Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: I think it would greatly help if we could have an updated organisation chart of who is reporting to whom, and what departments they are all in. The static graphics stopped being maintainable. We're exploring a couple of options for data-driven org chart generation and should have a publicly visible up-to-date org chart again soon. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile
Am 20. März 2012 18:18 schrieb David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: This is a drastic policy change that affects all projects, and so needs wider discussion than just wikitech-l. Thanks for forwarding the discussion. I wonder whether we should rather use our strength in users' demand in order to make pressure on manufacturers to support free-software codecs than adopting the costly and patented codecs. I mean, it's not only about content. MediaWiki and Wikimedia should remain free from a technical point of view, too. Regards, Jürgen. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile
On 21 March 2012 08:17, Jürgen Fenn schneeschme...@googlemail.com wrote: I wonder whether we should rather use our strength in users' demand in order to make pressure on manufacturers to support free-software codecs than adopting the costly and patented codecs. I mean, it's not only about content. MediaWiki and Wikimedia should remain free from a technical point of view, too. The actual problem there is there's not enough video content on Wikimedia sites as yet to make this a user pressure issue. So we need to be able to *ingest* anything that comes in from a camera or a phone, even if we save it as Theora or VP8. (This is harder than it sounds, but is apparently in progress, in the coming-some-day Timed Media Handler.) At that point we can start on serious programs to add video. Every article on a street should have video of the street, for example. Video of athletes in action [1]. Etc. - d. [1] and boy will *that* be interesting for egregious overreaching claims of copyright by sports leagues, but anyway. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Hey folks, I sent the note below to the staff and board a few hours ago: sharing now with everyone :-) Thanks, Sue -- Forwarded message -- From: Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org Date: 20 March 2012 19:17 Subject: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team! To: Staff All wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org Hey folks, A couple of changes at the Wikimedia Foundation that I want you to know about. Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia’s projects is our top priority. To make better progress, as of April 16 we're going to bring together resources from the Community and Engineering/Product departments into a new cross-functional team tasked specifically with conducting small, rapid experiments designed to improve editor retention. We already know some of the fixes that will solve the editor retention problem, and we're working to put them in place. The purpose of *this* team will be to identify the fixes we don't yet know about. Separately, Zack has to move back to Missouri for family reasons. When Zack told me about that, we agreed that it’s an extra impetus for this new team to be launched now. This means that going forward, Zack’s department will focus solely on fundraising, and some members of his department will move permanently into other groups. There have been lots of conversations about this over the past few weeks, which have included everyone affected. So here’s what we’re going to do: FUNDRAISING: Zack will manage fundraising remotely. He’ll continue to be part of the C-level team, but he’ll do it from Missouri. He’ll travel back to San Francisco frequently, and he’ll probably be here throughout the fundraising campaign every year and spend other longer chunks of time here when needed. We don’t yet know what the title of Zack’s department will be, or what Zack’s title will be. Neither Zack nor I care very much about titles, and we are in the happy position of not particularly needing to impress anyone -- so, we do not need fancy euphemistic titles. It would be nice to have titles that are clear and direct and understandable, and also to have ones that reflect the creative/storytelling/community aspect of the fundraising team’s work. So, we are leaving this piece open for the time being, and we’ll just call the department “fundraising” until and unless we think of something better. Folks with suggestions should talk with Zack. :-) EDITOR ENGAGEMENT EXPERIMENTATION: Reflecting the importance of editor engagement in the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy, we will have the following teams directly focused on it: **the Visual Editor group (led by Trevor as lead developer, and by the soon-to-be hired Technical Product Analyst) which is making the visual editor; **the Editor Engagement group (led by Fabrice Florin as Product Manager and Ian Baker as ScrumMaster) which is working on medium-term projects improving Wikimedia’s handling of reputation/identity and of notifications; **the new team focused on rapid experimentation, led by Karyn as Product Manager and a to-be-hired engineering lead/ScrumMaster, tentatively titled something like Research Experimentation, Editor Engagement Innovation Lab or the Rapid Experimentation Team. Our thinking is basically this: we know the Visual Editor will help with editor retention. We know that improving notifications, messaging, identity and other core features of MediaWiki will help with editor retention. But there are a handful of other smaller projects --maybe just simple tweaks, maybe ideas that should become fully-fledged new features-- that will also help. The purpose of the new experimentation team will be to conduct many quick experiments, which will identify a handful of small changes that can either be accomplished by the team itself, or be queued up as part of our overall product backlog. Staff moving from the Community Dept to Engineering and Product Development (AKA Tech) are: Karyn Gladstone, Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Ryan Faulkner. They will form a team tasked with rapid experimentation to find policy, product or other changes that will increase editor retention. Karyn will head product thinking and maintain the experimentation backlog, reporting to Howie. Alolita will hire and manage the engineers for this team, and will help interface them with the rest of the engineering organization. The important thing to know about this team is that they are being tasked with one of our absolutely most important objectives: to figure out new ways to increase editor engagement and retention. Karyn will report to Howie. Maryana, Ryan Faulker, and Steven will report to Karyn. The group has never had engineering resources assigned to it, and it’s clear they need engineering resources. Therefore, Alolita will work in close partnership with Karyn to recruit an engineering team --mostly developers but also UI/design people-- to support the new group. If you have ideas for people we
