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

[Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com]

> 
> 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?

I snipped previous emails because your summary is accurate and this ended up being massive. Fair warning.

Let's say this doesn't happen.  Things stay exactly as they are now. No increase in vandals nor PR agents nor anything other kind contributor for the rest of the year.  Do you imagine the workload for admins and veteran editors to be acceptable? Do you imagine the quality of articles to be acceptable? They are not.  I and am not talking about award-winning levels of quality. I am speaking articles right now that were tagged as being inaccurate, contradictory, or biased many months ago yet still are unaddressed.  I am thinking of known contributor's of copyright problems whose edits are cataloged and are waiting for someone willing to tediously review them. I suspect a large factor in the attrition of veteran editors is the current workload as it stands.  It is hard to stay motivated when you can't hardly notice your work has made any dent in the backlog.

I suppose I simply see the bigger concern to be: What if we don't add 1,000 new curators who care to learn how to interpret copyright law and 3,000 new contributors who are willing respond to RfCs and participate in peer review?  The vandals will come as inevitably as 8 year-olds transform into 12 year-olds. The PR agents are equally likely to remain consistent. I don't really understand the basis of the concern that this outreach is expected to add more vandals and PR agents. Why is it so suspect that this project could add sincere and useful people which are, perhaps in some aspects of their personality and/or circles of interest, simply a different kind of person than you and I who self-selected to contribute without any such an overt program? But truthfully while there are certainly tasks I selected to work on my own, because I find them inherently captivating (poetry) or because I am inherently driven to understand and make sense out what is presented as arbitrary and seeming senseless to me (copyright law), there are many contributions of significance I have made only because an overt effort was made asking me to contribute personally (peer review Evolution pre-FA) or by a generalized campaign (Proofreads of the Month).  So perhaps, the people brought in by such outreach won't be such a different kind of contributor after all.

If the underlying concern is that there are not enough veteran editors willing to educate them, or that these newcomers won't conform to our ways sufficently. Well then maybe the newcomers can educate us instead. We are great at some things we have done, but we are crap at a whole bunch of other things.  And was all trial and error to begin with! If new people come and want to do things differently, I can only imagine they will be trying to change the crap things not the great ones. 

> 
> 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.
> 

I disagree with this summary.  In fact, the wisdom of crowds is considered wiser because it assumes the members are *not* homogeneous. The model, however, does not give more weight to members with qualities that normally would earn them weight in more traditional models, which the point most people find counter-intuitive. The reason a larger crowd is supposed to be wiser is because a larger crowd is assumed to be more diverse.  I do not see see why a diversity of motivations to participate should be any less desirable than other forms of diversity. 

> 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.

I agree I was speaking of the wisdom of crowds model more than the wiki model. I do think there is a wiki-model which has emerged by happenstance and in fleshing it out below realized that the wisdom of crowds is not really inherent to it. For the record, I  believe the key facets of a working wiki are as follows:

*Low barriers to participation
*Self-Governance by participants
*Participation is transparent 
*Critical mass of participation is maintained

These are what seem to separate wikis which flourish from wikis which whither.  But why use a wiki if you do not want to form the wisdom of crowds? Looking up the key factors for wisdom of the crowds are (these I am not just throwing out there like the above which I really did write before looking this up!):

*Diversity of opinion
*Independence
*Decentralization
*Aggregation of output

So you can so see why wiki's are such a good model for forming the wisdom of the crowds. Critical mass will often naturally grant a diversity of opinion. Self-Governance inherently grants independence and often leads to decentralization (although I can imagine wiki participants choosing a centralized governance model and losing that one). Transparency means records which preserves all the raw data needed for aggregation. So the two models are a natural fit and tend to feed into one another. After all, it is hard to imagine a critical mass of participants governing themselves in any way at all familiar to our experience without forming the wisdom of the crowds.


