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

[MZMcBride]

Zack Exley wrote:
> MZMcBride wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> OK, don't know what you're talking about there... did moveon ever work on
> mandatory voting laws? but anyways... 

The comparison was a focus on trying to engage people to participate who
were too apathetic or ignorant to get engaged themselves. MoveOn.org has
done a lot of voter registration work, but for them, just as for Wikimedia,
it's a numbers game more than anything else. The focus isn't adding 1,000
new voters who are well-versed in (or even familiar with) politics, it's
about adding 1,000 new voters. Similarly, Wikimedia's goal isn't to increase
the amount of quality content-producing contributors, it's to increase the
number of contributors.

You seem to be arguing that the goal _really is_ to add quality contributors
and that this goal simply isn't being communicated effectively when the
subject is raised, but is there evidence of what you're saying? There's
plenty of evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase participation (both
of us agree on this point). Is there evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to
increase quality participation? Is there evidence that Wikimedia's goal is
to increase quality content? If so, can you share? :-)

> When we look back at user-to-user interactions in 2001-2004, we see that
> established users had very high standards and were often unwelcoming or even
> rude, but they were putting effort into finding the needles in haystacks who
> would be great Wikimedians. They were saying over and over, "It's really hard
> to do what we do, but we're doing something amazing, if you stick around and
> learn the ropes, we could really use you."

I wasn't around in this period (and I don't think you were either?), but if
you ask nearly anyone from that period whether Wikimedia wikis are more
friendly and collegial now than they were then, what do you think their
responses would be?

> Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that
> templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing
> a personal note about a specific edit. I know the solution is not to just stop
> using templates. But I'm just trying to make clear (since you didn't hear it
> the first time I said it) that I wasn't arguing for coddling spammers or even
> investing time into encouraging all good faith users.

What are you arguing for? It's still unclear to me.

How much editing work have you personally engaged in? I looked at
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Zackexley>, but I
assume that's just your staff account, right? You speak with an authority
about templates and user talk pages and such, so I can't imagine you've
never personally engaged with the subject. What have your experiences been?

> There are a ton of amazing new users who make their 10th -- or 100th, or
> 1000th -- high quality edit every week. We just need to encourage them
> (instead of merely blanketing their talk pages with impersonal warnings). 

Can you show an example of a user making his or her 10th, 100th, or 1000th
high quality edit who's being blanketed with impersonal warnings? I don't
understand this phenomenon, though it sounds fascinating.

MZMcBride