[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!

[Thomas Dalton]

On 21 March 2012 13:53, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Sue Gardner wrote:
>> Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation
>> in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
>
> Thank you for sharing this.
>
> How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong
> approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also
> trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the
> numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the
> quality of the new contributors, for that matter).

One key issue is that targets need to be measurable, or they don't
work. It is very easy to measure the number of people contributing. It
is much harder to measure the quality of what they produce.

The Foundation's strategy plan is here:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_StrategicPlan2011_spreads.pdf

See pages 10 and 11 for the bit on improving quality. A lot of it is
focused on measuring quality, because that is a real challenge (and,
in fact, simply measuring something can be enough to prompt a
significant improvement).

The Foundation's 2011-12 annual plan is here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf

The targets for the year are on page 28 and don't specifically mention
quality. I would like to hear an explanation for that from someone at
the Foundation. I'm guessing there isn't a target for actually
improving quality because we aren't yet at the stage where we can
measure it effectively, but wouldn't a target to produce a good
quality measuring system have been good?