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Sue Gardner wrote: Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority. Thank you for sharing this. How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement). Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)? MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Participation and content, quantity and quality (was re: new editor engagement experiments)
This seems like it deserves its own thread. On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:53 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement). There's a bit of both. A movement and a global network of editors are important to being accessible to people in all languages and overcome initial systemic biases, and a thriving editing community is important to many of our quality processes. Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)? participation vs. content is independent of quality vs. quantity. In both participation and content, we have quality-quantity tradeoffs. Right now there are many content areas in which our breadth and coverage is lacking, not to mention entire classes of knowledge that we don't have tools to gather, edit, and publish. [help us, openwikidata, you're our only hope!] Similarly, there are parts of human culture that are uncovered on our projects for lack of any contributors who know about them. There are also questions of quality content and contribution; something which can also be measured (if you focus on data, any goal can be seen as 'boosting' some number or other). SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect. But realistically, when you look at the total numbers and combine that with manual, qualitative checking of small samples, it's difficult to hold too much hope for that. There is too much evidence that high quality contributors are quitting early in their careers (like in the first months, or weeks) at a much higher rate than they used to. That's why the perspective of most staff at the foundation and most contributors who have looked closely at the situation, is that we better assume we've got a serious problem and work to correct it. Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of declining numbers. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On 21 March 2012 13:53, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority. Thank you for sharing this. How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). One key issue is that targets need to be measurable, or they don't work. It is very easy to measure the number of people contributing. It is much harder to measure the quality of what they produce. The Foundation's strategy plan is here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_StrategicPlan2011_spreads.pdf See pages 10 and 11 for the bit on improving quality. A lot of it is focused on measuring quality, because that is a real challenge (and, in fact, simply measuring something can be enough to prompt a significant improvement). The Foundation's 2011-12 annual plan is here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf The targets for the year are on page 28 and don't specifically mention quality. I would like to hear an explanation for that from someone at the Foundation. I'm guessing there isn't a target for actually improving quality because we aren't yet at the stage where we can measure it effectively, but wouldn't a target to produce a good quality measuring system have been good? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses:, , Britannica to stop printing books
This is an excellent idea - a kind of searchable sandbox where articles could eventually be promoted into the main site or simply used as in depth backing for a Wikipedia One article. It would need to have some high level sort mechanism to make it easier to access articles within a geopolitical area or niche focal point just to make it possible to disambiguate persons with the same name or the various flavors of engineering or architecture. Perhaps it could also serve as a beta test bed for Wikimedia software development. But what to call it? Wikipedia2 doesn't have much flavor. WikipediaLocalized? WikiDetails? WikipediaExpanded? WikipediaSuppliment? On 3/20/2012 5:24 PM, foundation-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote: From: David Goodmandgge...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc:r...@slmr.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses:, Britannica to stop printing books Message-ID: caniz0h18gyrky79jawzzskuaewd8rtwdc6mztun_y+66d7p...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 For English, and other languages also: What I suggest is a '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring Verifiability and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and a good deal of what we do not let in. It would for example include both high schools and elementary schools. It would include college athletes. It would include political candidates. It would include neighborhood businesses, and fire departments. It would include individual asteroids. It would include streets--and also villages. It would include ever ball game in a season. It would include anyone who had a credited role in a film, or any named character in one--both the ones we currently leave out, and the ones we put in. This should satisfy both the inclusionists and the deletionists. The deletionists would have this material out of Wikipedia, the inclusionists would have it not rejected. Newcomers would have an open and accepting place for a initial experience. But it would be interesting to see the results of a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the really notable (WP)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Zack Exley wrote: A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect. I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org. Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society. I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is my article was deleted, help! when the article was never appropriate for an encyclopedia to begin with. Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of declining numbers. Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise. Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal. But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being driven in are the type we want? And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit? MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Zack Exley wrote: A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect. I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org. Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society. I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is my article was deleted, help! when the article was never appropriate for an encyclopedia to begin with. Sorry, just want to jump in here and provide a citation for Zack's speculation on new user quality. We actually did this studyhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newcomer_quality#Conclusion:) (Props and shout-outs to Aaron Halfaker, who set this up.) With all the usual caveats about small-scale one-time qualitative research studies in place... the conclusion appears to be that the quality of new editors hasn't really changed much over the years, and most new editors are still (and always have been) trying to help the encyclopedia. Perhaps when viewed from the perspective of new page patrollers, there appears to be a significant rise in spammers and SPAs, but it's important to remember that there are many non-article-creating newbies out there. The other important thing to note from this study is that the rate of rejection (deletion or reverts) of new users' edits is disproportionate to the number of poor quality contributions, which means there are just as many good new editors now as there always have been, but they're entering an environment that's increasingly suspicious and critical of their work and, predictably, they aren't sticking around. So, personally, no, I'm not too worried that by opening the door a little wider for new contributors (and by holding it open long enough for them to learn all the social and technical nuances of editing), we're going to attract a flood of spammers and self-promoters. Those people will always be there, of course, but the community has developed pretty good methods of dealing with them, and ultimately they're a small part of a big community of people who just want to write a damn good encyclopedia :) Maryana Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of declining numbers. Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise. Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal. But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being driven in are the type we want? And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit? MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Maryana Pinchuk Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Editor retention (was Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!)
Responding to MZMcBride's question, And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit? First, I think that the new visual editor will help. Second, I think that the NOTFACEBOOK policy is a bit counterproductive in its current form. Wikipedia is a collaborative work and I've seen the NOTFACEBOOK policy pushed in the faces of people who engage in personal conversation on their talk pages. We want people to develop collaborative relationships here, right? I don't mean to suggest that people should turn userpages entirely into personal blogs, but I also think that the statement Wikipedians have their own user pages, but they may be used only to present information relevant to working on the encyclopedia is overkill and discourages people from forming friendly collaborative relationships. I think that we should move in the opposite direction, permitting and possibly even encouraging people to be social (within reasonable limits) while working collaboratively on our collective project of Wikipedia. Pine ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality. I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally. Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The evidence is detailed at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space. Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently include the establishment of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of more than 150 bytes. At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years to meet the same goal. Another very impressive structural improvement involves User:Dispenser's enhancements to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog where most of the article backlog count numbers are now clickable, such that they will show a list of the backlog category's articles sorted by importance, measured by the number of incoming links. For example, http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/categorder.py?page=Category:All_unreferenced_BLPs As the number of incoming backlinks strongly correlates with the number of page views, this represents a quantum improvement for dealing with quality issue backlogs. There is no reason to believe that such organics and structural quality improvements will not continue. -Will ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:30 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Zack Exley wrote: A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). I'm still holding out a hope that when we're able to do better analysis of contribution quality (by whatever subjective measure) (which right now we can only do well by hand) that we find out there is no decline of high quality contributions, and that in fact we're growing in that respect. I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org. Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society. OK, don't know what you're talking about there... did moveon ever work on mandatory voting laws? but anyways... I'm curious what your take on that is, particularly as it relates to the focus on increased participation vs. increased content quality on Wikimedia wikis. From my personal experience and from my discussions with others who deal with new users on a regular basis, a lot of new users have a singular purpose: to create an article about their company, product, organization, or group. This is almost exactly the opposite of what we want users to be doing. It's become so common that many people who try to assist new editors have grown exasperated and simply stop, as nearly every request is my article was deleted, help! when the article was never appropriate for an encyclopedia to begin with. I agree that most new users are not high quality and many are spammers, PR people, band managers, etc... with little regard for the values of the projects. There are hundreds of thousands of such users each year. But the vast majority of new users have always been destined not to become great wikimedians. That's not new. But each year there has also been a large number (in the low thousands -- just guestimating) of new users who really want to be part of creating a great project and are fully aligned with the values of the project they're trying to join. When we look back at user-to-user interactions in 2001-2004, we see that established users had very high standards and were often unwelcoming or even rude, but they were putting effort into finding the needles in haystacks who would be great Wikimedians. They were saying over and over, It's really hard to do what we do, but we're doing something amazing, if you stick around and learn the ropes, we could really use you. Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing a personal note about a specific edit. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. But I'm just trying to make clear (since you didn't hear it the first time I said it) that I wasn't arguing for coddling spammers or even investing time into encouraging all good faith users. There are a ton of amazing new users who make their 10th -- or 100th, or 1000th -- high quality edit every week. We just need to encourage them (instead of merely blanketing their talk pages with impersonal warnings). Everyone here is focused on increasing the numbers of high quality contributors, even if that isn't always communicated well in discussions of declining numbers. Truly, I don't think many people (myself included) think otherwise. Obviously attracting and retaining quality contributors is everyone's goal. But given the above, how do you ensure that the new editors that are being driven in are the type we want? And a bit larger than this, what's an acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an acceptable cost for the potential benefit? MZMcBride -- Zack Exley Chief Community Officer Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses:, , Britannica to stop printing books
But what to call it? Wikipedia2 doesn't have much flavor. WikipediaLocalized? WikiDetails? WikipediaExpanded? WikipediaSuppliment? On 3/20/2012 5:24 PM, foundation-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote: From: David Goodmandgge...@gmail.com What I suggest is a '''Wikipedia Two'' - an encyclopedia supplement where the standard of notability is much relaxed, but which will be different from Wikia by still requiring Verifiability and NPOV. It would include the lower levels of barely notable articles in Wikipedia, and a good deal of what we do not let in. But it would be interesting to see the results of a search option: Do you want to see everything (WP+WP2), or only the really notable (WP)? Anyone care to guess which people would choose? Ha! I'd choose Wikipedia2 anyday! ;-) (my favorite articles keep getting deleted from wikipedia. How's that useful to anyone?) Notability was originally a stopgap for verifiability IIRC. It's gone off the rails imo. On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 09:40:20AM -0700, Robin McCain wrote: This is an excellent idea - a kind of searchable sandbox where articles could eventually be promoted into the main site or simply used as in depth backing for a Wikipedia One article. I'm thinking wikipedia needs a reboot anyway. We'll probably end up with a replay of wikipedia/nupedia if we reboot a wp2 with tidied up and streamlined policy (redesign as a pattern language), integrated Prod/AFD, deprecated arbcom in favor of DRN, and most importantly: ensuring new users all get mentors. Acculturation failure has severely harmed WP1, we need some way to bring experienced and inexperienced users together reliably. This is the simplest and best way to retain editors. :-) sincerely, Kim Bruning ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On 21 March 2012 22:32, Zack Exley zex...@wikimedia.org wrote: Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing a personal note about a specific edit. And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are completely bot-generated. That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not the sort of gamification that is useful. That said, anyone who's ever done Special:Newpages will deeply empathise with ax-crazy newpages patrollers, because Special:Newpages is a firehose of *shit*. How's the article wizard's output looking? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:49 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are completely bot-generated. That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not the sort of gamification that is useful. If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't want to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human. Steven ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
Zack Exley wrote: MZMcBride wrote: I was thinking more about this today and how it somewhat relates to you and your previous work at MoveOn.org. Mandatory voting laws look great on paper: increased democratic and civic participation, a more involved and engaged citizenry, etc. But there's a counter-argument that reaching out to those who are too apathetic or ignorant to vote on their own simply expands the pool of voters without making a better society. OK, don't know what you're talking about there... did moveon ever work on mandatory voting laws? but anyways... The comparison was a focus on trying to engage people to participate who were too apathetic or ignorant to get engaged themselves. MoveOn.org has done a lot of voter registration work, but for them, just as for Wikimedia, it's a numbers game more than anything else. The focus isn't adding 1,000 new voters who are well-versed in (or even familiar with) politics, it's about adding 1,000 new voters. Similarly, Wikimedia's goal isn't to increase the amount of quality content-producing contributors, it's to increase the number of contributors. You seem to be arguing