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

[Theo10011]

 On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 5:10 AM, <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> On Mar 21, 2012, at 10:07 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
> > 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?
> >
>
> On the content level it doesn't really matter what what kind of
> contributors you are pulling in.  Given increased contributors over time
> (given they stick around after the contests you find distasteful end)
> quality of content improves.  This is the model assumption wikis are based
> upon.  Which why I find your stated objection so odd.  Now that said, I
> must admit there one and only one kind of contributor I find to have a
> significant negative impact on the quality of Wikipedia (and I imagine
> perhaps Wikinews as well): the "true-believer".  But I do not see this
> being a practical concern of the sort project under discussion.
> True-believer's seem to be one of the kinds of people that begin
> contributing without any encouragement.
>
>
> > 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.
>
> I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I truly believe the only ways to bring
> about a significant improvement in the quality of content on a project as
> mature as the English or German Wikipedia are A) increase the numbers of
> contributors, or B) increase the average life-span of activity for
> contributors. Every other sort project I can imagine, while possibly
> leading to a net improvement in quality, would only amount to dumping a
> bucket of water into the ocean.
>
> Seriously, and with all due respect, do you really believe it likely the
> content will actually become less accurate, less comprehensive, less
> neutral, and/or less understandable because of WMF inadvertently
> encouraging the wrong "kind" of people to join in?
>
> I cannot imagine this happening.
>
> >
> > 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?
>
> No it really isn't a convincing concern for me.  But I do understand this
> objection a great deal better.  Still I would rather see WMF put full
> effort into what it believes most worthwhile, than to be grudgingly
> addressing what I might think to be somewhat more worthwhile. If I could
> convince the people at WMF heart and soul to agree with me, that would be
> different. However I don't wish anyone to start acting as I might suggest
> without actually becoming convinced through my message. I am no kind of
> prophet and I am as capable of being mistaken as anyone. The two most basic
> lessons I have learned exclusively from my participation in the projects
> over the years is how immensely much passion counts and how easy it is to
> find myself absolutely mistaken even when I have taken care to throughly
> account for all that I could imagine.
>
> I am not certain that WMF will be successful with this program, but
> neither do I find them to be clearly heading for failure. As I said above,
> I do believe the objective worthwhile. Increasing contributions, through
> both new people and longer careers, is the most significant impact that I
> believe can be made towards improving content quality. My own uncertainty
> is mostly whether WMF can actually manage to increase either of these
> numbers.
>
> I certainly cannot imagine bringing this program to a halt would actually
> result in the resources involved being re-directed to a
> non-Wikipediacentric objective!
>
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
> You are an excellent politician, and if I were interested in such things
> you would have won my support. However, I am really much more interested in
> addressing accuracy for it's own sake while improving my own understanding
> of things.  I can't see how this endeavor can be accurately described as
> "increasing participation for statistic's sake", when I see that
> significant improvements in quality would be the end result (if
> successful).  Nor I do not understand how discouraging this program would
> lead to any practical support for those other things which you mention.
>
> BirgitteSB
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Hi Birgitte

I greatly respect your opinion, and rarely found myself disagreeing with
you. I didn't want to reply in-line because I believe majority of your
opinions stem from the wisdom of the crowd model, which might best describe
the wiki model and the assumption that, it will continue to
prevail indefinitely. There have been several good points made by you and
others so far, but I have a direct question for you based on the assumption
that increased contributors will eventually increase quality of articles.
What if we add 50,000 vandals tomorrow? What if we also add 20,000 PR
agents/marketers bent on promoting their client?

What if they make 10 or 20 edits each for the next month, it will satisfy
the statistical criteria for increase in contributors for WMF, it will also
satisfy your criteria for increasing the size of the crowd. What will
happen to the quality of articles, the work-load on admins and veteran
editors?

The Wisdom of the crowd model is based on the notion that average of
assumptions will improve as the sample size increases. As the size of the
crowd increases, the mean of its aggregate estimates will keep improving.
For that purpose of the crowd, there is no distinction between any two
members of the said crowd, they are homogeneous. Real world rarely has such
a group, not to mention, there is no distinction made between the
motivation of why someone joined that crowd. Whether a member chose to be
there or was given a temporary incentive. The crowds model discounts both
these real world problems.

The model works to a certain extent, I would guess that there would be
direct correlation between most edited articles and highest rated ones. The
more eyes that see it, the more refined the article would be. I might be
wrong on this, but I recall someone mentioning a study done by IBM (not
certain if it was IBM) a couple of years ago, that found this exact
relation between articles and the number of edits. (If anyone knows what I
am referring to, then please mention the study or link me to it.)

There is no wiki model, it is something that just came to be. The
underlying software just promotes cooperation, but no one ever consciously
planned a model to base this on. It just came to be, and there is nothing
to base where it goes from here.

There have been several good points made already. We rarely talk about the
quality of articles, number of featured articles, external collaborations,
projects, events, even milestones crossed by the sister projects. It seems
mostly focused on the number of contributors, it leaves a lot out of the
view. Sj mentioned aspects of community building as important to retaining
editors, but is that really necessary? I don't believe social interactions
have a direct correlation with encyclopedia quality. A vibrant,
diversified, healthy community can still be inept at producing any good
content. Did any experienced editor need a community building exercise or
tool to start editing? The* condicio sine qua non* for what brought us here
is motivation of editors, self-motivation to be exact. No one directed this
crowd, incentivized, or socially engineered it to be here, we chose. No
amount of outreach can replace this primary ingredient for what we need,
anyone can place an incentive, it can not replace motivation.

There is something unique about the editors, what they gravitate towards.
It is not as simple as joining Facebook or twitter to share what someone
ate, or what they think of the new Lady Gaga song. Facebook can look at raw
figures, fall and rise in users and take steps to promote accordingly. The
basic idea is promoting communication, interaction and building a
community, and absolutely nothing more. Anyone with an internet connection
is a potential user in their case. We however, have a common purpose, the
communication and the community aspects are incidental to the common goal.
There is a barrier of entry, tomes of policies and guidelines to comply,
requirements to conform to standards. No matter how easy these are made,
they will always appeal to a limited subset of the Facebook audience.

Regards
Theo