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

[Samuel Klein]

There are many good reasons to attract new contributors - from
countering systemic bias to higher quality over time to new forms of
collective wisdom that emerge as people currently overwhelmed with
admin work have time to reflect and find better ways to work.

Technically, we could attract raw contributors with the flick of a
finger: by encouraging editing via sitenotices.
But attracting people who won't contribute well, or will have a bad
experience -- or doing so when there is no good way to integrate them
into the project -- could simply waste everyone's time. That's a
reason to try lots of small experiments and see what works and what
might scale.

So even the simplest 'editor retention' or 'editor recruitment'
project starts from the assumption that quality contributions, and
solid contributors, are wanted.  That doesn't mean mistakes aren't
sometimes made.

As others noted, new contributors questions are more interesting in
languages other than the largest ones. Sometimes research and
experiments 'cluster under lampposts' where other work has already
been done. But I believe there is better multilingual and multiproject
data now than we were last year.

@Theo: Yes, more human interactions rather than bots and templates are
valuable to building a lasting community.  Human interaction and a
friendly welcome are also things that many newbies can do well with a
little practice.  So the right framework for new contributors could in
theory cover many of its own scaling costs.  We simply haven't found
such a framework yet.

SJ

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:17 PM, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:35 AM, <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing
>> project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the
>> quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content.  Is this
>> really disputed?
>
>
> An astute observation.
>
> I do believe the end goal is increasing the size of the collected wisdom,
> whether it is achieved by merely increasing the size of the crowd so the
> mean is more accurate or some other approach entirely. There isn't a lot of
> experiments or past projects to base this on, but I don't believe that the
> same numbers approach is the right way to proceed.
>
> What the concern should be, in this particular case, is the almost myopic
> focus on the statistical rise and fall in the number of contributors. And
> that too, focused on one language of one project. Regardless of which side
> of the argument one is on, you can not overlook the importance of getting a
> complete picture.
>
> I suppose it is revealing that some of the earlier criticism already on
> this thread, is about the impersonal nature of interactions and usage of
> automated tools and templates. Individualism is usually the first casualty
> of collectivist constructs. Collectivism replaces the individual nature for
> a more linear, modular, yet parsimonious approach to interaction. As it
> should, I suppose, since the sole focus is on increasing the collective and
> nothing more. They are both very related, you will have more usage of
> templates, and automated tools, and less personal interactions, as the size
> grows and only new, possibly temporary contributors join on an hourly
> basis.
>
> Templates or automated tools do not directly cause any rise or fall in the
> number of contributors, they and their increased usage, is merely the
> symptom of the underlying issue.
>
> Regards
> Theo
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-- 
Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266