Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
2011/2/27 wjhon...@aol.com: The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of effort here. With Wikipedia, I can contribute a word here, a sentence there, parse some grammar over there, fix a bad phrasing, add a source... all to seven articles and call it a day. A book takes an awful lot of effort. And then I give it away free to the world. Sorry I'm just not seeing that. This explains perfectly well why wikibooks has not been working very well from its beginning. However, it doesn't explain the decline of admins in the last years someone mentioned earlier in this thread. I was active a while in the german wikibooks, but eventually got frustrated by the lack of interaction with others. You're working alone on your book project, and all the satisfaction you get is from the work you put in - no feedback, no discovering somebody has improved your stuff while you were away, no discovery that someone has ruined everything in your absence and now you have to fight for your version... very peaceful and absolutely boring. greetings, elian ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
From: Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk I was surprised to see the pagecount figures on en.wikibooks! Is this no new pages being created, or is it page creation being approximately equal to the rate of deleting old pages? The full period graph has an anomaly where pages went from almost 39,000 to just under 35,000 and that was the result of merging the histories of pages that were part of the same textbook but were later editions created by class projects over several semesters derived by copying and pasting content in one page to a new one and then making improvements. Quite often I see editing patterns indicative of schools and universities editing Wikibooks; work by several contributors all showing up at once on a new or existing book is a clear indication as the normal trend is a lone editor working on a book at any period in time. The one-year graph will be more accurate [1]. The major dips were largely books transwikied to Wikiversity due to original research concerns. The number of new pages has been such a trickle that the overall trend is largely flat. That said, it is possible that this graph is not entirely accurate either. Content pages for the purposes of the software include a link to another page in the wiki, and that doesn't count links in the navigational templates that books often use. Many pages do not have links to other pages other than in those templates, so there is an outstanding feature request to count any page with a comma instead [2]. - Adrignola [1] http://www.wikistatistics.net/wikibooks/en/articles/365 [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27256 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/26/2011 6:12:10 AM Pacific Standard Time, dger...@gmail.com writes: So, for WIkibooks: what's the tuna? What's the compelling attraction that will keep people lured in? I will go one step further. What is Wikibooks at all? The scope, content, purpose were really poorly defined. Something to large for Wikipedia doesn't really cut it in my mind. When our Wikipedia article on Marilyn Monroe can be 25 screen pages long, than who needs a book and how much bigger would a book be anyway? I'm not sure it makes sense on the Internet to call anything a book. The other problem I have is who writes the book? I surely don't want to write a book on Obama, but I can contribute a *chapter* perhaps of course I'd want to be the editor-in-chief of my own chapter but allow contributors. But heck, if I'm going to go to that much trouble, why not just throw it up on my own web site ? W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 26 February 2011 16:32, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: I will go one step further. What is Wikibooks at all? The scope, content, purpose were really poorly defined. Something to large for Wikipedia doesn't really cut it in my mind. When our Wikipedia article on Marilyn Monroe can be 25 screen pages long, than who needs a book and how much bigger would a book be anyway? The scope was supposedly textbooks - how-to books. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/27/2011 12:26:22 PM Pacific Standard Time, dger...@gmail.com writes: The scope was supposedly textbooks - how-to books. The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of effort here. With Wikipedia, I can contribute a word here, a sentence there, parse some grammar over there, fix a bad phrasing, add a source... all to seven articles and call it a day. A book takes an awful lot of effort. And then I give it away free to the world. Sorry I'm just not seeing that. Some has been some effort on Knol to create books and collections. The books are not official but the collections are an official tool, even if the results are not. So on Wikibooks for example, I could create my own How-To Home Repair, and collect *chapters* contributed by a dozen people into a *book*. So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually accomplish. I suppose... maybe I'm just rambling. But just the name Wikibooks doesn't sound to me like How To, it sounds like 150 to 1000 pages on an overarching topic of some kind. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 27 February 2011 20:37, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually accomplish. Arguably we could have started wikihow.com ... which is CC by-nc-sa, rather than an actually free licence. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/25/2011 3:12:17 PM Pacific Standard Time, jay...@gmail.com writes: At the moment, we need admins who press buttons more than we need to welcome new users. It is unfortunate, but that is how it is. We need to find ways of reducing the amount of work needed, or radically increase the number of admins. I have to respectfully disagree with John. IMHO we need a more welcoming environment to new editors. The idea that the vast majority of new contributors contribute nonsense, or vandalize is in my opinion, not a well-founded claim. I would agree with a statement like the vast majority of new contributors don't really understand the now-Byzantine rule system in place, which is a completely different situation. I also agree that our templates make the I.R.S. appear friendly, and that our user outreach is close to non-existent. Whatever happened to the Please Come Back campaign which was seemingly moribund before even getting launched ? It's fine to say nothing's wrong as the Titanic sinks, but it's still sinking. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/25/2011 9:56:26 AM Pacific Standard Time, smole...@eunet.rs writes: To my knowledge, no one has ever tried it, but why not? In reality, some people don't do what they know to do, but choose to become teachers. Maybe there are people who know how to edit Wikipedia and would want to teach new users rather than actually edit. Well if you mean Wikipedians, yes there was a Welcoming committee at one time which died due to lack of participation. It was maybe five years ago or something. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
From: Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk The absolute number of active community members on enwp peaked in early 2007 and has been in a slow decline more or less steadily since then; it's currently about two thirds what it was. I was given permission to forward any portion of an email I received from MZMcbride, and this is a relevant portion: Sure, but there is a more fundamental question about what the goal and mission actually is. I see it as about content creation. Wikimedia's focus should primarily be creating the best free content it can. Others seem far more interested in creating a movement (a large social network). From: Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk If we don't increase the rate at which we attract and retain new contributors while we can, there's a real danger we could end up by 2020 or 2025 with a virtually moribund community - a small handful of devoted vandal-fighters spending their days trying to keep millions of pages clean and stable, and no influx of new users worth mentioning because no-one has the time to cultivate it. That proportion of active administrators to content pages is already the case at Wikibooks. It pains me to say it as a heavy contributor, but the number of admins has fallen to a third of what it was in 2007. [1] While I could hope for content growth instead, that's also stagnated. [2] From: wjhon...@aol.com It's fine to say nothing's wrong as the Titanic sinks, but it's still sinking. If Wikipedia is the Titanic, the sister projects are the Britannic. [3] I mourn the loss of many missing Wikibookians myself who were seriously involved in the community, helped mentor me and give me the enthusiasm I have for the project, but have since left. Nowadays I feel alone and the discussion rooms are nearly empty. I was disappointed that the usability initiative and outreach focused solely on Wikipedia. -- Adrignola [1] http://www.wikistatistics.net/wikibooks/en/admins/full [2] http://www.wikistatistics.net/wikibooks/en/articles/full [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMHS_Britannic ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 26 February 2011 13:52, Aaron Adrignola aaron.adrign...@gmail.com wrote: I was given permission to forward any portion of an email I received from MZMcbride, and this is a relevant portion: Sure, but there is a more fundamental question about what the goal and mission actually is. I see it as about content creation. Wikimedia's focus should primarily be creating the best free content it can. Others seem far more interested in creating a movement (a large social network). Although Wikipedia is not a social network, and the community seems to rotate every 18-24 months, volunteer motivation remains tricky. Humans interact like humans. Volunteers are not employees, and can't be expected to just shut up and work. It really, really deeply doesn't work like that. That proportion of active administrators to content pages is already the case at Wikibooks. It pains me to say it as a heavy contributor, but the number of admins has fallen to a third of what it was in 2007. [1] While I could hope for content growth instead, that's also stagnated. [2] If Wikipedia is the Titanic, the sister projects are the Britannic. [3] I mourn the loss of many missing Wikibookians myself who were seriously involved in the community, helped mentor me and give me the enthusiasm I have for the project, but have since left. Nowadays I feel alone and the discussion rooms are nearly empty. I was disappointed that the usability initiative and outreach focused solely on Wikipedia. Blog post I just made: http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/?p=543 Key quotes: Motivating volunteers is like herding cats. “Herding cats is easy if you know the local value of tuna.” — me, some years ago. An observation I know of no-one else having made before me, so I’m taking this as my law of volunteer motivation. Lure them with something *compelling*. Volunteers will work ten times as hard as any employee, but only because they want to be there and only on things they want to. But that motivation is so fragile, and volunteer effort is not fungible. So, for WIkibooks: what's the tuna? What's the compelling attraction that will keep people lured in? Repeat that question for each project. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Le 26/02/2011 11:11, David Gerard a écrit : Volunteers are not employees, and can't be expected to just shut up and work. It really, really deeply doesn't work like that. I don't follow you. Are you answering to something or somebody in particular? Was there a disagreement about that? Did anyone suggest that volunteers should shut up and work? If yes I would like to know what was said. Motivating volunteers is like herding cats. “Herding cats is easy if you know the local value of tuna.” — me, some years ago. An observation I know of no-one else having made before me, so I’m taking this as my law of volunteer motivation. Lure them with something *compelling*. I don't subscribe to this point of view. Instead of herding, luring and compelling with a logic of market, isn't it best to listen to them, share their genuine, altruistic interests and put yourself at their service? Volunteers will work ten times as hard as any employee, but only because they want to be there and only on things they want to. But that motivation is so fragile, and volunteer effort is not fungible. So, for WIkibooks: what's the tuna? What's the compelling attraction that will keep people lured in? What bothers me is that you talk about in terms of us and them as if they were aliens. It's good to ask about the ideals of a community, but it's even best when you share their ideals. Thus, a better question would be, imho, to how to be part of the community first. I don't imply anything personal, I'm just stating my own priorities. The ideal executive branch of wikimedia should share genuinously the spirit of the community they serve. Just my 2c. No offense meant. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 26 February 2011 16:43, Pronoein prono...@gmail.com wrote: What bothers me is that you talk about in terms of us and them as if they were aliens. It's good to ask about the ideals of a community, but it's even best when you share their ideals. The ideal is tuna too in this context. I don't mean to set up an us and them. I am one of said volunteers. However, I don't think anything I wrote was in any way incorrect. If you lament a lack of volunteers, you need to attract them, and to do that you need to actually think and work out what would attract them. This requires understanding the process. What in what I wrote was actually not how volunteer motivation works? In the blog post I listed examples from my experience; discounting these will require you to give more than I'm reading what you wrote as 'us' and 'them'. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 26 February 2011 13:52, Aaron Adrignola aaron.adrign...@gmail.com wrote: [via MZM] Sure, but there is a more fundamental question about what the goal and mission actually is. I see it as about content creation. Wikimedia's focus should primarily be creating the best free content it can. Others seem far more interested in creating a movement (a large social network). I think, on the whole, I agree with the primacy of content. That said... To my mind, we can argue for increasing and broadening participation without automatically believing that creating a movement is desirable, or even an expected result. Good quality content creation - and perhaps more critically, a constant and reliable level of content maintenance and preservation - is at risk if we don't have a healthy and robust community; there's no need to press further than that, but we do need to at least be confident we've got that far! [Aaron] That proportion of active administrators to content pages is already the case at Wikibooks. It pains me to say it as a heavy contributor, but the number of admins has fallen to a third of what it was in 2007. [1] While I could hope for content growth instead, that's also stagnated. [2] The figure I quoted, incidentally, is highly active users (users with 100 edits in a given month) rather than active administrators; that said, the two figures generally vary in the same way. I was surprised to see the pagecount figures on en.wikibooks! Is this no new pages being created, or is it page creation being approximately equal to the rate of deleting old pages? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
- Original meddelelse -
Fra: John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com
Til: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Dato: Fre, 25. feb 2011 04:01
Emne: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An
Essay)
The systems are designed so that the cliche '15 year old
admin-want-a-be' is expected to handled any newbie/new page, and they
do.
Wikimedia Commons is going the same way.
Smaller projects are far more welcoming and friendly to newbies, as
the project participants know the value of every new person.
Also each person participating in a smaller project has a sense of
achievement in 'the project'.
On smaller projects it is also possible for *one* person to watch
RecentChanges and see *everything*, and when more than one person
does
that, the project has peer review of the newbie welcoming processes.
On many of the Wikisource projects, we have *edit* patrolling; if a
newbie makes five edits, up to five different people will be brought
into contact with the newbie.
We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end
up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about
the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in.
And they need to be reliable enough that we don't end up with 50%+ of
newbies being left to be managed by the admin-want-a-bes who have
more
interest in pressing buttons than they do in the topic that interests
the newbie they are 'processing'.
--
John Vandenberg
This is certainly part of the problem. I would point also to the
overwhelming amount of policies (and their corresponding abbreviations,
WP:NOT etc. etc.) and procedures as being practically impossible to cope
with for newbies.
Question is, of course, what to do about it all? Could we create a
procedure for admin appointment that puts the ability to communicate with
people way above the persons need for tools and buttons for doing
clean-up? Should we have a special welcoming staff instead of random
people or bots inserting {{welcome}}?
I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis
with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in
fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to
'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere
of the smaller wikis could prevail.
Regards,
Sir48 (Thyge)
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Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Дана Friday 25 February 2011 13:18:36 dex2...@pc.dk написа:
clean-up? Should we have a special welcoming staff instead of random
people or bots inserting {{welcome}}?
To my knowledge, no one has ever tried it, but why not? In reality, some
people don't do what they know to do, but choose to become teachers. Maybe
there are people who know how to edit Wikipedia and would want to teach new
users rather than actually edit.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Here's a recent email I received from Answers.com after editing an answer there. Talk about friendly! Compared to this, we make the IRS look friendly. Hey Kaldari, Someone's been busy lately! Don't think your contributions go unnoticed... your tireless efforts are helping thousands of individuals from all over the world. Continue to sharpen your WikiAnswers skills: * Keep your eye on the ball. Add your favorite categories and questions to your watchlist http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Special:Watchlistsrc=emaildim1=First5dim2=Watchlist. * Go in for the win. Browse http://wiki.answers.com/help/how_to_contributesrc=emaildim1=First5dim2=Browse our tips, suggestions and how-tos, or check out the Help Center http://wiki.answers.com/help/help_centersrc=emaildim1=First5dim2=CommunityHQ. * Be a pro. Find out if you're really as good as you think you are. Check out the Top Contributors Hall of Fame http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Special:Topssrc=emaildim1=First5dim2=TopContribs. We're glad you're part of the team! Ryan Kaldari ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs wrote:
Дана Friday 25 February 2011 13:18:36 dex2...@pc.dk написа:
clean-up? Should we have a special welcoming staff instead of random
people or bots inserting {{welcome}}?
To my knowledge, no one has ever tried it, but why not?
On English Wikipedia there is a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee
--
John Vandenberg
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Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM, dex2...@pc.dk wrote: .. This is certainly part of the problem. I would point also to the overwhelming amount of policies (and their corresponding abbreviations, WP:NOT etc. etc.) and procedures as being practically impossible to cope with for newbies. Question is, of course, what to do about it all? Could we create a procedure for admin appointment that puts the ability to communicate with people way above the persons need for tools and buttons for doing clean-up? At the moment, we need admins who press buttons more than we need to welcome new users. It is unfortunate, but that is how it is. We need to find ways of reducing the amount of work needed, or radically increase the number of admins. .. I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere of the smaller wikis could prevail. This is the best solution, in my opinion. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 25 February 2011 03:01, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: English Wikipedia is now sufficiently well known and culturally important, that 'we' no longer need to care about new contributors. Even if only 1% of new contributors work their way past the rejections and through our maze of rules, we will still have significant growth. For content growth (which is broadly ever bigger, ever better), yes, but not for community growth. The absolute number of active community members on enwp peaked in early 2007 and has been in a slow decline more or less steadily since then; it's currently about two thirds what it was. If we don't increase the rate at which we attract and retain new contributors while we can, there's a real danger we could end up by 2020 or 2025 with a virtually moribund community - a small handful of devoted vandal-fighters spending their days trying to keep millions of pages clean and stable, and no influx of new users worth mentioning because no-one has the time to cultivate it. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but there's certainly no end of examples of once-flourishing internet communities that have died that sort of death by neglect, a spiral of spambots, vandals, and passing once-off contributors leaving plaintive notes but with no real way to restart a critical mass. (Interestingly, the decline of editors is more or less proportional to the overall editing rate - since the beginning of 2008, the ratio of overall edits per month to highly active users has been about 10,000:1 - so in relative terms, the recent-changes firehose has been stable for three years) We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in. There already is a relatively rough-and-ready system in place for identifying and categorising new pages by project areas, using keyword analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot producing daily reports like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AlexNewArtBot/IslamSearchResult Building something which sends targeted invitation messages off the back of that to new users is certainly plausible: Hi! You recently created [[Freedom and Justice Party (Egypt)]]. You might be interested in the following projects working on these topics... with appropriate links and specific messages to, in this case, the projects for Egypt/Africa/Politics/Law/Islam. For people who don't create articles, you could have a bot look at the first (say) ten or so article/talk edits of a new user, and then send a list of suitable projects based on the way those pages were categorised or project-tagged. (I have no idea how easy this would be to implement...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Renata St renataw...@gmail.com wrote: ... Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders ( http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages evaluations this is what you got right, this is what you should improve. I was shocked. These people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time, energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie who reviewed 30 book pages... There are other aspects that need to be considered when comparing Distributed Proofreaders and Wikipedia. Distributed Proofreaders (DP) does not publish until their work has been completed, checked and rechecked. As a result, there is no urgency to 'get it right'. On Wikipedia, BLP violations and hoaxes are published and appear in Google results on an hourly basis, and would stay there if it wasn't for our existing processes and patrollers who fight the good fight. In addition to this, the task of proofreading all writings of mankind is so large, and the likely pool of contributors so small, that they can easily summise that the backlogs arn't fixable. DP have projects which are moribund for *years*. Another difference is that the task of proofreading texts is one that has very little personal opinion involved. Their contributor base doesn't have a wide variation of opinions on how the task should be done. They are constrained by the software and Project Gutenberg rules, eliminating most of the fierce battles which could be wages over important issues like ... typography, orthography, etc. Finally, the Distributed Proofreaders project only consists of already published public domain material. It is all already dusty, and there can be no dispute about what the text was. This also reduces the opportunity for conflict, and it also results in less personal involvement in the work. Proofreading doesn't even require any knowledge of the text, or even the language of the text - contributors merely need to know how to find the glyphs to match the type on the page. And a contributors choice of texts to work on doesn't say much about their beliefs, personality or mission in life. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Samuel Klein wrote: On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:33 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Samuel Klein wrote: tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely. Hmm, prove it. :-) You talk a good game and I'm not sure you're wrong, but I haven't seen much to suggest that you're right. The design of an effective request / campaign for a certain type of contribution likely takes a significant amount of time and tweaking, and a body of people available to respond to the initial interest generated. Forgive me, but I'm still a bit lost here. Are you saying you can or can't crowdsource your crowdsourcing? The initial comments were about red herrings and the illusion of finite resources. Now you're pointing at resource limitations that exist before we can even get more resources? Is that about right? (Yes, it's still turtles all the way down.) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Renata St renataw...@gmail.com wrote:
Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages evaluations this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve. I was shocked. These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with 30
edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and my
articles with endless variations of {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their
articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity of
the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia. But
what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing the
participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.
I heartily agree, with one minor difference of opinion about the
underlying cause.
In my opinion, the 'English Wikipedia' response mechanisms are not
driven by the size of the backlogs, but by the perceptions regarding
the 'need' for new contributors.
English Wikipedia is now sufficiently well known and culturally
important, that 'we' no longer need to care about new contributors.
Even if only 1% of new contributors work their way past the rejections
and through our maze of rules, we will still have significant growth.
Many new contributors on English Wikipedia are seen by peers and
treated with respect, like in the old days, however many more are not
found by people who care, and end up driven through the gates of our
systems of escalating warnings and the like.
'we' allow our systems to become automated and depersonalised, and any
newbies lost as a result are collateral damage:
They were never suitable anyway.
The systems are designed so that the cliche '15 year old
admin-want-a-be' is expected to handled any newbie/new page, and they
do.
Wikimedia Commons is going the same way.
Smaller projects are far more welcoming and friendly to newbies, as
the project participants know the value of every new person.
Also each person participating in a smaller project has a sense of
achievement in 'the project'.
On smaller projects it is also possible for *one* person to watch
RecentChanges and see *everything*, and when more than one person does
that, the project has peer review of the newbie welcoming processes.
On many of the Wikisource projects, we have *edit* patrolling; if a
newbie makes five edits, up to five different people will be brought
into contact with the newbie.
Contrast this with English Wikipedia, which has *new page* patrolling.
Once the page has been 'actioned' by one person, nobody else in the
community will see the newbie while they work on that new page.
We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end
up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about
the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in.
And they need to be reliable enough that we don't end up with 50%+ of
newbies being left to be managed by the admin-want-a-bes who have more
interest in pressing buttons than they do in the topic that interests
the newbie they are 'processing'.
--
John Vandenberg
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Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 12:02:09 -0800, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2011/2/22 Michel Vuijlsteke wikipe...@zog.org: This is where it starts. Thousands of our users have their first interactions with a bot or with a user leaving a template. We're unlikely to alter our practice to completely abandon bots and talk page templates (although we can improve our software to give more direct user feedback which makes bots and automated messages unnecessary, e.g. for something like missing categories), but while we're still using them, we really need to pay more attention to what they are saying. I do not see why it would be impossible to abandon warning templates. I actually only use the copyvio warning template, because it is technically advanced, and it would be difficult to write all these issues without the templete. For the rest, if I warn someone, I just write smth myself, it does not take any longer time. Bots are a different issue altogether, I agree. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:42:25 -0500, aude aude.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:19 PM, Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.eduwrote: On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: If you were going to do something more useful than welcoming users, you're talking about dealing with about 180,000 edits per day and an active user base of ... maybe 10,000 users? To be clear: those 180,000 edits per day are the source of future active users. By rejecting them or dealing with them summarily we are simply committing ourselves to remaining at our current community flavor and size (if there is no channel for becoming a champion welcomer, people who like to socialize with and welcome others will never join the community) Actually, this is smth we implemented in Russian Wikipedia about a year ago (mainly due to user Samal). We have a subspace called Wikipedia/Incubator (not to be confused with incubator.wikimedia.org which is a separate project). This is kind of a school for beginning editors. They usually get spotted, get an invitation to move (together with their first article) to Incubator, and there they can quietly learn the policies without having to save their articles from speedy deletion. We have a dedicated team of people who are mostly active in Incubator helping the newbies, and we already have the first generation of users who went through the Incubator, had their articles moved to the main space, and some of them even have GAs and FAs. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/22/2011 10:16:25 PM Pacific Standard Time, sjkl...@hcs.harvard.edu writes: There's a shortage of core developers. There are quite a lot of PHP developers who have built some sort of MediaWiki extension, or otherwise hacked on it to make their own fork, however. We have some opportunities here to recruit more of them as well -- some way of encouraging each downloader to get involved, or one-click sharing of their local hacks with a global community? I'm not sure; but this is certainly another case of how can we embrace people who take the first step to join us worth solving. AdSense Integration. The ability for a MediaWiki install (retroactive to earlier releases) to stick Adsense ads in where they want. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Hello SJ, and all the others, I think SJ's mail has a lot of points. And I think the most important thing is not to talk about this, but to change one's own attitude. Most people who are talking here are also the most heavy contributors in our projects, and as these, they have a heavy mindsetting function in the projects. And if everyone of us work in our projects in another way as earlier, this would have an impact in the project. This is exactly what I do in my home project, zh-wp. Earlier it was also for me a easy one to say: Hey, this is spam, speed delete. But meanwhile I see this in a different way. Speed deletion is initially introduced to battle against deliberate destructive behavior. Deliberate spam is such a behavior, so there is need to speed delete deliberate spam. But a new user who put in an article about a product is not necessarily deliberately spamming. It is far more important to tell him what he did wrong and give him the chance to improve his article. So meanwhile I got to change my own behavior. If a user is not proven to be a notorious spammer, I would not speed delete his contributions. I would tell him his article is considered too one sided and as an advertisement. As such it would be deleted in seven days. But he can try to improve it, so that it would not be deleted. And I try to convince other patrolers and admins to do the same. The same is with badly formated new articles. They tend to be considered as destruction and tend to be speedy deleted. If I see them now I try to make a few formattings so that they don't looks really ugly, and try to find a category for them, so that they would not be speed deleted because they are uncategorized. Yes this all makes more work for me, and I cannot say if it really pay back, if more new editors would stay. But my hope is, and I fancy that I do have some success, that this changes also the behavior of other admins and patrolers, at least some of them. And they would change other people's behavior. So this is really something that everyone of us can really change, by changing our own behavior. And there is no reason not to do it just now. Greetings Ting ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
You have just made your 100th edit: congratulations. That would be good bot to run: encourage people! Another idea: A simple message to make a compliment on people who make their first 3 posts which are not reverted after a day. make it aimed at anonymous contributors, and inviting them to register. My own welcome was in the pre-bot age, so it was personal and warm. In that tradition I have long placed a personal welcome message at newbies talk pages, with different results. Some harrassed me with questions, some disappeared, some stayed on and became valuable wikipedians. I strongly believe in warmth and people orientation. I still remember a game forum, where i was welcomed by two different people, where everyone commented on each others posts, sometimes critical, sometimes positive, but always with an undertone of friendliness. It was that atmosphere which kept me going there a long time. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:00 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are purely malicious and another decent-sized percentage of which are completely clueless. On English. On some African language wikis, a single edit can be a cause for celebration[1] I think it's important to remember as we chat on Foundation-l that Wikipedia is not a single monolithic entity. :-) Also, since not many people seem to want to clutter up the thread with answers to my welcome message question, I posted it on my blog instead; comments welcome. http://www.phoebeayers.info/phlog/?p=2009 -- phoebe 1. http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=802 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 23 February 2011 10:07, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:00 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are purely malicious and another decent-sized percentage of which are completely clueless. yeah -- I actually did both. And yes, I have sympathy for Recent Changes / new article patrollers too. it was an interesting experiment. I used Twinkle to nominate an article for speedy deletion (or something like that, I don't remember exactly) and immediately felt awful about deterring the poor newbie, who was maybe misguided, but not a vandal. What I learned from that: some Wikimedians --like me-- are likely better psychologically suited to new editor _rescue_ type work, rather than deletions/reversions. (If you've read Nicholson Baker's New York Review of Books article on Wikipedia, he describes the addictive nature of New Article Rescue Squad really well.) Those people should be encouraged to rescue/support/guide new editors. It also made me wonder if patrollers find themselves over time starting to dehumanize new people, as a kind of coping mechanism, or just because they feel beleagured. The experience, for me, felt a bit like a videogame. (And yeah, I am a person who, when playing Pikmin, felt terrible when I didn't rescue all the little guys before nightfall, and the predator bug ate them. LOL.) To belabour the videogame analogy a little further: Zack Exley and I were talking about new article patrol as being a bit like a first-person shooter, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the rifle sites. We need patrollers to be able to identify nuns and tourists, so that they don't get shot :-) Thanks, Sue ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
In a message dated 2/23/2011 11:16:00 AM Pacific Standard Time, sgard...@wikimedia.org writes: To belabour the videogame analogy a little further: Zack Exley and I were talking about new article patrol as being a bit like a first-person shooter, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the rifle sites. We need patrollers to be able to identify nuns and tourists, so that they don't get shot :-) New Article Patroller Fatigue or NAPF is that disease characterized by bleary-eyed snipers jacked up on caffeine and cheetos attacking the slimy monsters they imagine are in their sights. Each NAP should be instructed that after every day or week of patrol they are required to take an equal amount of time ... off. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
