Keeping the teahouse thread alive...
...for some time I've wanted to prototype some real-time chat and editing features with the Teahouse folks (eg, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TogetherJS) to make the "conversations" Risker mentions easier/more natural. If anyone has suggestions about who to talk to about this, let me know. --scott
On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 10:58 AM, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfaker@gmail.com wrote:
Ori said:
I would like us to consider the contribution that modifications to the
user experience make to the
interpersonal climate on the wikis.
I think that this is important. Our social experience in computer
mediated spaces is intertwined with the technologies that manage our interactions. This is certainly true to Wikipedia[1] and I think it is true generally[2]. While we may find it easy to discuss the technology and social things separately, it is very important that we don't interpret this as a real separation. Our social patterns affect how we choose and design our digital technologies and our digital technologies -- in turn -- affect our social patterns(for more discussion, see [3]).
J-Mo said:
If WMF ever supports any additional Teahouse-related development, it
should
be focused on giving more new editors, on more Wikis, access to Teahouses and Teahouse-like tools and resources—rather than doing anything to the Enwiki Teahouse itself, which is doing just fine.
But J-Mo, we're literally planning to explore supporting the Teahouse
with more digital technologies right now -- you and I! E.g. using ORES https://ores.wmflabs.org/ to identify more good-faith newcomers to route to the Teahouse & building a search interface to help newcomers explore past questions. Maybe it's OK because we don't plan to do anything *to* the Teahouse, but rather to work *with* the hosts to figure out how to build up capacity. I suspect that, if the technologies we develop are able to make the positive social interactions that the Teahouse excels in available to more newcomers -- we'll succeed. And hopefully, if our technological investments into the Teahouse fail and somehow make positive, human interactions more difficult or otherwise less common, we'll have the insight to not deploy them beyond an experiment.
This thread started out as a harmless (and humorous!) joke and it has turned into a debate around our values with regards to technologies that we intentionally integrate with social behaviors. I think this is a conversation we ought to have, but I'd really like to see us move beyond platitudes. Technology isn't good or bad. It certainly isn't easy to get right, but I believe we can co-evolve our tech and our social structures. In a computer mediated environments such as ours, this socio-technical co-evolution is our only hope to actually making real progress.
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_Rise_and_Decline
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociotechnical_system
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-We4GZbH3Iw#t=34m04s (my "Paramecium
talk")
-Aaron
On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 7:30 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 04/02/2016 09:37 PM, Ori Livneh wrote:
Why am I going on about this? I guess I'm a bit bummed out that the idea of designing user interfaces that seek to improve the emotional environment by making it easier to be warm and personal to one another is a joke.
For what it's worth, as someone who wasn't involved in that April Fools's "feature", but joke-reviewed it, I did not intend to to discourage any serious efforts to encourage a warm and productive editor community.
Matt
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