[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Sue Gardner]

On 9 April 2011 20:21, Andrew Garrett <agarrett at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I don't mean to minimise the importance of keeping our established
> users happy and free from harassment, but I want to caution against
> the biases that we will undoubtedly have in considering our focus.
>
> Anecdotally, we tend to hear a lot more about established users
> picking up and leaving, because these are our friends — we work with
> them, chat with them on IRC, and whatever else. But for every story we
> hear about an established user leaving because of harassment, there
> are ten new-ish users who encounter the same hostile environment and
> stop editing without all the pomp and ceremony that necessarily
> accompanies the departure of a popular or well-known member of the
> community.
>
> So let's make sure we deal with the factors that make our overall
> editing environment conducive to hostile conduct. I don't want to see
> us fall into the trap of thinking only about long-term established
> users who are harassed in the long term, rather than the newer users
> who don't get a chance to be harassed in the long term because they
> pick up and leave straight away.


Thanks Andrew: this is an important comment and I'm glad you made it.
We do all see the world from where we sit, and we interact with the
people we already know ... so, experienced editors will be more
exposed to the kinds of concerns shared by other experienced editors,
and those concerns will instinctively resonate more for them.

This isn't a problem necessarily, it just means that we all need to
try hard to imagine the world through other people's eyes, to listen
to what other people say, and to not over-generalize from our own
experiences and the experiences of our friends.

To that end ...... with help from others on the staff, a few weeks ago
I took a crack at creating a framework for understanding the kinds of
problems faced by editors at various stages of their 'life-cycle.'
You can see it in this Google spreadsheet here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aq_nhKkb7L-OdG5uWlJLT25TZkZ3MzdSeUNqZnZqY2c&hl=en&authkey=CP3O_PgO
-- it's publicly viewable but not editable.

There's also this spreadsheet, which people may find interesting:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aq_nhKkb7L-OdFdzTG1KTUxVeXBOS0hhdWZMVmtxNUE&hl=en&authkey=CNK2oI8G
-- it's a documentation of all the decline theories I know about it,
tested against the available research. Also publicly viewable, also
not editable.

Both of these are just first stabs... probably they will want to be
moved to wiki pages and further fleshed out. But not by me: my
table-making skills aren't up to the task :-)

Thanks,
Sue