[Wikimedia-l] What community initiatives have made an impact on editor engagement?

[Samuel Klein]

On Sat, Jul 6, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Oona Castro <ocastro at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> For now, it's worth mentioning the Portuguese Wikipedia community has been
> working on this antivandalism project
> http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia_Discuss%C3%A3o:Projetos/AntiVandalismoin
> order to build alternative measures to deal with vandalism and
> inappropriate edits with a very small portion of the community reverting
> edits - considering the short and mid terms.
>
> They are already aware that even the return of emergency CAPTCHA won't be a
> definite measure (lasting no more than one year, as per what was agreed)

As much as I dislike captchas, this seems like a considered decision
by the Portuguese Wikipedians.  We should support local wiki
communities in making choices for themselves -- and help them to run
short-term experiments, evaluate the results, and correct mistakes.

Letting communities make and learn form their own mistakes is more
important than always being 'right' for one definition of rightness:
we can learn from many independent communities, each with their own
standards.  Of course we all want to improve editor engagement +
retention, and overall quality + coverage - the pt:wp community does
too!  The question is how to trade off between these.

One requirement for making a controversial configuration change - or
for continuing it beyond a short initial test period - might be the
ability of the requesting community to evaluate its effect.

Sam.