that the goal _really is_ to add quality contributors and that this goal simply isn't being communicated effectively when the subject is raised, but is there evidence of what you're saying? There's plenty of evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase participation (both of us agree on this point). Is there evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase quality participation? Is there evidence that Wikimedia's goal is to increase quality content? If so, can you share? :-) When we look back at user-to-user interactions in 2001-2004, we see that established users had very high standards and were often unwelcoming or even rude, but they were putting effort into finding the needles in haystacks who would be great Wikimedians. They were saying over and over, It's really hard to do what we do, but we're doing something amazing, if you stick around and learn the ropes, we could really use you. I wasn't around in this period (and I don't think you were either?), but if you ask nearly anyone from that period whether Wikimedia wikis are more friendly and collegial now than they were then, what do you think their responses would be? Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of writing a personal note about a specific edit. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. But I'm just trying to make clear (since you didn't hear it the first time I said it) that I wasn't arguing for coddling spammers or even investing time into encouraging all good faith users. What are you arguing for? It's still unclear to me. How much editing work have you personally engaged in? I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Zackexley, but I assume that's just your staff account, right? You speak with an authority about templates and user talk pages and such, so I can't imagine you've never personally engaged with the subject. What have your experiences been? There are a ton of amazing new users who make their 10th -- or 100th, or 1000th -- high quality edit every week. We just need to encourage them (instead of merely blanketing their talk pages with impersonal warnings). Can you show an example of a user making his or her 10th, 100th, or 1000th high quality edit who's being blanketed with impersonal warnings? I don't understand this phenomenon, though it sounds fascinating. MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
- Original Message - From: Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 10:57 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team! On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:49 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are completely bot-generated. That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test. I know the solution is not to just stop using templates. I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not the sort of gamification that is useful. If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't want to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human. Steven I don't know what you're doing, or where, but it seems to me that templates often seem to be trying to do too much. One solution might be to have some generics for particular issues with a mandatory freetext field, in which the templater would be required to explain exactly what is wrong with the templatee's edit, in the templater's opinion. I realise this might be a hostage to fortune in possibly amplifying discord, but good templaters should be happy to help and explain their reversions, and it would focus the minds of those others who issue templates willy-nilly. I think the above comment about Twinkle and Huggle is perfectly valid; after all, if you can push a button rather than engage and educate an editor, those tools make it all to easy so to do. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On 22 March 2012 00:11, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Can you show an example of a user making his or her 10th, 100th, or 1000th high quality edit who's being blanketed with impersonal warnings? I don't understand this phenomenon, though it sounds fascinating. I'm around the hundred thousands and I still get 'em. Templates are fundamentally a way to insulate yourself from dealing with others. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't want to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk template system more human. Steven Well, just to prohibit or strongly discourage templating articles unless really necessary and try to shift people back to the fix-it culture. To strongly discourage templating users pages with a few exceptions such as vandalism and copyvio templates. To greet users manually and only then give the hello template. So, yes, I am letting you know as requested. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority. Thank you for sharing this. How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement). Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)? MZMcBride This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed? BirgitteSB ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed? BirgitteSB I am not sure whether I want to dispute this but let me put it in this way: This statement is not obvious and should be proven by research. Moreover, it could be true for some areas and false for other areas. Whereas, not to offend anybody, the quality of articles on football players of major clubs (I guess) are proportional to the quantity of editors, the quality of an article on Landauer formula (which I am going to create now) is probably not a such simple function of a number of contributors. And on top of this, the conclusions may change with time. