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

[MZMcBride]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> 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.

[...]

>> 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.

Really, it's a red herring? You're talking about making automated
anti-vandalism tools and implementing script-assisted tools for clueless
users. Who do you think writes those tools? While there's a sizeable
volunteer development base surrounding MediaWiki, most large tech projects
(AbuseFilter, LiquidThreads, UploadWizard, ResourceLoader, etc.) require
paid developers, of which there are precious few. Even "high priority"
projects can and do quickly get placed on the backburner (inquire about
LiquidThreads development sometime), so it's not so much a red herring as it
is the reality, as I see it. If you have contrary evidence, I'd be very
interested to read it.

While it's often overlooked, MediaWiki is the current bedrock of all
Wikimedia wikis and it clearly does not have an abundance of resources.
Wikimedia has a small budget; what isn't spent on outreach, fundraising, and
non-tech staff gets allocated to the tech side. With this in mind, I'll
stand by my statements that there is a finite amount of resources and that
it's wasteful to be devoting time and energy on the very low-hanging fruit
like the text of welcome templates.

> 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.

Visits, but how many of those people contribute? 100,000 "active" users out
of 400,000,000 million views per month? Is that about right? You're talking
about .025% of visitors in this community you're dreaming up. Making bold
claims like "30% of the entire Internet" is great for Wikipedia advertising,
but drawing conclusions such as "we can make any community we want with so
many people!" is rather silly.

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

More channels and tools? Sounds like more development work. Do you some
secret store of developers? :-)

MZMcBride