On 29/12/10 18:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote: > I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber > kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. > > But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. > > Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you > are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be > paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: > > 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on > your content. > > 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But > make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match.
This has been done before: Wikinfo, Citizendium, etc. > 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of > super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. This is basically Wikia's business model. I think you need to think outside the box. I would make it more like World of Warcraft. We should incentivise people to set up wiki sweatshops in Indonesia, paying local people to "grind" all day, cleaning up articles, in order to build up a level 10 admin character that can then be sold for thousands of dollars on the open market. Also it should have cool graphics. OK, if you want a real answer: I think if you could convince admins to be nicer to people, then that would make a bigger impact to Wikipedia's long-term viability than any ease-of-editing feature. Making editing easier will give you a one-off jump in editing statistics, it won't address the trend. We know from interviews and departure messages that the editing interface creates an initial barrier for entry, but for people who get past that barrier, various social factors, such as incivility and bureaucracy, limit the time they spend contributing. Once you burn someone out, they don't come back for a long time, maybe not ever. So you introduce a downwards trend which extends over decades, until the rate at which we burn people out meets the rate at which new editors are born. Active, established editors have a battlefront mentality. They feel as if they are fighting for the survival of Wikipedia against a constant stream of newbies who don't understand or don't care about our policies. As the stream of newbies increases, they become more desperate, and resort to more desperate (and less civil) measures for controlling the flood. Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our social problems, then we could burn out the majority of the Internet population before we figure out what's going on. Increasing the number of new editors by a large factor will increase the anxiety level of admins, and thus accelerate this process. I think there are things we can do in software to help de-escalate this conflict between established editors and new editors. One thing we can do is to reduce the sense of urgency. Further deployment of FlaggedRevs (pending changes) is the obvious way to do this. By hiding recent edits, admins can deal with bad edits in their own time, rather reacting in the heat of the moment. Another thing we could do is to improve the means of communication. Better communication often helps to de-escalate a conflict. We could replace the terrible user talk page interface with an easy-to-use real-time messaging framework. We could integrate polite template responses with the UI. And we could provide a centralised forum-like view of such messages, to encourage mediators to review and de-escalate emotion-charged conversations. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
