Nice, thought-provoking post, Pine. Here's my take on two ways to attract a population of good-faith contributors 1 or 2 orders of magnitude larger than the current one, based on what I've seen over the last couple of years:
*Gamified interfaces for microcontributions à la Wikidata game*. (per GerardM) there's absolutely no doubt this model is effective at creating a large volume of high-quality edits, and value to the project and communities. So far these tools have been primarily targeted at an existing (and relatively small) population of core contributors and the only attempt at expanding this to a much broader contributor base (WikiGrok) were too premature. I do expect we will see more and more of lightweight distributed curation in the next 5-10 years. In my opinion Wikidata is ready to experiment with a much larger number of single-purpose contributory interfaces (around missing images, translations, label evaluation, referencing etc) *Ubiquitous outreach, supported by dedicated technology*. I called out in my Wikimania 2014 talk <http://www.slideshare.net/dartar/wikimania-2014-the-missing-wikipedia-ads> the fact that the single, most effective initiative ever run to attract new contributors has been WLM (I am intentionally not including initiatives like WP in the classroom as they target a pre-defined population such as students, but they are probably the most advanced example in this category). Creating tools such as recommender systems and todo lists *tailored to the interests of particular, intrinsically motivated contributors* as well as the analytics dashboards <http://tools.wmflabs.org/hashtags/> to measure the relative impact and best design of these programs, is the most promising venue to expand the Wikimedia contributor population. My 2 cents. How making the edit button 10x larger is not a solution to this problem is a topic I'll reserve to a separate thread. Thanks for starting this thread. Dario On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 5:32 AM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thur...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < > amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > >> The English Wikipedia alone has hundreds of thousands of items to fix - >> missing references, misspellings, etc. The problems are nicely sorted at >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_backlog . There are >> millions of other things to fix in other projects. So quality is getting >> higher in many ways, but the amount of stuff to fix is still enormous. >> >> What we don't have is an easy way for new people to start eliminating >> items from the backlogs. The Wikidata games are a nice step in the right >> direction, but their appeal to new participants is non-existent. >> > > there is a backlog? after 15 years contributing you tell that on the > research mailing list :) i used wikidata games for a couple of minutes and > great pleasure when i see the link flying by in an email. but i am never > able to find that link again in my life. maybe that is the problem? rename > the "donate" link to "contribute" and then have "money" and "time" which > links to code and content. just my 2c ... > > rupert > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > > -- *Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter <http://twitter.com/readermeter>
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