21 April 2012 21:52, Mono <monomium(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tom, has a reputable news source actually
verified this? Even Wikipedia
editors know that HuffPost isn't reliable...
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:53 AM, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:
On 16 April 2012 18:41, Jan Ku?era
<kozuch82(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> how do we want to work on editor retention if we lack social features
at
all???
Only with community approval. On English Wikipedia, we have discussed
social media/social network integration repeatedly. Share This buttons
and so on. And editors don't want it.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PEREN#Share_pages_on_Facebook.2C_Tw…
.
English Wikinews already has some, but there's a much smaller
community there who can decide which services we wish to integrate
with.
If we're going to have social "features" (and I use that word with
deliberate scare quotes around it) mandated by the Foundation, I do
hope we are going to worry about privacy. A former co-worker of mine
discovered that NHS Direct, the health information website provided
the UK's National Health Service, had Facebook share this links that
were transmitting every page you went to on NHS Direct to Facebook,
which could be matched to your Facebook profile if you are logged in.
Which is kind of shocking given that people use NHS Direct to look up
information on health conditions they think they might have, as well
as all sorts of other personal issues (sexual health, gender identity,
advice on fixing lifestyle health issues like smoking and drinking). I
wouldn't want the clickstream of people visiting Wikipedia articles
shared on Facebook without them pretty explicitly choosing to share
that information. We've already seen one kid in Britain who has
allegedly been thrown out of his house by fundamentalist parents after
Facebook algorithmically outed him as gay. [1]
I do also hope we'd decide on what basis we'd choose these social
services. Okay, yes, Facebook is pretty popular in the West. And
Twitter. And maybe G+. But what about in China: do we want to support
sharing to sites that are being censored by the Chinese government?
Does the Foundation have the expertise to know what the popular social
networking sites are in every country and language in the world? And
we'd then become a commercial player: if we had done this years ago
and had added MySpace integration, the moment MySpace stops being so
popular and Wikipedia (whether that's the community or the Foundation)
de-emphasizes the MySpace sharing/social functionality, there'd be a
big stack of headlines about how Wikipedia is pulling out of MySpace.
We really ought to be neutral in this market, and there's only one way
to be neutral: try as hard as possible not to participate.
You know, there might be an easier solution here: people who are into
the whole social networking thing, their browsers ought to improve
sharing with their social networks. Social plugins for browsers like
Firefox and Chrome are opt-in for the user, and can give a better
experience than Wikipedia pages being turned into NASCAR-esque branded
adverts for dozens of social sites. I know Mozilla people have been
discussing coming up with better ways of doing social sharing at the
browser level.
[1]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/11/facebook-targeted-advertising-gay-…
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
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Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation