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

[rupert THURNER]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 02:26, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Technically, we could attract raw contributors with the flick of a
> finger: by encouraging editing via sitenotices.
> But attracting people who won't contribute well, or will have a bad
> experience -- or doing so when there is no good way to integrate them
> into the project -- could simply waste everyone's time.

wise words, indeed. very, very important when going forward, at least
imo. i can tell you why as well. i tried to be a new editor for a
couple of weeks now. let me give the most striking examples out of
this experience:

1. mediawiki buggy
changing user preferences resulted in a very helpful "... problems
with some of your input". there is no way to click through to "bug
report" and follow further. unfortunately i cannot remember which ones
i changed :( but coding something which tells you what was wrong
should be state of the art.

2. article feedback is surveyed sometimes, but it ends in a "black hole"
on article feedback the feedback privacy statement
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Feedback_policy) popped up. i
found it somehow inappropriate, because it was foundation centered,
but i wanted to contribute to wikipedia. to my big surprise, somebody
really read the article feedback and asked details. but - this person
then was unable to follow through. the privacy statement is still the
same.

3. edits are reverted with unhelpful comments
i added a paragraph to an article where it might have not been
completely right. it got reverted with a comment "not like that". no
further help where it could fit better, no suggestion of improvement,
no edit help as well.

4. new articles are deleted immediately
i tried to create a new article with wikibasha, which did not do its
job and i ended up with an empty new article. so i put "wikibasha" in
it, saved, to try again. seconds later the article was marked for
speedy deletion. there is obviously no tool to quickly traverse
"articles created three days ago not yet marked as good enough". so
patrols revert to what is most easy with the current software, namely
for newly created articles, with disastrous effects on new editors.

5. should one be lucky and know the right template, a threat follows
now i used knowledge a new editor does not have and put a "currently
beeing edited" template. this gives you 24 hours time to edit the
article on your own. a very heartwarming comment "if there is not
immediately some useful addition, this nonsense will be deleted" was
the result.

in all five cases i had no possibility to give feedback using
mediawiki which then would result in something which somebody takes
care of until it is solved. in my highly biased opinion this is an
indication that the editor retention investments were not yet
successful (enough). there seems to be some deviation between
"identify a challenge" and "act to relieve the pain". neither the
technical, nor the organizational challenge seems to be addressed.

rupert.