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

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Will Takatoshi <willtakatoshi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> > seem to care about the quality of the content....
>
> There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality.
> I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests
> of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to
> improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally.

Will, the concerns about the WMF's new editor targets is not driven by
concerns that English Wikipedia quality is decreasing.

English Wikipedia quality is increasing, and is less accepting of poor
quality contributions and contributors.
Adding lots of new editors with low quality contributions is a concern.

If the WMF wants more new editors in order to meet strategic goals
that they set for themselves, they should be adding them to projects
other than the large Wikipedia.  Yet the WMF appears to be focused on
recruiting editors to English Wikipedia.

> Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always
> been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to
> frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long
> term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very
> small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The
> evidence is detailed at
> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true
> now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent
> contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space.
>
> Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently
> include the establishment of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles
> which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed
> articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of
> more than 150 bytes.  At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles
> will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as
> opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years
> to meet the same goal.

And the creator of Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles has retired
after 16 days..due to harassment/accusations of sock puppetry/etc

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Npmay&diff=482503236&oldid=482441874

--
John Vandenberg