Welcome Karyn, Maryana, Steven and Ryan to our expanded editor engagement group!
I am really happy to hear about this decision, which feels like the right thing to do in
so many ways.
It's going to help us focus together on creating more practical solutions to this
complex challenge, which is as much about psychology and culture as it is about
technology.
I can't wait to work more closely with you all -- and to learn from each other in the
process.
Onward!
Fabrice
__________________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager,
Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6827 work
fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
Check our new report:
Helping readers improve Wikipedia: First results from Article Feedback:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:52:19 -0700
From: Maryana Pinchuk <mpinchuk(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Message-ID:
<CAOjELoaxymDeK=xd650g+ERAGxwRmKCxK11ENUS4pDzi6hL2xA(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)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
study<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_quality#Conclusio…on>:)
(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
_______________________________________________
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Unsubscribe:
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--
Maryana Pinchuk
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:01:18 -0700
From: En Pine <deyntestiss(a)hotmail.com>
To: <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Foundation-l] Editor retention (was "Announcement: New
editor engagement experiments team!")
Message-ID: <BLU154-ds5A876A39662C890698D92A6400(a)phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original
Responding to MZMcBride's question, "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?"
First, I think that the new visual editor will help.
Second, I think that the NOTFACEBOOK policy is a bit counterproductive in
its current form. Wikipedia is a collaborative work and I've seen the
NOTFACEBOOK policy pushed in the faces of people who engage in personal
conversation on their talk pages. We want people to develop collaborative
relationships here, right? I don't mean to suggest that people should turn
userpages entirely into personal blogs, but I also think that the statement
"Wikipedians have their own user pages, but they may be used only to present
information relevant to working on the encyclopedia" is overkill and
discourages people from forming friendly collaborative relationships. I
think that we should move in the opposite direction, permitting and possibly
even encouraging people to be social (within reasonable limits) while
working collaboratively on our collective project of Wikipedia.
Pine
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:26:18 -0600
From: Will Takatoshi <willtakatoshi(a)gmail.com>
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Message-ID:
<CAF-2vByE2RDp7niHGx45gOtyaJv+K7_LFO-foSj-hpXrm6pvOQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but
doesn't
seem to care about the quality of the content....
There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality.
I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests
of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to
improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally.
Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always
been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to
frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long
term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very
small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The
evidence is detailed at
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true
now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent
contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space.
Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently
include the establishment of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles
which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed
articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of
more than 150 bytes. At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles
will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as
opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years
to meet the same goal.
Another very impressive structural improvement involves
User:Dispenser's enhancements to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog where most of
the article backlog count numbers are now clickable, such that they
will show a list of the backlog category's articles sorted by
importance, measured by the number of incoming links. For example,
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/categorder.py?page=Category:All_un…
As the number of incoming backlinks strongly correlates with the
number of page views, this represents a quantum improvement for
dealing with quality issue backlogs.
There is no reason to believe that such organics and structural
quality improvements will not continue.
-Will
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:32:28 -0700
From: Zack Exley <zexley(a)wikimedia.org>
To: MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com>
Cc: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Message-ID:
<CA+iYU95J-jJg9gsUqAG15bzMhS1LceWvZOGdC7MZHF8fGWALwg(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)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
--
Zack Exley
Chief Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:57:57 +0100
From: Kim Bruning <kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl>
To: rm(a)slmr.com, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Stopping the
presses:, , Britannica to stop printing books
Message-ID: <20120321225757.A6572(a)bruning.lan>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
But what to call it? Wikipedia2 doesn't have
much flavor.
WikipediaLocalized? WikiDetails? WikipediaExpanded? WikipediaSuppliment?
On 3/20/2012 5:24 PM, foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> From: David Goodman<dggenwp(a)gmail.com>
> What I suggest is a '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia
supplement
> where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be
> different from Wikia by still requiring Verifiability and NPOV. It
> would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in
> Wikipedia, and a good deal of what we do not let in.
> But it would be interesting to see the
results of a search option:
> Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the really notable (WP)?
> Anyone care to guess which people would choose?
Ha! I'd choose Wikipedia2 anyday! ;-) (my favorite articles keep getting
deleted from wikipedia. How's that useful to anyone?)
Notability was originally a stopgap for verifiability IIRC. It's gone off
the rails imo.
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 09:40:20AM -0700, Robin McCain wrote:
This is an excellent idea - a kind of searchable
sandbox where articles
could eventually be promoted into the main site or simply used as in
depth backing for a Wikipedia One article.
I'm thinking wikipedia needs a reboot anyway. We'll probably end up
with a replay of wikipedia/nupedia if we reboot a wp2 with tidied up and
streamlined "policy" (redesign as a pattern language), integrated
Prod/AFD, deprecated arbcom in favor of DRN, and most importantly:
ensuring new users all get mentors.
Acculturation failure has severely harmed WP1, we need some way to
bring experienced and inexperienced users together reliably. This is
the simplest and best way to retain editors. :-)
sincerely,
Kim Bruning
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:49:48 +0000
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Message-ID:
<CAJ0tu1HD8s91qgQG9sxGs4=DCXjAx2s98JvDkwEYp4wDWNFpaQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On 21 March 2012 22:32, Zack Exley <zexley(a)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.
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Mar 21, 2012, at 5:00 AM, foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:24:24 -0700
From: Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Announce Mailing List
<WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement:
New editor engagement experiments team!
Message-ID:
<CAGZ0=LN=B+wmG1K2AfPWFxx4XnVfnxxG6mFUFQdu-H3LcnSrew(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
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(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 20 March 2012 19:17
Subject: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
To: Staff All <wmfall(a)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
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End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 96, Issue 68
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