[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Samuel Klein]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
> You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour
> from people all over the world,
> a decent-sized percentage of which are purely malicious and

These we should handle in automated fashion.

> another decent-sized percentage of which are completely clueless.

These people who love helping others should handle in script-assisted fashion.

> Wikipedia's treatment of new users is a response to the fire hose of edits
> that come into the site. The only way to fight such a stream has been to
> develop quick or automated tools. Based on my numbers, the English
> Wikipedia gets about 4800 new users per day. While it'd be nice to be
> able to welcome every user individually, for example, it isn't practical on
> any large site.

This is a peculiar perspective.  The # of potential welcomers scales
with community size, along with the # of new users.   The only
question is what channels are in place to attract long-term
contribution and collaboration, and what sorts of activities are
amplified by good tools.

Currently, we honor and respect page deletion, anti-vandalism, and
user blocking, for two reasons.
1) there is a constant battle involved; it is one of the self v. other
wars that shapes our group identity
2) we have created a group of 'special' users defined around access to
those tools, so people who want to become admins spend time on that
work; and people who do that work are confirmed as special and imbued
with a halo of authority that (despite some claims that adminships
should be no big deal) seeps into all aspects of policy and
process-creation.


> If you were going to do something more useful than welcoming users,
> you're talking about dealing with about 180,000 edits per day and an
> active user base of ... maybe 10,000 users?

To be clear: those 180,000 edits per day are the source of future
active users.  By rejecting them or dealing with them summarily we are
simply committing ourselves to remaining at our current community
flavor and size (if there is no channel for becoming a champion
welcomer, people who like to socialize with and welcome others will
never join the community)

> but with finite resources, there are much bigger issues that need focus and
> attention.

The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting,
but a red herring.

30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month.  We can dream
up any community structure we want, any combination of collaborative
channels, any set of creative or repetitive, simple or complex tasks
-- and find people interested in making that idea happen.  We could be
our own social network; we could ask people to participate in a local
photography project like geograph.co.uk and cover dozens of countries
in a matter of weeks; we could start randomly matching millions of
readers with one another as knowledge-seeking penpals.

Each of these would require designing appropriate channels and tools;
naming the work we'd like to see; and welcoming people who do that.

> (I'll side-step the issue of _why_ participation, as opposed to
> article quality, is viewed as so important by Wikimedia for now.)

We're far from covering 'the worlds knowledge' in any language,
dramatically so in most languages, participation is dropping, and many
of our best / most prolific current participants feel that it's
unpleasant rather than rewarding to contribute.  Whereas there is no
known impact on article quality stemming from being more welcoming
(aside from 'No September!' fear-mongering), and in fact history
suggests that more and more diverse participants likely has a positive
effect on overall quality despite the need to teach newbies how to be
an effective contributor.

SJ

-- 
Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266