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

[MZMcBride]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> 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.

Did you read 
<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2012-March/072776.html>?

Experiments are acceptable... sometimes. They come with a cost. I think both
sides (the Wikimedia Foundation staff and Wikimedians) acknowledge that the
past experiments have failed or haven't done as well as everyone hoped. I
don't think both sides acknowledge the cost of performing these types of
experiments. _That's_ an issue.

> 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.

Right, but going back to my opening reply, my questions still seem to sit
unanswered. I think everyone agrees that you're going to need people to do
the work. But the larger issue is that not everyone seems to have the same
mission right now.

Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational
content. At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and
there's a huge focus on "building the movement." But my question was (and
is): how much discussion has there been internally about this (the focus on
simply boosting the number of contributors) being the wrong approach? And is
there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a
focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of
improving the content (a focus on quality)?

There seems to be a fundamental difference of opinion about what Wikimedia's
mission actually is (and how to best achieve it). For the Wikimedia
Foundation, the goalposts seem to have shifted and it's now all about adding
people to build a movement. Is this the right approach, though?

MZMcBride