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

[Zack Exley]

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.
>

OK, don't know what you're talking about there... did moveon ever work on
mandatory voting laws? but anyways...

>
> 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.
>
>
I agree that most new users are not high quality and many are spammers, PR
people, band managers, etc... with little regard for the values of the
projects. There are hundreds of thousands of such users each year. But the
vast majority of new users have always been destined not to become great
wikimedians. That's not new.

But each year there has also been a large number (in the low thousands --
just guestimating) of new users who really want to be part of creating a
great project and are fully aligned with the values of the project they're
trying to join.

When we look back at user-to-user interactions in 2001-2004, we see that
established users had very high standards and were often unwelcoming or
even rude, but they were putting effort into finding the needles in
haystacks who would be great Wikimedians. They were saying over and over,
"It's really hard to do what we do, but we're doing something amazing, if
you stick around and learn the ropes, we could really use you."

Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is
that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of
writing a personal note about a specific edit. I know the solution is not
to just stop using templates. But I'm just trying to make clear (since you
didn't hear it the first time I said it) that I wasn't arguing for coddling
spammers or even investing time into encouraging all good faith users.

There are a ton of amazing new users who make their 10th -- or 100th, or
1000th -- high quality edit every week. We just need to encourage them
(instead of merely blanketing their talk pages with impersonal warnings).


> > 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
>
>
>


-- 
Zack Exley
Chief Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation