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

[Zack Exley]

> A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also
> trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the
> numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't
> seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the
> quality of the new contributors, for that matter).


I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of
contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we
can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high
quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect.

But realistically, when you look at the total numbers and combine that with
manual, qualitative checking of small samples, it's difficult to hold too
much hope for that. There is too much evidence that high quality
contributors are quitting early in their careers (like in the first months,
or weeks) at a much higher rate than they used to. That's why the
perspective of most staff at the foundation and most contributors who have
looked closely at the situation, is that we better assume we've got a
serious problem and work to correct it.

Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality
contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of
declining numbers.