[This was a passing comment I made on wikien-l, but it's a reasonably serious topic for consideration in how the wikisphere works.]
No matter how much work is put into flagged revisions on en:wp, it is 100% certain that it will be greeted with deafening whinging.
This is not a reason not to make it as good as possible, but the complaint is a certainty. Anyone who's been around Wikipedia or Wikimedia long enough can see this is what will happen. There is no change that will not be greeted with complaint, significant or petty.
1. Is this a bug or a feature? 2. If it isn't a feature, how can we make it into one? 'Cos we really need to.
(AGK suggests Special:Complain or Extension:Whine.)
- d.
Thanks for bringing this up, David.
On 05/05/2010 07:31 AM, David Gerard wrote:
No matter how much work is put into flagged revisions on en:wp, it is 100% certain that it will be greeted with deafening whinging.
This is not a reason not to make it as good as possible, but the complaint is a certainty. Anyone who's been around Wikipedia or Wikimedia long enough can see this is what will happen. There is no change that will not be greeted with complaint, significant or petty.
- Is this a bug or a feature?
- If it isn't a feature, how can we make it into one? 'Cos we really need to.
I'm insanely busy with non-Wikipedia stuff for the next couple days, and hope to come back to this more later. But even as a person fully expecting to be the target for a lot of the grumbling, I wanted to come out in favor of the complaining, or at least some of it.
Good software development is a dialog between the makers and the users. Through use and discussion, we jointly learn what the product should be. The future is not generally foreseeable, but we can at least react as swiftly and smartly as possible to new learning as it comes in. This is only possible with an engaged audience, and for better or worse, people are much more likely to speak up when they see a problem than when they are happy.
What I'd love is a way to foreground the reasonable, thoughtful, and actionable complaints, while attenuating the other ones. Productive complaints tend to be specific, personal, actual (as opposed to hypothetical), limited in scope, future-oriented, practical, and aware of the situation. E.g., "When I do X, I have problem Y that could be fixed in way Z." Or, "When I observe a novice user doing A, they are confused about B, and we could make it clearer in way C, but there's a risk we will impact people in situation D."
Having no time machine, the FlaggedRevs team can't do anything about the past, but we're very eager to improve the future, and clear, actionable community feedback is vital for that.
How to achieve that, I dunno, but we do have a lot of collective talent in creating, cataloging, and filtering information in ways that are useful to readers, so it seems like we have a lot to work with. And perhaps the complaining can be even put to use; is there some way to get people to complain about bad complaints?
William
On 5 May 2010 17:13, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
And perhaps the complaining can be even put to use; is there some way to get people to complain about bad complaints?
Up/down rating feature on complaints. Bugzilla has votes for this purpose. But many web boards work quite well on all users being able to up/down-rate posts and comments.
- d.
On 5 May 2010 17:13, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Thanks for bringing this up, David.
I must point out I'm not at all talking about just flagged revisions - I mean the perpetual complaints, petty and significant (and one often resembling the other) that happen in the wake of many changes or suggested changes. I suspect it's something about having a wiki editor population the size of a city (135,000 any given month on en:wp, for example).
- d.
It's not just changes that draw petty, sarcastic and juvenile replies for Wikipedians. We have a pervasive problem of burnout, wherein our more experienced contributors became jaded and disillusioned and make a practice of appalling behavior. Two recent cases in point... I don't need to explain the Tanthalas situation more than just to mention it as an example, but the second case is, I think, more serious. An administrator replies to a plea for help from a new contributor, who has uploaded his own work several times and tried to release it under public domain. Rather than explain, the administrator uses what appears to be his boilerplate response - snide, condescending, and perfectly tailored to send this new contributor away with a bad taste of the entire project. [1][2]
Unfortunately this type of interaction isn't even unusual. In some respects it appears to be the norm, in fact, and there doesn't seem to be any effective way of addressing this problem. I can no longer recommend people to become involved in editing, because frankly I refuse to subject friends and colleagues to the risk of this type of treatment. Perhaps the Foundation should put some effort into this issue before soliciting new participants who are likely to be shocked at the editing culture.
Nathan
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fastily#SYS_logo.png [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sfan00_IMG#Fair_use
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
It's not just changes that draw petty, sarcastic and juvenile replies for Wikipedians. We have a pervasive problem of burnout, wherein our more experienced contributors became jaded and disillusioned and make a practice of appalling behavior.
<snip>
Unfortunately this type of interaction isn't even unusual. In some respects it appears to be the norm, in fact, and there doesn't seem to be any effective way of addressing this problem. I can no longer recommend people to become involved in editing, because frankly I refuse to subject friends and colleagues to the risk of this type of treatment. Perhaps the Foundation should put some effort into this issue before soliciting new participants who are likely to be shocked at the editing culture.
Nathan
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fastily#SYS_logo.png [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sfan00_IMG#Fair_use
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Interesting point to follow up to David's. I've gone a rounds about your point and David's, and how it integrates.
Data is good, data is useful. When discussing the operation of a collaborative, volunteer environment, data does not always say what we want it to unless we want it to.
Let's use BLPs on the English Wikipedia for an example. No, I don't have refs, this is off the top of my head but I've been up to my eyes in it since September.
