Anders Wennersten wrote:
The discussion on the proposed amendment is now closed [1) and it is up to the Board will review the community comments. And with almost 5,000 edits in the discussion - with more than 2,000 editors and 320,000 words in various languages and with very different opinions on the subject, it will be a challenge for the Board to come to a common standpoint if it as all is possible
Stephen LaPorte writes: /The !vote is one strong indicator of the importance of addressing this topic/, in which I fully agree
[...]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/Paid_contributions_amendment
Hi.
Thanks for starting this thread.
I think it's important to note that the paid contributions amendment discussion (or perhaps more accurately, the straw poll) was very heavily advertised, using a banner at the top of Wikimedia wikis for several weeks that displayed to both logged-in and logged out users (as is required for a change to the site terms of use). Due to the heavy advertising, it's no surprise there were several thousand participants, but that number needs context, of course.
It may or may not be a good use of time and energy to address paid editing (or rather, paid advocacy) or article quality or any number of other strategic goals, but we shouldn't allow a heavily advertised discussion alone sway what we feel is important to focus on, particularly not without better understanding whether this specific set of self-selected people (i.e., people who saw the banner and decided to comment) is representative of the overall Wikimedia community.
I personally agree that measuring and improving the quality of the work on Wikimedia wikis is important and deserves renewed focus as the next strategic planning process gets underway. Though as others in this thread have already noted, it's difficult to measure article (or transcript or dictionary entry or news story or data item or...) quality. And I'll add to this that the current Strategic Plan sets a fair number of goals that likely won't be reached, so we'll need to figure out whether the expectations and/or the resource allocation needs adjustment.
MZMcBride