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

[MZMcBride]

Zack Exley wrote:
>> 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).
> 
> I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of
> contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we
> can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high
> quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect.

I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and
your previous work at MoveOn.org.

Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic
participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a
counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or
ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without
making a better society.

I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the
focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia
wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who
deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular
purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or
group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be
doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors
have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is "my
article was deleted, help!" when the article was never appropriate for an
encyclopedia to begin with.

> Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality
> contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of
> declining numbers.

Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise.
Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal.
But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being
driven in are the type we want?

And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new
editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the
easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their
spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential
benefit?

MZMcBride