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

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:35 AM, <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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?


An astute observation.

I do believe the end goal is increasing the size of the collected wisdom,
whether it is achieved by merely increasing the size of the crowd so the
mean is more accurate or some other approach entirely. There isn't a lot of
experiments or past projects to base this on, but I don't believe that the
same numbers approach is the right way to proceed.

What the concern should be, in this particular case, is the almost myopic
focus on the statistical rise and fall in the number of contributors. And
that too, focused on one language of one project. Regardless of which side
of the argument one is on, you can not overlook the importance of getting a
complete picture.

I suppose it is revealing that some of the earlier criticism already on
this thread, is about the impersonal nature of interactions and usage of
automated tools and templates. Individualism is usually the first casualty
of collectivist constructs. Collectivism replaces the individual nature for
a more linear, modular, yet parsimonious approach to interaction. As it
should, I suppose, since the sole focus is on increasing the collective and
nothing more. They are both very related, you will have more usage of
templates, and automated tools, and less personal interactions, as the size
grows and only new, possibly temporary contributors join on an hourly
basis.

Templates or automated tools do not directly cause any rise or fall in the
number of contributors, they and their increased usage, is merely the
symptom of the underlying issue.

Regards
Theo