Niklas puts it well. Analogously, in sports like baseball there are lots of
statistics about players, coaches, teams, divisions, and leagues. Awards
are given based strictly on quantities, as well as more subjectively on
qualities for recognitions such as Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable
Player.
Wikimedia technical development is a team sport, and that unlike on the
content side of Wikipedia where there can be rival views, I think that on
technical matters almost everyone collaborates toward compatible goals.
I've been thinking about how to ensure that *quality* is valued alongside
*quantity*. We struggle do this balance well in the US health care system
when we evaluate hospitals and doctors, and WMF stuggles to do this well
when the Community Resources and Evaluation teams evaluate grant proposals
and the performance of Wikimedia affiliates. I'm very interested in ideas
about how to estimate the quality of contributions (including code review!)
as well as the quantity of contributions.
Pine
On Apr 4, 2016 08:22, "Niklas Laxström" <niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
2016-04-04 17:02 GMT+03:00 Quim Gil
<qgil(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
The first question to answer is what information
are you looking for when
you want to measure developers' "productivity". What would be the
motivation of that estimation? What is the motivation behind this thread?
One reason comes to me mind. My gut feeling is that we are not very
good at consistently giving recognition for technical work. One
possible reason is that we do not have clear and understandable
metrics or promote those metrics enough. Nor am I aware of any process
for awards and celebration (The Academy Awards would be an example in
another context, also Wikipedian of the year).
As an example, I recall vaguely that during the Bugzilla times we used
to have regular emails on wikitech-l with list of people who closed
most bugs.
Having some metrics for different activities could stir up some
healthy competition (also unhealthy if we are not careful) and of
course there is a lot of important work that is not visible from the
numbers only.
I am not expert on this subject, but I think developers (especially
volunteers, but also others) are more likely to stick around if they
feel that their work is recognized and appreciated. For the latter we
already know that we should improve our code review process.
-Niklas
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