To belabour the videogame analogy a little further: Zack Exley and I were talking about new article patrol as being a bit like a first-person shooter, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the rifle sites. We need patrollers to be able to identify nuns and tourists, so that they don't get shot :-) Thanks, Sue Which is to say that new article patrol is a task requiring more skill rather than less; it is not a quiet corner for people who are unable to edit productively and lack people skills. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 16:04, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Which is to say that new article patrol is a task requiring more skill rather than less; it is not a quiet corner for people who are unable to edit productively and lack people skills. Let's not be too quick to criticize recent-change patrollers. Just glancing at new articles now, I see (no sources): [[Quksace agjke]]: quksace agjke is a term in ancient Chinese. quksace means quick and agjke means aggies. Back to 1902, students from Texas AM University visit in China. and [[Mama Wiggles]]: Mama Wiggles is a noted showgirl and burlesque dancer mostly famous for her turn in the 2005, Saskatoon based stage-production of Moulin Rougue in which she played the character Fat Peggy. She also concurrently holds the record for eating the most poutine in one sitting (4,400 servings). and [[Todd Marcus]]: Edison High School '92-'96 Irvine Strikers '94-'96 Westmont College '96-'00 Chicago Sockers '99 Southern California Seahorses '02-'03 Santa Barbara F.C. '96-'02 They do have their work cut out. :) Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
David Gerard wrote: Ban Twinkle? The tool seems to directly encourage problematic behaviour. In my opinion, this would be suboptimal. The truth is, that tool made my life easier when I was admin-ing on a regular basis. But perhaps cutting out particular problematic features wouldn't be a terrible idea. pb -- Philippe Beaudette Head of Reader Relations Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. phili...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
To be clear about what I meant: On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:33 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Samuel Klein wrote: tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely. Hmm, prove it. :-) You talk a good game and I'm not sure you're wrong, but I haven't seen much to suggest that you're right. The design of an effective request / campaign for a certain type of contribution likely takes a significant amount of time and tweaking, and a body of people available to respond to the initial interest generated. There was a contribution campaign following the most recent fundraiser. It would be cool to see data from that campaign. what should we ask for first? Assuming that it's possible to simply ask people to get more involved and receive willing, competent volunteers, I think you'd want to start by making editing less painful, if the goal is to build (better) free content. Editing sucks currently, for a lot of reasons. So you'd need developers who can work on solutions to make it suck less. From that, better content and contributors flow. A list of specific make editing less painful problems that we know how to solve but haven't found time to solve yet, pointing to related bugs/feature requests, might be helpful here. [do we have the equivalent of long-term bug reporting for known brokenness on-wiki that requires policy or process fixes?] SJ. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 5:26 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: Great examples :-) Building on them for a moment: Just glancing at new articles now, I see (no sources): [[Quksace agjke]]: quksace agjke is a term in ancient Chinese. quksace means quick and agjke means aggies. Back to 1902, students from Texas AM University visit in China. Spam script: welcome! the article you recently created, [[Quksace agjke]], was considered unhelpful, and has been deleted. Please do not spam Wikipedia. Read the following [long detailed policy pages pages] to learn how to edit, and how to create your new article. Newbie encourager; very funny. please keep the bad jokes in your userspace ;) there are actually a bunch of Aggie articles that need work [link to category]. you might want to add some [userboxes] to your page to indicate where you are from. also: welcome! [link to a quick newbie's guide] [[Mama Wiggles]]: Mama Wiggles is a noted showgirl and burlesque dancer mostly famous for her turn in the 2005, Saskatoon based stage-production of Moulin Rougue in which she played the character Fat Peggy. She also concurrently holds the record for eating the most poutine in one sitting (4,400 servings). Spam script; An article you created has been nominated for deletion. Please go there to discuss it. Newbie greeter: Moulin Rougue! Look out for the rougue admins, who are even now deleting poor Mama Wiggles. If you're from around Saskatoon, there's a WikiProject for your area [link] and some requests for articles and images... maybe you can get a photo of poutine featured on the main apge one day. Welcome :) [[Todd Marcus]]: Edison High School '92-'96 Irvine Strikers '94-'96 Westmont College '96-'00 Chicago Sockers '99 Southern California Seahorses '02-'03 Santa Barbara F.C. '96-'02 NPP: your article had no sources and did not indicate notability. BALEETED Greeter: Hi, who is Todd Marcus? You should list some of his achievements if you want to write an article about him; or just add him tothe roster of [[Santa Barbara F.C.]] (hmm, that article doesn't exist... is that the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos?) They do have their work cut out. :) Both greeters and quality-patrollers do :) Their work doesn't have to conflict. S. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Philippe Beaudette pbeaude...@wikimedia.org wrote: David Gerard wrote: Ban Twinkle? The tool seems to directly encourage problematic behaviour. In my opinion, this would be suboptimal. The truth is, that tool made my life easier when I was admin-ing on a regular basis. But perhaps cutting out particular problematic features wouldn't be a terrible idea. pb -- Philippe Beaudette Head of Reader Relations Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. phili...@wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l Suboptimal? Yes. This gets into a dirge... Automated tools like Twinkle, Huggle, Igloo, the now defunct VandalProof and RickK's tool serve useful purposes. It allows review through an interface and easy clicks to solve the issue at hand. Misuse comes when Wikipedia is viewed as the massive multi-player online role-playing game that anyone can edit, and speed, edit counts, and first to report to AIV or a noticeboard are psychologically construed as points toward building your character. What has been lost is instilling that there is no deadline, things can be removed, so take a moment to *check* what you're doing with these tools. For me, Lupin's tool is the only one I still use because it provides onwiki .js links to show edit, history, diff, rollback, undo, and warn options. With time to check these features, I'm usually too late and the rollback has been undertaken by one of the faster tools. However, this gives me the opportunity to review the use of them and in probably 15% of the cases undo what the patroller acted upon with far too much haste to get the rush of vandal fighting. On the flipside, with so many page views an edits exponentially increased since the first scripts rolled out over six years ago, such haste may make waste but it is quite impossible to scan all recent changes and be swift without such tools. Two edges to the sword. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Would it make sense to have a be nice session at Wikimania to share all
kinds of experiences and best practices around this topic?
Phoebe, you sound like the ultimate person to organize such a session (in
case you did not yet propose such) :)
Lodewijk
2011/2/22 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Renata St renataw...@gmail.com wrote:
This is to some degree a question of balance in approach.
Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get
started that really have no point or hope. Every day, new page
patrollers find (most) of those, and they go kerpoof. It would
largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them citation needed
talk to the new user. The user never had any intention of
contributing legitimately to an online information resource /
encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their
friend/school/work/favorite whatever.
We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large
these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're
an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.
That's what I though: There is too much garbage coming in, too few
admins
to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on
sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!
Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages evaluations this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve. I was shocked.
These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with
30
edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and
my
articles with endless variations of {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes
that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and
raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
This is a really interested (and lovely) experience.
I am curious, apropos of this discussion: how many people remember
their welcome message? Did it make you want to stick around?
I do mine, and it did; it was short and to the point and led me into a
little discussion about grammar with my welcomer. I was kind of a jerk
about it, but they (an editor who sadly left the project not long
after) were kind enough to walk me through best practice. Then later
someone else recommended a topic for me to work on, and pointed me to
Wiktionary. It was nice, and gave me the impression there were real,
quirky people behind the project. This was all pre-templates, to date
myself.
