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

[WereSpielChequers]

>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:05:31 -0500
> From: Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd:
>        Announcement: New       editor engagement experiments team!
> Message-ID: <86D627E5-3FB4-452A-BF9E-6C9C32C8261B at yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=us-ascii
>
> 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
>
>
>
Some members of the community had a very bad experience with the
foundation's Academic outreach program. Large numbers of students were
instructed to edit as part of their course without proper supervision or
being taught not to plagiarise, the quality of the resulting work was not
as good as we typically get from volunteer editors. Age and even compulsion
is not the issue here as we've had successful schemes where high school
students were translating articles as school homework. But the combination
of compulsion and lack of supervision was unhealthy. Of course
crowdsourcing projects benefit from larger crowds, but not if the crowds
are less well motivated or otherwise doing lower quality edits. For
example: We could easily increase the number of editors by issuing an
amnesty to everyone blocked for more than 60 days; But simply judged on
quality grounds such an experiment would almost inevitably fail.
Alternatively we could significantly increase editing levels in certain
parts of the world where editing or even reading wikmedia sites is a slow
and frustrating experience by we opening more local datacentres such the
one we have in Amsterdam. The probability is that extra editors or extra
edits from existing editors who could do more in the same time  would be
similar quality to the edits we already get, though possibly skewed towards
subjects and languages where currently we are relatively weak.

WereSpielChequers