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

[Maryana Pinchuk]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Zack Exley wrote:
> >> 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.
>
> I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and
> your previous work at MoveOn.org.
>
> Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic
> participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a
> counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or
> ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without
> making a better society.
>
> I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the
> focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia
> wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who
> deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular
> purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization,
> or
> group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be
> doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors
> have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is "my
> article was deleted, help!" when the article was never appropriate for an
> encyclopedia to begin with.
>

Sorry, just want to jump in here and provide a citation for Zack's
speculation on new user quality. We actually did this
study<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_quality#Conclusion>:)
(Props and shout-outs to Aaron Halfaker, who set this up.)

With all the usual caveats about small-scale one-time qualitative research
studies in place... the conclusion appears to be that the quality of new
editors hasn't really changed much over the years, and most new editors are
still (and always have been) trying to help the encyclopedia. Perhaps when
viewed from the perspective of new page patrollers, there appears to be a
significant rise in spammers and SPAs, but it's important to remember that
there are many non-article-creating newbies out there. The other important
thing to note from this study is that the rate of rejection (deletion or
reverts) of new users' edits is disproportionate to the number of poor
quality contributions, which means there are just as many good new editors
now as there always have been, but they're entering an environment that's
increasingly suspicious and critical of their work and, predictably, they
aren't sticking around.

So, personally, no, I'm not too worried that by opening the door a little
wider for new contributors (and by holding it open long enough for them to
learn all the social and technical nuances of editing), we're going to
attract a flood of spammers and self-promoters. Those people will always be
there, of course, but the community has developed pretty good methods of
dealing with them, and ultimately they're a small part of a big community
of people who just want to write a damn good encyclopedia :)

Maryana


>
> > 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.
>
> Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise.
> Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal.
> But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being
> driven in are the type we want?
>
> And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new
> editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the
> easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing
> their
> spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential
> benefit?
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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-- 
Maryana Pinchuk
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org