I know we've had this discussion many times before -- welcome messages
help, they don't help, they don't make any statistical difference when
it's measured. But I'm actually curious about people's anecdotal
experiences. Presumably if you made it to Foundation-l you did stick
around, after all :)
-- phoebe
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Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity of the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia. But what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing the participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc. We have to make a profound choice in the culture here: 1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority #1, content #2). So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is time we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will be creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best... Renata To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written. The only serious problems I got was when several trolls started to request a source on every word in two of my articles, and this had nothing to do with the quality of the articles, but with me being a sysop. So I believe the problem exists but is grossly exaggerated (though for someone who has to fight for the notability of his/her only article it may very well be the most serious and grave problem). Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 22 February 2011 14:14, Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru wrote: We have to make a profound choice in the culture here: 1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content priority #1, people #2), or 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority #1, content #2). So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is time we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will be creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the largest and the best... Renata To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written. I don't think it has to be as obviously annoying as slathering templates all over pages or wikilawyering the newbies away -- it's often much more subtle how content/data seems to be considered more important than people. One interaction I encountered recently is typical. Michiel Hendryckx, one of Belgium's best-known photographers, started uploading fairly high-resolution, good quality images to Wikipedia (well, Commons) on 3 July 2010. Stuff like this 1983 Chet Baker portrait: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chet675.jpg The first message on his talk page was a request to confirm his identity (which he did). The second message was a complaint by Nikbot (no valid license for one particular image). A couple of hours later, at 10:51 on 4 July, the next message is from CategorizationBot, asking Hendryckx to add categories to his images. The third message, not six hours later, was this: *Please categorize our images !!!* You already have been asked by a bot to categorize your images. Therefore I don't understand why you keep on uploading images without categories. Uploading images without categorizing them doesn't make sense. Only categorized images can be found! I'm pretty sure the user in question meant really well, but *this* is what that focusing on content over people means to me. It's in the small things, the interactions that experienced Wikipedians take in their stride, but that can end up scaring people away. It's like the last message on Hendryckx' talk page, dated 1 February 2011: a notification that one if this images is listed at commons:deletion requests, and to please do not take the deletion request personally... thank you!. Follow the link to the discussion ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istendael675.jpg): turns out the requester couldn't see the image. His/her first action was to nominate the image for deletion. Took about three hours for someone to confirm that no, the image works perfectly fine for them, and about five hours for the original person to close the deletion request (thanks). Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer, no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. The last interaction Hendryckx had on Commons -- on 19 February, almost three weeks after the deletion request was closed -- was a baffled question ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Deletion_requests/File:Van_istendael675.jpg), asking what on Earth is wrong with the image, and that he'd like to at least know why it needed to be deleted. Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too: content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions, don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the templates, etc. Michel Vuijlsteke ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Again: content over people. No personal interaction with the photographer, no message on the photographer's talk page after the deletion request was closed, nothing. Again, I'm sure the user in question meant really well again, but here too: content over people. Drive-by templating, shoot first, don't ask questions, don't even provide feedback, trust people will read every last word in the templates, etc. Precisely. Renata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 2:15 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Would it make sense to have a be nice session at Wikimania to share all kinds of experiences and best practices around this topic? Phoebe, you sound like the ultimate person to organize such a session (in case you did not yet propose such) :) Lodewijk Sounds like a great best practices session, if well organized (focused on techniques that worked, perhaps); I think we can all sit around and give examples of problems all day long, but I'd be interested in a Wikimania session in cross-wiki comparisons and ideas on what works best on a broad scale. I am usually pretty overworked, tired and cranky at Wikimania, though :) So perhaps I'm not the best person to run it! Someone should propose it if there's interest though. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 22 February 2011 12:02, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: IMO every single Wikimedia project would benefit from dedicated community effort to 1) catalog the most widely used templates on talk pages, 2) systematically improve them with an eye on the impact they can have on whether people feel their work is valued and the environment in which they're contributing is a positive and welcoming one. This is something that anyone can help with, right now. +1 :-) I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). So yes, I think efforts to make templates and bot notices friendlier would be time well spent. I also wonder if we do any templating that's meant to be purely encouraging good behaviour. Like, Your edits to [x] article were constructive and useful: thank you for helping Wikipedia, or You have just made your 100th edit: congratulations. That kind of thing. Does anyone know: do we do much of that? And if not, should we? Thanks, Sue ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 22 February 2011 21:38, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: +1 :-) I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). People see these templates and assume they're bot-created and nothing to do with humans. Which is pretty close, considering many are placed on pages using automated tools. The wording on almost all needs severe culling. [[m:Instruction creep]] was written in 2004 and remains largely unheeded in practice. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Instruction_creep - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On 22 February 2011 12:02, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: IMO every single Wikimedia project would benefit from dedicated community effort to 1) catalog the most widely used templates on talk pages, 2) systematically improve them with an eye on the impact they can have on whether people feel their work is valued and the environment in which they're contributing is a positive and welcoming one. This is something that anyone can help with, right now. +1 :-) on 2/22/11 4:38 PM, Sue Gardner at sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). So yes, I think efforts to make templates and bot notices friendlier would be time well spent. I also wonder if we do any templating that's meant to be purely encouraging good behaviour. Like, Your edits to [x] article were constructive and useful: thank you for helping Wikipedia, or You have just made your 100th edit: congratulations. That kind of thing. Does anyone know: do we do much of that? And if not, should we? I don't know whether or not it's done now, Sue, but it's a great idea! Marc Riddell ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Renata, I really loved this message of yours, and the reminder of how awesome PGDP is :-) On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:47 PM, Renata St renataw...@gmail.com wrote: We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it. I don't think they are advanced vandalism. I see them as the first step towards becoming a solid contributor. Anyone who doesn't intend to spam or vandalize, and has already done the hardest part -- learning that there is an edit button! -- is a community asset to be helped and supported. That's what I thought: There is too much garbage coming in, too few admins to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight! Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders ( http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages evaluations this is what you got right, this is what you should improve. I was shocked. These people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time, energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie who reviewed 30 book pages... We can learn a lot from them. We need significant, persistent attention to this problem; not simply a few social gatherings to talk about it at annual meetings. Some cross-project banner campaigns to promote being welcoming might help -- but first we need specific welcoming projects that could use the input of thousands of participants. Two places to start: 1. Make a few newbie-helping pages *really* friendly -- moderate how we use them, change local policy there, make them sources of joy and acknowledgement. Ask newbies mentored through those channels to give back time to help others there, after their first week. (this helps make it sustainable even if thousands of people show up there) 2. Set up a noticeboard to discuss hard problems involving supporting / biting newbies. A place to discuss improving New Page Patrol, improving and shortening template style used by major bots, improving bot friendliness and sensitivity. A place to review incidents needing attention by welcomers and supporters (to balance attention by vandalfighters) To address 1., I've started monitoring [[WP:EAR]] and [[WP:WQA]] (editor assistance requests, and wikiquette alerts) on en:wp, and encourage others to do the same (or to choose other newbie pages to watch). To address 2., I am drafting a noticeboard about editing and supporting editors, and welcome comments and contributions there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/EN In my mind, this noticeboard would be a place to discuss how to fix talk-templates, how to improve the guidelines for approving bots to make sure they are sufficiently friendly, c. It could also have a subboard for tracking 'incidents' to counterbalance pages like AN/I. Regards, SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Sue Gardner wrote: I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are purely malicious and another decent-sized percentage of which are completely clueless. Wikipedia's treatment of new users is a response to the fire hose of edits that come into the site. The only way to fight such a stream has been to develop quick or automated tools. Based on my numbers, the English Wikipedia gets about 4800 new users per day. While it'd be nice to be able to welcome every user individually, for example, it isn't practical on any large site. If you were going to do something more useful than welcoming users, you're talking about dealing with about 180,000 edits per day and an active user base of ... maybe 10,000 users? It might be nice to improve some of the language in welcoming templates and give personalized thank you messages for particularly good contributions, but with finite resources, there are much bigger issues that need focus and attention. (I'll side-step the issue of _why_ participation, as opposed to article quality, is viewed as so important by Wikimedia for now.) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are purely malicious and These we should handle in automated fashion. another decent-sized percentage of which are completely clueless. These people who love helping others should handle in script-assisted fashion. Wikipedia's treatment of new users is a response to the fire hose of edits that come into the site. The only way to fight such a stream has been to develop quick or automated tools. Based on my numbers, the English Wikipedia gets about 4800 new users per day. While it'd be nice to be able to welcome every user individually, for example, it isn't practical on any large site. This is a peculiar perspective. The # of potential welcomers scales with community size, along with the # of new users. The only question is what channels are in place to attract long-term contribution and collaboration, and what sorts of activities are amplified by good tools. Currently, we honor and respect page deletion, anti-vandalism, and user blocking, for two reasons. 1) there is a constant battle involved; it is one of the self v. other wars that shapes our group identity 2) we have created a group of 'special' users defined around access to those tools, so people who want to become admins spend time on that work; and people who do that work are confirmed as special and imbued with a halo of authority that (despite some claims that adminships should be no big deal) seeps into all aspects of policy and process-creation. If you were going to do something more useful than welcoming users, you're talking about dealing with about 180,000 edits per day and an active user base of ... maybe 10,000 users? To be clear: those 180,000 edits per day are the source of future active users. By rejecting them or dealing with them summarily we are simply committing ourselves to remaining at our current community flavor and size (if there is no channel for becoming a champion welcomer, people who like to socialize with and welcome others will never join the community) but with finite resources, there are much bigger issues that need focus and attention. The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting, but a red herring. 30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month. We can dream up any community structure we want, any combination of collaborative channels, any set of creative or repetitive, simple or complex tasks -- and find people interested in making that idea happen. We could be our own social network; we could ask people to participate in a local photography project like geograph.co.uk and cover dozens of countries in a matter of weeks; we could start randomly matching millions of readers with one another as knowledge-seeking penpals. Each of these would require designing appropriate channels and tools; naming the work we'd like to see; and welcoming people who do that. (I'll side-step the issue of _why_ participation, as opposed to article quality, is viewed as so important by Wikimedia for now.) We're far from covering 'the worlds knowledge' in any language, dramatically so in most languages, participation is dropping, and many of our best / most prolific current participants feel that it's unpleasant rather than rewarding to contribute. Whereas there is no known impact on article quality stemming from being more welcoming (aside from 'No September!' fear-mongering), and in fact history suggests that more and more diverse participants likely has a positive effect on overall quality despite the need to teach newbies how to be an effective contributor. SJ -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
I would estimate that we could reach a few thousand new people a day who are not editors, but would be glad to do something practical to help wikipedia. That's my mental baseline for how much support we could tap if we found a way to match each of those people to something they wanted to do. When we put out the call for contribution to the strategic planning process, we got a couple thousand people who were willing to go through quite an arduous process to help. We could easily get ten times that to do something more down-to-earth. It's important that a human listens and there is human interaction... it would be awesome to expand the ambassador program and have people to help out newbies more. I don't know how much capacity we have but definitely would like to see that. So I think this is a question of defining what is needed, more than capacity. If we put out a public call for 'newbie ambasadors', noting that experience with editing isn't needed but an interest in learning how others edit is, and asking people to help mentor new editors (you may not have anything to edit about, but we will pair you with someone who does and may be doing it wrong... help them figure out how!), I think we could easily draw in a thousand solid new helpers a month to a related program. The question might become one of giving them all something to do every week, so that they stay involved and interested. But then MZMcBride could provide them with a constant stream of clueless editors :) S. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:19 PM, Samuel Klein sjkl...@hcs.harvard.eduwrote: On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: If you were going to do something more useful than welcoming users, you're talking about dealing with about 180,000 edits per day and an active user base of ... maybe 10,000 users? To be clear: those 180,000 edits per day are the source of future active users. By rejecting them or dealing with them summarily we are simply committing ourselves to remaining at our current community flavor and size (if there is no channel for becoming a champion welcomer, people who like to socialize with and welcome others will never join the community) One aspect that bites particularly hard is the rapid speedy deletions of new articles. Yes, many are nonsense and should be deleted immediately. Some are more borderline, not obvious nonsense but have some major issue. What about having some staging area to put articles in that otherwise would go to speedy deletion? Maybe userfy pages or some other place for them? One possible way to do this is to require new users to make their first article, with use of the article creation wizard (or similar tool) and have the pages go into a review queue like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Submissions Once they get one approved here, then automatically give them permission to directly create articles. Still, keep the wizard somewhere handy for newbies if they want if for their second, third, ... article. One aspect, not that easy to find, of the article creation wizard is there is a live chat feature where you can ask questions and get help. It's a wonderful feature and the people in the channel are very helpful. (but we would need more helpers there, if we were to scale this up) I suggest we look at refining the article creation wizard and chat tools, and evaluate ways to better incorporate into the experience for new users. Cheers, Katie (aude) SJ -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Samuel Klein wrote: On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are purely malicious and These we should handle in automated fashion. another decent-sized percentage of which are completely clueless. These people who love helping others should handle in script-assisted fashion. [...] but with finite resources, there are much bigger issues that need focus and attention. The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting, but a red herring. Really, it's a red herring? You're talking about making automated anti-vandalism tools and implementing script-assisted tools for clueless users. Who do you think writes those tools? While there's a sizeable volunteer development base surrounding MediaWiki, most large tech projects (AbuseFilter, LiquidThreads, UploadWizard, ResourceLoader, etc.) require paid developers, of which there are precious few. Even high priority projects can and do quickly get placed on the backburner (inquire about LiquidThreads development sometime), so it's not so much a red herring as it is the reality, as I see it. If you have contrary evidence, I'd be very interested to read it. While it's often overlooked, MediaWiki is the current bedrock of all Wikimedia wikis and it clearly does not have an abundance of resources. Wikimedia has a small budget; what isn't spent on outreach, fundraising, and non-tech staff gets allocated to the tech side. With this in mind, I'll stand by my statements that there is a finite amount of resources and that it's wasteful to be devoting time and energy on the very low-hanging fruit like the text of welcome templates. 30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month. We can dream up any community structure we want, any combination of collaborative channels, any set of creative or repetitive, simple or complex tasks -- and find people interested in making that idea happen. We could be our own social network; we could ask people to participate in a local photography project like geograph.co.uk and cover dozens of countries in a matter of weeks; we could start randomly matching millions of readers with one another as knowledge-seeking penpals. Visits, but how many of those people contribute? 