[Foundation-l] Participation and content, quantity and quality (was re: new editor engagement experiments)

[Samuel Klein]

This seems like it deserves its own thread.

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:53 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible
> repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about
> trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a
> movement).

There's a bit of both.  A movement and a global network of editors are
important to being accessible to people in all languages and overcome
initial systemic biases, and a thriving editing community is important
to many of our quality processes.

> 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)?

"participation vs. content" is independent of "quality vs. quantity".
In both participation and content, we have quality-quantity tradeoffs.

Right now there are many content areas in which our breadth and
coverage is lacking, not to mention entire classes of knowledge that
we don't have tools to gather, edit, and publish. [help us,
openwikidata, you're our only hope!]  Similarly, there are parts of
human culture that are uncovered on our projects for lack of any
contributors who know about them.

There are also questions of quality content and contribution;
something which can also be measured (if you focus on data, any goal
can be seen as 'boosting' some number or other).

SJ