[Foundation-l] Controversial Content Study Update

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 8:17 AM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is possible that there is a difference between what the WMF is
> interested in and what the community is interested in, something which
> makes itself evident when there is no responses from people in the
> various projects. . I'm aware there are various portions of the
> community, but I can only judge by the responses from my own
> projects.--and this does not mean that I myself am necessarily not
> interested, as can in fact be seen by my commenting here !

David and all,

This is an interesting problem in general: what to do with hot topics
that don't have sustained interest. There certainly seemed to be
enough interest in objectionable content a few months ago, or at least
enough interest to warrant looking into it further. I suspect the
concerns and ideas that people raised then haven't actually gone away
over the summer.

However, now Excirial writes that there's not so much activity on this
meta page, while Robert is still asking for help. I can hypothesize a
few possibilities for why this might be so:

* our entire editor base is on holiday, preparing to go back to
school, or otherwise engaged
* somehow the meta page wasn't advertised to all of the people who do
care about this topic, so they don't know it exists
* people are, as you say, sick of talking about it, or feel like
they've said what needs to be said already somewhere
* people are content to leave it others, or are actively choosing to
leave it to people who might be more involved in the issue (like
commons admins)
* the page is long and complex, and people don't have time to get
through it or have other priorities
* these things can't be rushed
* people don't have anything to say about these specific questions, or
have only thought through one part of the issue and don't want to
address the rest
* responding to dramatic topics, heated email threads or "crisis
situations" is more exciting than thinking things through slowly (in
which case we should threaten to do something drastic to raise
interest -- like no more photos of anything, only line engravings from
here on out. Victorianpedia!)
* there's not enough motivation to participate because it's not clear
what will actually happen afterwards; there's not a sense of building
something or coming to a conclusion in the discussion
* the situation is actually not as dire as Excirial writes, since
there was a fair amount of participation in July, quite a bit before
that, and any of the above factors might be true for one or more
potential discussants now.

I don't think any of those possibilities, if true, necessarily point
to a lack of interest by "the community"; clearly some people are
interested and some could care less, some may be working elsewhere on
the same issue, and some may simply be distracted. But I do think that
it can sometimes be hard to get productive collaboration & discussion
through the mechanism of asking for feedback, for these reasons and
more; many other efforts to get input from the community have also had
difficulty (or else, like pending changes on en:, there's so much
discussion over such a long period that it's difficult to tell what's
going on). So is there a better way?

best,
Phoebe

p.s. I agree with Delphine; thank you Robert for the long explanation
of your thinking and process, which I think is really valuable and a
lovely demonstration of openness and transparency; I look forward to
seeing the research results.