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: On Mar 21, 2012, at 8:53 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: Everybody knows that reversing stagnating/declining participation in Wikimedia's projects is our top priority. Thank you for sharing this. How much discussion has there been internally about this being the wrong approach? A good number of active editors (who I imagine Wikimedia is also trying to engage and retain) feel that Wikimedia's sole focus is on the numbers game. That is, Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content that it's producing (or the quality of the new contributors, for that matter). The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to create a free and accessible repository of (high-quality) educational content; the vision is not about trying to get as many people involved as possible (or even build a movement). Is there a concern that the current focus on simply boosting the numbers (a focus on quantity) is overshadowing the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on quality)? This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed? How do you draw that correlation? It seems like you're missing a very important may. Surely it depends on what kind of contributors you're pulling in and why. It would be trivial to add a lot of contributors through gimmicky incentives (make ten edits, win a prize!), but are those the type of editors we want? Content is king. People visit Wikimedia wikis for their content and the Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is to ... empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content The hawkeyed focus on simply bumping up the number of contributors doesn't necessarily improve the content. It may. But if the focus is purely on the numbers (and not the quality of the contributors being added), it may also make the content worse. It isn't the Wikimedia Foundation's stated vision or mission to build a movement; the idea is to find ways to create and disseminate free, high quality, educational content. So I continue to wonder: is the current focus of adding more and more people overshadowing the arguably more important focus of producing something of value? There are finite resources (as with nearly any project), but they're being used to develop tools and technologies that focus on one project (Wikipedia) and that often have questionable value (MoodBar, ArticleFeedback, etc.). ArticleFeedback has gone through five major iterations; FlaggedRevs was dropped after one. Doesn't that seem emblematic of a larger problem to you? Commons needs more support. Wikisource needs more support. Wiktionary needs more support. And it goes on. But the focus is about adding more people to Wikipedia. It isn't about making it possible to easily add music notation to articles. Or making it easier to transcribe articles. Or making it easier to re-use the vast content within contained within Wiktionary. Or ... The focus on solely increasing participation for statistics' sake comes with a real cost. MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 9:26 AM, Will Takatoshi willtakato...@gmail.com wrote: ... Wikimedia is all about adding people, but doesn't seem to care about the quality of the content There is no need for the Foundation to try to improve content quality. I keep careful tabs on quality studies and perform independent tests of Wikipedia quality regularly. By every measure, quality continues to improve, both organically from transient editors and structurally. Will, the concerns about the WMF's new editor targets is not driven by concerns that English Wikipedia quality is decreasing. English Wikipedia quality is increasing, and is less accepting of poor quality contributions and contributors. Adding lots of new editors with low quality contributions is a concern. If the WMF wants more new editors in order to meet strategic goals that they set for themselves, they should be adding them to projects other than the large Wikipedia. Yet the WMF appears to be focused on recruiting editors to English Wikipedia. Transient editors, whether registered or IP address users, have always been the largest source of the bulk of Wikipedia content, contrary to frequent claims that a core group writes most content. Certainly long term Wikipedians have large edit counts, but they represent a very small minority by total number of bytes added to articles. The evidence is detailed at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia which is more true now than ever as transient editors are displacing long term frequent contributors on the largest wikipedias in article space. Structural quality improvements which have impressed me recently include the establishment of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles which in the 10 days that it has existed, more than 270 of its listed articles have been improved, each of which have gained an average of more than 150 bytes. At that rate, most of the level 4 vital articles will have more than 9,000 bytes of content in less than a year, as opposed to the prior rate of improvement which was closer to six years to meet the same goal. And the creator of Wikipedia:Short_popular_vital_articles has retired after 16 days..due to harassment/accusations of sock puppetry/etc https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Npmaydiff=482503236oldid=482441874 -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:35 AM, birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: This strikes me as a very oddly articulated concern about a crowd-sourcing project. The basic premise underlying the whole model is increasing the quantity of contributors increases the quality of the content. Is this really disputed? An astute observation. I do believe the end goal is increasing the size of the collected wisdom, whether it is achieved by merely increasing the size of the crowd so the mean is more accurate or some other approach entirely. There isn't a lot of experiments or past projects to base this on, but I don't believe that the same numbers approach is the right way to proceed. What the concern should be, in this particular case, is the almost myopic focus on the statistical rise and fall in the number of contributors. And that too, focused on one language of one project. Regardless of which side of the argument one is on, you can not overlook the importance of getting a complete picture. I suppose it is revealing that some of the earlier criticism already on this thread, is about the impersonal nature of interactions and usage of automated tools and templates. Individualism is usually the first casualty of collectivist constructs. Collectivism replaces the individual nature for a more linear, modular, yet parsimonious approach to interaction. As it should, I suppose, since the sole focus is on increasing the collective and nothing more. They are both very related, you will have more usage of templates, and automated tools, and less personal interactions, as the size grows and only new, possibly temporary contributors join on an hourly basis. Templates or automated tools do not directly cause any rise or fall in the number of contributors, they and their increased usage, is merely the symptom of the underlying issue. Regards Theo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
