2010/12/29 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment.
The actual effect of FlaggedRevs on revert behavior appears to be, if anything, to accelerate reverts. See Felipe Ortega's presentation at Wikimania 2010, page 18 and following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Felipe_Ortega,_Flagged_revisions_study_res...
Performing review actions as quickly as possible is generally seen by FlaggedRevs-using communities as one of the key performance indicators connected with the feature. The moment of performing the review action also tends to be the moment of reverting. I see no evidence, on the other hand, that FlaggedRevs has contributed to a decreased sense of urgency anywhere it's been employed.
It's important to note that FlaggedRevs edits aren't like patches awaiting review. They must be processed in order for anyone's subsequent edits to be reader-visible. Logged-in users, on the other hand, always see the latest version by default. These factors and others may contribute to a sense that edits must be processed as quickly as possible.
I do fully agree with the rest of your note. We have sufficient data to show not only that the resistance against new edits as indicated by the revert ratio towards new users has increased significantly in the last few years, but also that only very few of the thousands of new users who complete their first 10 edits in any given month stick around. Our former contributors survey showed that among people with more than 10 edits/month who had stopped editing, 40% did so because of unpleasant experiences with other editors.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Former_contributors_survey_presentat...
While fixing the editing UI is absolutely essential, I strongly agree with your hypothesis that doing so without regard for the problematic social dynamics is likely to only accelerate people's negative experiences. Useful technology changes in the area of new user interaction are a lot harder to anticipate, however, and the only way we're going to learn is through lots of small experiments. We can follow in the footsteps of the GroupLens researchers and others who have experimented with interface changes such as changes to the revert process, and how these affect new user retention:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/NICE (See their publications to-date at http://www.grouplens.org/biblio )
Once we've identified paths that are clearly fruitful (e.g. if we find that an experiment with real-time chat yields useful results), we can throw more resources at them to implement proper functionality.
Over the holidays, my mother shared her own "newbie biting" story. She's 64 years old and a professional adult educator. Her clearly constructive good faith edit in the FlaggedRevs-using German Wikipedia [1] was reverted within the minute it was made, without a comment of any kind. She explained that she doesn't have enough frustration tolerance to deal with this kind of behavior.
It's quite likely that we won't be able to make Wikipedia frustration-free enough to retain someone like my mother as an editor, but we should be able to make it a significantly more pleasant experience than it is today.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transaktionsanalyse&diff=76794...