For those who are interested in quantitative studies on the subject of editor motivation, I suggest looking at the list of academic papers at http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/Motivations. I learned about that list from a recent post to research-l. I assume that Steven Walling and the other WMF staff are aware of this list but it might be new and interesting to other contributors.

That list doesn’t include http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Editors_Survey_2011 and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011/Su... which are likely more familiar to the readers of foundation-l.

I think that some of the concerns that have been expressed in this thread are well founded while others are overblown.

An effort to improve the retention of editors who take their time to register seems unlikely to produce a wave of vandals because vandalizing Wikipedia is easy already and doesn’t require registration.

It’s true that we don’t want experiments to unleash significant technical problems or massive amounts of copyvio content into Wikipedia. I believe that the official failure analysis of the IEP was, if anything, too kind in its conclusions. It is my understanding from Steven Walling’s posts that the possible projects for editor retention will be much smaller in scale and that the community will be notified in advance about the specifics of these experiments.

I doubt that we need to worry about the possibility of attracting more PR manipulators and POV pushers who abuse editing privileges because those people seem to be strongly motivated already, and anyone who doesn’t know how to do it themselves can hire someone to do it or recruit volunteers to do it for them. My understanding is that the focus of these outreach efforts will be to retain editors whose motivation to edit is sufficiently marginal that they’re likely to leave if the status quo continues.

Steven, is there a place on Meta or Outreach where editors can go to propose ideas for editor retention? Maybe a link was already posted but I don’t recall seeing one.

Also, Steven, could you send the link to the place where we can look at your “not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human”? I’m not clear on which page is the main one, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing or https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Template_testing. Is https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Template_testing the main page and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing the list of past tests? There’s also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Engagement which looks like it’s a coordinating page for multiple projects but some of the information is a bit outdated. I think it would be helpful for all three of these pages to articulate their relationships with each other more clearly and be updated to reflect current information, including clearly stating which staff members are the appropriate contacts for each page.

Thanks,

Pine