Message: 2 Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:05:31 -0500 From: Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team! Message-ID: 86D627E5-3FB4-452A-BF9E-6C9C32C8261B@yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:

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Sue Gardner wrote:

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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

Some members of the community had a very bad experience with the foundation's Academic outreach program. Large numbers of students were instructed to edit as part of their course without proper supervision or being taught not to plagiarise, the quality of the resulting work was not as good as we typically get from volunteer editors. Age and even compulsion is not the issue here as we've had successful schemes where high school students were translating articles as school homework. But the combination of compulsion and lack of supervision was unhealthy. Of course crowdsourcing projects benefit from larger crowds, but not if the crowds are less well motivated or otherwise doing lower quality edits. For example: We could easily increase the number of editors by issuing an amnesty to everyone blocked for more than 60 days; But simply judged on quality grounds such an experiment would almost inevitably fail. Alternatively we could significantly increase editing levels in certain parts of the world where editing or even reading wikmedia sites is a slow and frustrating experience by we opening more local datacentres such the one we have in Amsterdam. The probability is that extra editors or extra edits from existing editors who could do more in the same time would be similar quality to the edits we already get, though possibly skewed towards subjects and languages where currently we are relatively weak.

WereSpielChequers