[Wikimedia-l] Editor retention implies social features

[Richard Symonds]

I believe the Geograph images (the UK landscape pictures of which you
speak) may be slightly more than 80,000 images...

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru>wrote:

> Consider, for example, that Zynga and Facebook have successfully managed to
>> get millions of people to log in at all hours of the night to milk
>> virtualcows and harvest virtual beans (or whatever it is that people
>> actually do in Farmville).  Could we do something similar to drive
>> particpation, particularly in editing areas that don't require
>> long-duration sessions (e.g. adding or verifying citations, categorizing
>> articles, etc.)?  Even a few percent of Farmville's user base would be an
>> order-of-magnitude increase of our own editor base; and if the price for
>> that is letting these editors display Citationville badges on their user
>> pages and send each other silly messages, is it not worth it?
>>
>>
> This is actually a very good example. Imagine this happened, and we got
> for several hours a million of users who do not know anything about BLP,
> verifiability, POV, notability, and other issues. Would we be able to clean
> up their edits? I doubt it. If I remember well, when 80K landscape pictures
> of British Isles were donated to Commons more than a year ago (which is
> certainly a good thing), they were not categorized, and many of them
> (several dozen of thousands) remained uncategorized last time I checked. We
> will not just be able to digest this.
>
> The way out obviously that we do not have a million random editors. We
> want a million of editors who understand basic principles and know what
> they want to do. I just do not see how it could happen. When I personally
> ask my friends to upload photos which are clearly needed (for instance, to
> illustrate an already existing article), my best success is to ask them to
> send a mail to OTRS, and then I upload photos myself. And uploading a photo
> is generally easier than to find a category for an article or to source a
> statement.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
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