The English Wikipedia has 3.5 million articles. Of those, /only/ 50,000 of those were unreferenced BLPs. So numerically, very small. To break that down further, of the BLP tagged articles on the English Wikipedia, less than a thousand get in touch with the volunteer response team about issues per year. Again, statistically small.
So what we have are four salient questions: How many people don't care, how many people care and don't know what to do, how satisfied are they if they figure that out, and how much volunteer resource is spent on these issues.
The thing is that this can all never be quantified to the extent of the human condition. All we can do is work toward helping and enticing new consumers of Wikimedia projects. There are new users that are eager, ones that don't care, and others that are initially openly hostile. The fact of the matter is that dedicated contributors stay, the truly dedicated ones get it, and we do need a way to promote a more friendly, welcoming environment. Reading over the new Public Policy intent is a good step in that direction.
I said something to someone in the office today, that I think might be worth sharing here. It's just an observation from my past life as a journalist, but it feels germane.
In newsrooms, it is very very common for experienced senior editors to be curt and gruff --- in general, but particularly with new news staff. It's a cliche you see all the time in TV and movies -- e.g., the Lou Grant type character.
I think it's inherent to the work. Experienced editors have seen it all: they are a little tired, a little jaded, a little cynical. They talk in shorthand among each other, and they're impatient with newcomers. That's understandable and it's forgiveable.
The trick is, I think, to create a healthy mix. Wikimedia needs experienced editors who have good judgment and can recognize patterns and coach and guide the inexperienced. It also needs a regular influx of new people who can bring fresh perspectives and new insights, and relieve experienced people of grunt work they're tired of doing. Good newsrooms have a healthy mix of both, and we need that too.
I hear you Nathan, when you say you're loathe to expose new people to our current culture -- I know our public outreach staff sometimes feel that way too. But I think it's essential: we need to bring in new people and help them get through their early days with us, in order to ensure an overall healthy balance. We're a bit out of kilter now, but I think with some effort on everybody's part, we can rebalance into good health.
Thanks, Sue
-----Original Message----- From: Nathan nawrich@gmail.com Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 22:46:44 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] How to make unstoppable petty complaint a feature?
It's not just changes that draw petty, sarcastic and juvenile replies for Wikipedians. We have a pervasive problem of burnout, wherein our more experienced contributors became jaded and disillusioned and make a practice of appalling behavior. Two recent cases in point... I don't need to explain the Tanthalas situation more than just to mention it as an example, but the second case is, I think, more serious. An administrator replies to a plea for help from a new contributor, who has uploaded his own work several times and tried to release it under public domain. Rather than explain, the administrator uses what appears to be his boilerplate response - snide, condescending, and perfectly tailored to send this new contributor away with a bad taste of the entire project. [1][2]
Unfortunately this type of interaction isn't even unusual. In some respects it appears to be the norm, in fact, and there doesn't seem to be any effective way of addressing this problem. I can no longer recommend people to become involved in editing, because frankly I refuse to subject friends and colleagues to the risk of this type of treatment. Perhaps the Foundation should put some effort into this issue before soliciting new participants who are likely to be shocked at the editing culture.
Nathan
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fastily#SYS_logo.png [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sfan00_IMG#Fair_use
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On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 1:57 AM, Sue Gardner susanpgardner@gmail.com wrote:
The trick is, I think, to create a healthy mix. Wikimedia needs experienced editors who have good judgment and can recognize patterns and coach and guide the inexperienced. It also needs a regular influx of new people who can bring fresh perspectives and new insights, and relieve experienced people of grunt work they're tired of doing. Good newsrooms have a healthy mix of both, and we need that too. Thanks, Sue
For me, the issue is that I think we have an untapped healthy mix. We have continuity in new userbase that can't be quantified. As I was saying before, the human condition does not meet up with data. While numbers have dropped in participation and admin promotion on the English Wikipedia, it is my feeling that several factors come into play, mainly bots and that there's not much else to write about.
What I would like to see is the improvement of guiding new users. I've been a fixture in #wikipedia-en-help since I was a new user five years ago, and I've jumped the hoops and watch others jump them. I had a similar conversation with someone this evening, Sue, and it is an interesting mountain.
I suppose my point is that things sort themselves out with the wiki model, but it does take interaction and integration. Fancy models for article creation or file uploading help, they do. However, the flip side is when we have consumers complaining because they followed the rules as outlined. I know that it is apparent to the volunteers on the English Wikipedia that we've reached the self-evaluation point, it is a part of growing up. Hopefully, other projects can say "We already knew that" or "Oh, good idea". We'll see how that goes.
David -
Great idea. I do think this should become a feature, though it's currently seen as a bug.
We could start with a sexier year-round feedback process, that captures what page you are looking at when you leave feedback and lets you browse / rate the feedback of others, would certainly be helpful. We'd end up with an order of magnitude more input than we currently get through bugzilla, about very very different topics.
However the link to feedback is highlighted on regular pages, it could be made a bit more visible when new features are rolled out, or when you're using a section that has a new feature recently enabled... to offer an outlet for frustration, or just to get targeted testing.
SJ
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 12:23 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I must point out I'm not at all talking about just flagged revisions - I mean the perpetual complaints, petty and significant (and one often resembling the other) that happen in the wake of many changes or suggested changes. I suspect it's something about having a wiki editor population the size of a city (135,000 any given month on en:wp, for example).
- d.
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