> 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 see
> 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 interaction
> 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 
> anyone can place an incentive, it can not replace motivation.
> 

I addressed some of this above and I hope the inline replies do not annoy you, it easier for me to think of it in pieces.  I am probably less "social" than the average contributors, but still I feel the community aspect is truly necessary.  Especially, with regard to the more tedious chores of curation. If all we needed was people to share their writings on subjects they are passionate about, I would hold your opinion.  But community is the power driving much necessary and tedious work (copyvio!). Honestly I burned out on copyright years ago. But I remember thinking myself once upon a time thinking to myself "I cannot leave all of this work for Moonriddengirl to do, no one else helping her! I' ll at least fix X before calling it a night." I do not believe I had any purely social interaction with her at the time of that experience (or ever!), but just receiving some explanation from her and seeing her doing so much good work made me feel an obligation to pitch in.  I am certain SJ means community building as working together on a common objective and necessary education of any contributors new to some area of the wiki, rather than socializing for it's own sake.  Proofread of the month at Wikisource is probably a good example, but he can correct me if I have misunderstood. Along these lines, I personally find community to be supremely motivating. 

Truthfully I am highly self motivated to explore and understand things, the community, however, is what motivates me to share my understanding.  If I didn't feel community engagement, I imagine I would have merely lurked till I got busy and forgot I had been fascinated by the place. I am sure I would still consult Wikipedia and Wikisource, even if I hadn't ever belonged to the community but I would rarely remember to pull back the curtain and lurk. I have lurked in scores of places over the years, sometimes one thing in particular will really motivate to comment. Mostly I begin to comment and find the barrier to participating troublesome and change my mind, less often I actually leave a comment on the topic that motivated me. Nowhere else have I stuck around more than three months. And I am not even sure how you guys laid a claim on me. And it is not the overall project, although I really still find the whole idea as marvelous as ever, it the people that I bound to more than the idea.  As I said I really don't have the strong individual social ties that I see among others here. So I mean the collective of people, the collective which also sees this Marvelous Possibility which barely resembles the feeble attempts we have managed so far. I feel this collective belongs a little bit to me and owns a little bit of me in return. That it would be irresponsible of me, no, worse dishonorable of me, not to tell you guys that I see rocks ahead when I happen to see rocks ahead. Or to stay quiet when people are talking about the sky falling and it all seems rather normal to me.  I know people can perceive me as angry sometimes (often?), but really I am not so attached to what is finally decided out of my line of sight.  However, I do feel this obligation with you guys that I feel no where else outside of my employer, with those things sent for public consumption. That I have share any strong convictions with you, even when I find it unpleasant, in order to sleep in good conscience. It matters much less to me whether or not my opinion prevails than that I offered it, that I discharged my duty. So this is all rather anecdotal, but I believe community engagement is really the only thing that has ever driven my participation past the curious stage. I wanted to help the hard-working and helpful *people* I observed on the wikis long before I understood the full implications of the project.  And then at some point, which I can't pin down, it had become my community where I was obligated to share myself, which is an even stranger thing in my experience. This part is probably incomprehensible, but I cannot articulate these thoughts any clearer. I tried not to use the word community to steer clear of begging the question in describing community engagement, but substitute community for any of that if makes more sense.

> 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.
> 
 
Maybe my non-article writing background is influencing me here, but there really are simple tasks anyone on Facebook could do (Proofread of the month). There are things that can be done entirely individually without *needing* to understand a single policy tome (peer review). I also imagine a lot of potential for breaking down existing backlogs into some incremental tasks which could used as introduction to more complex issues. I am sure there is all kinds of other stuff I haven't been exposed as well.  And really do you think people on Facebook really care that much about some song or what they ate? Those people are just sitting in front of a computer feeling bored. They are being directly prompted  to "post your status"  while eating a plate of food and the radio playing in the background.  They could equally satisfy their boredom being asked to do something useful on a wiki.  I don't  imagine Facebook really appeals to them any more than it appeals to me. It probably just appeals to them more than nothing at all.

BirgitteSB