[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Michael Snow]

On 11/20/2013 9:20 AM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
> That's actually an interesting question that has been lurking beneath
> all the "editing is going down" nervousness.
>
> How much of that 'editing' was, in fact, busy work made immaterial by
> technical advantage (bots, extensions, abusefilter)?  The number of
> antivandalism edits a /human/ has to do in a day has most certainly come
> down a *lot* since c. 2006; this no doubt contributed to a large - now
> diminishing - fraction of total edits.
>
> It's not clear to me that the number of *productive* edits has been
> going down all that much (if at all) in the past several years; the
> proportion of edits that were tedious and repetitive clearly has.
>
> Are you arguing that there is *value* in volunteers spending time on
> work that could be automated?  Except for artificially driving up edit
> counts, that is time (and effort) that would be better spent pretty much
> anywhere else!
A lot of work that gets automated is not necessarily difficult for 
humans, just time-consuming. But volunteer time is not a resource we get 
to allocate or control; the volunteers do. Simple tasks can help recruit 
or retain contributors--providing a way to ease people into 
participation, or a break to prevent burnout between tackling more 
challenging projects. And while that time and effort might appear more 
"valuable" if spent on other tasks, there's no guarantee that it in fact 
would be.

For tasks that most contributors find unpleasant (dealing with certain 
types of vandalism, perhaps), automation is clearly the way to go. But 
repetition does not necessarily equal tedium in all circumstances or for 
all people. Nor do we need to apply some business-type evaluation of 
what constitutes "productive" effort, at least in the context of 
volunteer work. If a task simply makes someone feel productive, their 
own evaluation is what matters, and it can help them feel more engaged 
and part of the community.

My general point is that opportunities for automation are best 
considered with our overall mission in mind, not just the speed or 
efficiency of a particular workflow. In certain situations, automation 
that creates more work rather than removing it (such as by identifying 
potential tasks and feeding them to editors) might be preferable. And 
some of our tools already use such an approach, which is a good thing.

--Michael Snow