[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Kim Bruning]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 10:50:55PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
> >
> > A wiki usually serves its participants first, (with the world at
> > large being a secondary goal; after all - the entire world is
> > invited and welcome to participate if they want to).
> I've commented at length already on why this is the wrong approach; and
> forces us into an even more insular community with greater biases 

Initially, this is how the system worked exclusively, and we got more and
more participation. Since 2005, people have slowly been making things
harder for new participants, and the trend reversed itself.

So your conclusion does not match the statistics. The inverse conclusion is
warrented. A stronger emphasis on anonymous participation and greater ease
of access to talk pages (perhaps through tools such as liquid threads)
will likely improve our situation considerably. I certainly doubt it will harm it
:-P

> (you only
> have to look at the different ways that different language Wiki's present
> topics to understand how little "neutrality" we have. There is a bias; it's
> just that each community agrees on it).
>
The fact that we have different language wikis working past each other is
actually a form of (inadvertant) pillarization. 

As a thought experiment:

In fact, if culture issues are the reason for this filter, couldn't we just
terminate commons? Then each project could keep images that are ok in
their culture, and discard images that they are 'uncomfortable' with.
 
If you have reasons why we shouldn't terminate commons, those reasons are
likely to overlap with some reasons why we shouldn't filter.

> This is a vicious circle that ignores our readers (who are a much wider
> cross section) and leaves a somewhat close minded and inaccessible community
> that believes it is the pillar of neutrality :)

There is a vicious circle happening, but I really doubt that steps such as
more openness, more outreach, clearer and easier editing, and more
prominent access to talk pages are part of that circle. :-P

The vicious circle I see is as follows:

*START: Wikipedia works by having amateurs work together using a tight, rapid
feedback cycle for editing. (More mistakes are made, but they're caught as
quickly)

* People start 'raising the bar for quality'
* some people fall below the bar
* more discussion is requested, and more pre-study is required.
* It takes longer to make an edit to an article
* less mistakes are made, but less mistakes are caught too.
* Netto less articles are written, although only slightly higher quality 
  quality (diminishing returns)

* END: You practically have to write an article fully-formed in userspace.
   a lot of  work done in mainspace ends up deleted or reverted.

> > I can't ASSUME
> > things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do
> > (including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we
> > don't know.
>  And this takes us full circle to just about my first question on this long
> thread.... has anyone actually asked our consumers what they would like to
> see?

Yes. We do. That's why we have a discussion tab on every single page.
Would you like it to be more prominent, in blinking letters 3 miles high?
Perhaps we should do something like that (within reason) if you think it
will help. But the community attitude will have to change a bit too. Right
now the community is becoming more and more insular, and unwilling to
"talk to strangers".

Outside participation is possible, permitted, and encouraged at page-level
granularity. Where it is not, we have a problem with a known solution. 

At the moment, very few people are going page-by-page and solving it
though. We may need some new forms of patrol. :-)


sincerely,
	Kim Bruning


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