[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and the networked society (SJ)

[Martin Walker]

The English Wikipedia is littered with many "big ideas" and longterm plans 
that have evoked lively debate and high emotion at the time, but most of 
these ideas die out when it becomes apparent that they lead nowhere.  That 
does not mean that big ideas are bad, I happen to strongly agree with SJ, 
it's just that we need to have processes to bring ideas forward into reality.

Let's consider one of the old chestnuts, article assessment.  One year ago, 
I printed off 36 pages of discussion and ideas on article assessment, 
produced over about two years.  But only one article had actually been 
assessed.  Now just one year later, thanks to the efforts of thousands of 
people, we are in a situation where over 100,000 articles have been 
assessed, with over 50,000 done in the last month alone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team
What lessons can be learnt from this to help us get ideas off the drawing 
board and into Wikipedia?  I've drawn the following conclusions:

1.  Set some specific goals: Some may be vague like "Write 100,000 featured 
articles" but other goals should be very specific like "Write an FA from 
this list of 100 articles by the end of the month" and perhaps a signup 
that says "I have agreed to work on this specific articles".  Without 
something tangible, the idea will remain pie in the sky forever.  At WP:1.0 
we focussed initially on getting a system of article assessment up and 
running, as a prerequisite to making CDs or DVDs.

2. These goals should visibly lead to a larger goal in the medium term: If 
you want people to keep committing their time to your big idea, you have to 
be able to see some serious progress towards the grander goal.  If you say, 
"One FA done this month, only another 99,999 to go!" everyone will get 
discouraged.  If you say, "Let's get every country in the world be an FA" 
and you plot a graph of your progress, and you celebrate the halfway point 
after 3 months, some people will probably stay involved.  When you finish 
the project, celebrate and tell the Signpost - people will be proud that 
they were part of it.

3. Lead by example: You can't expect others to do work for you - you have 
to expect to do the lion's share of the work to get a big idea off the 
ground.  If you think it's reasonable for an active Wikipedian to write one 
FA per week, then you need to write three per week yourself.  When you've 
done 100 FAs yourself in 30 weeks, people may start noticing you and trying 
to emulate what you are doing.  Keep doing it - some who join you may move 
on - you can only begin to back off once it's become an established part of 
Wikipedia that many Wikipedians are writing an FA every week or two.

4. Find a way to scale it up: Just putting your idea on Wikipedia alongside 
1000 other big ideas won't mean that everyone will stop writing articles on 
their favourite sitcom and start helping you.  You have to set up a 
mechanism for implementation, then find a way to scale that up.  There are 
two ways I know of to scale things - delegate the work to others, and 
automate the work.  The mechanisms that work best do both, of course - the 
article assessments are done by WikiProject members (that's the delegation 
part), while the data handling and compilation is done by templates, 
categories and a bot (the automation).  Of course you can only delegate 
work that falls within people's area of interest; I might be willing and 
able to work on an FA on an organic chemical reaction (I'm an organic 
chemist), but not on much outside chemistry.  You can really only delegate 
work well if the work helps the person who does it reach their own personal 
goals.  Finding the right infrastructure and process to do that may be hard 
- you need (a) to get person X to hear about the project, (b) get them to 
work on their little piece of it and (c) get some automation to put 
together all the little pieces into a big piece.  Then (d) tell everyone 
about the big piece you've made so they get excited about doing more and 
get their friends to help.

5.  Listen to others: I think sometimes we're so busy pushing our own big 
ideas we don't bother to listen to others.  Often we can put several big 
ideas together to make one big idea that works.  Then you have a core of 
people with ownership of the idea who can get the idea started.   One 
person may have a good knowledge of process, another some technical skills, 
so having a team helps.  If we let our big idea evolve through the input of 
others it will probably get implemented - if we don't, it will probably 
join the masses of "ideacruft" that lurk in many dusty corners of Wikipedia.

So I hope we come up with a vision for the future, and some big ideas to 
help us get there, but we won't build a new networked society by simply 
talking about it.  As Harvard chemist George Whitesides says (paraphrased), 
until you get your big breakthrough into a paper - into reality - it means 
nothing.  So by all means let us dream some dreams, but let's then 
carefully design some targeted projects with real, tangible goals, and get 
to work!

Martin Walker (User:Walkerma)