[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Thomas Morton]

>
> > > I can't ASSUME
> > > things about non-participants. For all I know anything we do
> > > (including filtering) might hurt them. If they don't speak up, we
> > > don't know.
> >  And this takes us full circle to just about my first question on this
> long
> > thread.... has anyone actually asked our consumers what they would like
> to
> > see?
>
> Yes. We do. That's why we have a discussion tab on every single page.
> Would you like it to be more prominent, in blinking letters 3 miles high?
> Perhaps we should do something like that (within reason) if you think it
> will help. But the community attitude will have to change a bit too. Right
> now the community is becoming more and more insular, and unwilling to
> "talk to strangers".
>
> Outside participation is possible, permitted, and encouraged at page-level
> granularity. Where it is not, we have a problem with a known solution.
>
> At the moment, very few people are going page-by-page and solving it
> though. We may need some new forms of patrol. :-)
>


Whilst the discussion tab is good for a small sub-section of our readers, it
doesn't cover everyone.

A large swathe of people don't even notice those tabs. Or if they do they
don't understand them.

This is why OTRS gets emails saying "I saw X mistake on Y article"; because
emailing in a problem makes more sense to some people.

>From the perspective of broader product development, getting people to
navigate the community discussion pages is non-trivial. In any decent
organisation you go to your pool of passive users and force them to respond
(i.e. pro-active surveys etc.)

> The fact that we have different language wikis working past each other is actually
a form of (inadvertant) pillarization.

This was the point I was making. The extension being... we should be
condensing all of these view points and then allowing cultural perspectives
to modify the experience as you want.

Enforcing a cultural perspective on someone is one of the sneakiest forms of
POV pushing.

Tom