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

[Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com]

On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Sue Gardner wrote:
>> Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation
>> in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority.
> 
> Thank you for sharing this.
> 
> How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong
> approach? 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).
> 
> 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).
> 
> 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)?
> 
> MZMcBride
> 
> 
> 
> 
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content.  Is this really disputed?

BirgitteSB