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

[Samuel Klein]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Experiments are acceptable... sometimes.

MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism!

I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow
'optional' or new.  Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project
build around being bold and low barriers to participation.  We should
simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops,
and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once.


> Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational
> content.

It's funny, you've said this three times so far this thread :-)
But if you read the mission again, I think you'll find you are mistaken.

Wikimedia's mission is to *empower and engage people* to develop
content.  There's nothing about quality, unless you assume that an
empowered and engaged society will produce high quality materials.
(As it turns out, in practice if not in theory, we do.)

Our goal is global engagement of creators; and providing
infrastructure to empower their work.

> At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and
> there's a huge focus on "building the movement."

See above; this isn't new.

We are a community dedicated to organizing and sharing knowledge; not
the knowledge itself.   That's what 'movement' means for us.

We have produced some great collections over time, yes; who doesn't
love Wikispecies, now the most thorough collection of its kind?  But
we have also produced translation networks, global citation standards,
new social norms and standards for sharing, proposed national policy
in countries everywhere; and have inspired a new generation of
creators and sharers. We aren't replicating what high-quality
publishing houses have done for centuries, just under a free
license... We are doing something fundamentally different in scale,
decentralization, motivation, and flexibility.

There are many things we can learn from old models of collaboration;
but giving up ease of experimentation and warning off newbies aren't
among them.

> the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)?

I do support those who focus on the quality of our existing content.
But other priorities -- from expanding content scope and formats, to
expanding the editing community -- also deserve support.

SJ