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

[MZMcBride]

Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com wrote:
> 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)?
> 
> 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?

How do you draw that correlation? It seems like you're missing a very
important "may." Surely it depends on what kind of contributors you're
pulling in and why. It would be trivial to add a lot of contributors through
gimmicky incentives ("make ten edits, win a prize!"), but are those the type
of editors we want?

Content is king. People visit Wikimedia wikis for their content and the
Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is to "... empower and engage people
around the world to collect and develop educational content ...." The
hawkeyed focus on simply bumping up the number of contributors doesn't
necessarily improve the content. It may. But if the focus is purely on the
numbers (and not the quality of the contributors being added), it may also
make the content worse.

It isn't the Wikimedia Foundation's stated vision or mission to build a
movement; the idea is to find ways to create and disseminate free, high
quality, educational content. So I continue to wonder: is the current focus
of adding more and more people overshadowing the arguably more important
focus of producing something of value? There are finite resources (as with
nearly any project), but they're being used to develop tools and
technologies that focus on one project (Wikipedia) and that often have
questionable value (MoodBar, ArticleFeedback, etc.). ArticleFeedback has
gone through five major iterations; FlaggedRevs was dropped after one.
Doesn't that seem emblematic of a larger problem to you?

Commons needs more support. Wikisource needs more support. Wiktionary needs
more support. And it goes on. But the focus is about adding more people to
Wikipedia. It isn't about making it possible to easily add music notation to
articles. Or making it easier to transcribe articles. Or making it easier to
re-use the vast content within contained within Wiktionary. Or ...

The focus on solely increasing participation for statistics' sake comes with
a real cost.

MZMcBride