100,000 active users out of 400,000,000 million views per month? Is that about right? You're talking about .025% of visitors in this community you're dreaming up. Making bold claims like 30% of the entire Internet is great for Wikipedia advertising, but drawing conclusions such as we can make any community we want with so many people! is rather silly. Each of these would require designing appropriate channels and tools; naming the work we'd like to see; and welcoming people who do that. More channels and tools? Sounds like more development work. Do you some secret store of developers? :-) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely. what should we ask for first? == Herring talk == On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:50 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting, but a red herring. Really, it's a red herring? Red herrings are real, but only seem to be related to the problem being solved. When discussing how to remove barriers to participation, a premature limiting of what we consider based on currently-identified resources is a (common) red herring. Depending on context, the investment of energy into removing barriers to entry may net additional community resources. Or it may leave total 'available' community resources the same, while expanding the community or changing its balance. == Tech talk == You're talking about making automated anti-vandalism tools and implementing script-assisted tools for clueless users. Who do you think writes those tools? While there's a sizeable volunteer development base surrounding MediaWiki, most large tech projects (AbuseFilter, LiquidThreads, UploadWizard, ResourceLoader, etc.) I love these large projects. but the ones that make the most difference to newbies and contributors (AWB, Twinkle, pywb) are often 'small' or bootstrapping projects. require paid developers, of which there are precious few. There's a shortage of core developers. There are quite a lot of PHP developers who have built some sort of MediaWiki extension, or otherwise hacked on it to make their own fork, however. We have some opportunities here to recruit more of them as well -- some way of encouraging each downloader to get involved, or one-click sharing of their local hacks with a global community? I'm not sure; but this is certainly another case of how can we embrace people who take the first step to join us worth solving. While it's often overlooked, MediaWiki is the current bedrock of all Wikimedia wikis and it clearly does not have an abundance of resources. A projects-wide campaign to improve mediawiki or attract new technical contributors would also be a fine idea. == Grep talk == 30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month. We can dream Visits, but how many of those people contribute? 100,000 active users out of 400,000,000 million views per month? Is that about right? This is my point: a significant portion of our readers would be glad to help Wikipedia, but don't know how. (possibly half of all readers never see an 'edit' tab, thanks to semi-protection. many edit anonymously. roughly 10,000 new editors start editing en:wp each month [over 1/4 the total active population!], but most quickly leave, never even reaching the 10 edits threshhold for autoconfirmation on en:wp) If we create a clear way to help -- for instance, by inviting people who don't themselves feel they have anything to write to help others learn how to write effectively -- we will start drawing on a pool of actively interested users who are not editors but have time and expertise to share. Making bold claims like 30% of the entire Internet is great for Wikipedia advertising Is it good for advertising? (advertising what?) I'm simply pointing out what a large, diverse readership means for our capacity to attract involvement from groups with targeted combinations of interest, talent, and availability. More channels and tools? Sounds like more development work. Do you some secret store of developers? :-) Often a 'channel' is nothing more than the definition of a project, a wiki space for trying something new, and a social guideline for what a group should be doing... a 'tool' can be nothing more than a new template and a few modified bots. We should perhaps be training another few hundred editors to maintain and use bots and client-side scripts (this may be a good channel to work on; anyone who'se made a thousand edits should get a basic tutorial in this to help them make routine tasks easier), but I don't see this as a bottleneck yet. S ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Samuel Klein wrote: tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely. Hmm, prove it. :-) You talk a good game and I'm not sure you're wrong, but I haven't seen much to suggest that you're right. There was a contribution campaign following the most recent fundraiser. It was a campaign that was specifically designed to get people involved in editing (in combination with the English Wikipedia's tenth anniversary). Do you have any idea if that had a measurable impact? It's essentially what you're talking about, as far as I can tell. Which is to say, there may already be preliminary evidence that can prove or disprove this theory of yours regarding the ask and receive culture that you suggest exists. what should we ask for first? Assuming that it's possible to simply ask people to get more involved and receive willing, competent volunteers, I think you'd want to start by making editing less painful, if the goal is to build (better) free content. Editing sucks currently, for a lot of reasons. So you'd need developers who can work on solutions to make it suck less. From that, better content and contributors flow. Somewhat tangential to this, Wikimedia needs a tighter focus. It's been quite obvious for the past few years that Wikipedia is the Wikimedia Foundation's primary focus. This is reflected in the way in which Wikimedia generally presents itself nowadays; this was reflected in the Wikipedia Foundation fundraising materials; it's reflected in many other places as well. I think it's unfair to the other projects to continue stringing them along, pretending as though one day they'll get the attention they desperately need to grow. Wikimedia needs to refine what it actually wants to be. Rather than trying to do many things and ending up doing none of them well, Wikimedia should focus on doing a few things very well. Making bold claims like 30% of the entire Internet is great for Wikipedia advertising Is it good for advertising? (advertising what?) I'm not sure if you noticed, but a lot of the Wikimedia Foundation's work has been trying to build the Wikipedia brand. :-) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
This is to some degree a question of balance in approach.
Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get
started that really have no point or hope. Every day, new page
patrollers find (most) of those, and they go kerpoof. It would
largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them citation needed
talk to the new user. The user never had any intention of
contributing legitimately to an online information resource /
encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their
friend/school/work/favorite whatever.
We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large
these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're
an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.
That's what I though: There is too much garbage coming in, too few admins
to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on
sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!
Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages evaluations this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve. I was shocked. These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with 30
edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and my
articles with endless variations of {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their
articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity of
the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia. But
what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing the
participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or
2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority #1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will
inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the
largest and the best...
Renata
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Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Renata St renataw...@gmail.com wrote:
This is to some degree a question of balance in approach.
Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get
started that really have no point or hope. Every day, new page
patrollers find (most) of those, and they go kerpoof. It would
largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them citation needed
talk to the new user. The user never had any intention of
contributing legitimately to an online information resource /
encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their
friend/school/work/favorite whatever.
We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large
these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're
an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.
That's what I though: There is too much garbage coming in, too few admins
to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on
sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!
Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages evaluations this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve. I was shocked. These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with 30
edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and my
articles with endless variations of {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
This is a really interested (and lovely) experience.
I am curious, apropos of this discussion: how many people remember
their welcome message? Did it make you want to stick around?
I do mine, and it did; it was short and to the point and led me into a
little discussion about grammar with my welcomer. I was kind of a jerk
about it, but they (an editor who sadly left the project not long
after) were kind enough to walk me through best practice. Then later
someone else recommended a topic for me to work on, and pointed me to
Wiktionary. It was nice, and gave me the impression there were real,
quirky people behind the project. This was all pre-templates, to date
myself.
I know we've had this discussion many times before -- welcome messages
help, they don't help, they don't make any statistical difference when
it's measured. But I'm actually curious about people's anecdotal
experiences. Presumably if you made it to Foundation-l you did stick
around, after all :)
-- phoebe
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