Niklas puts it well. Analogously, in sports like baseball there are lots of statistics about players, coaches, teams, divisions, and leagues. Awards are given based strictly on quantities, as well as more subjectively on qualities for recognitions such as Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player.
Wikimedia technical development is a team sport, and that unlike on the content side of Wikipedia where there can be rival views, I think that on technical matters almost everyone collaborates toward compatible goals. I've been thinking about how to ensure that *quality* is valued alongside *quantity*. We struggle do this balance well in the US health care system when we evaluate hospitals and doctors, and WMF stuggles to do this well when the Community Resources and Evaluation teams evaluate grant proposals and the performance of Wikimedia affiliates. I'm very interested in ideas about how to estimate the quality of contributions (including code review!) as well as the quantity of contributions. Pine On Apr 4, 2016 08:22, "Niklas Laxström" <niklas.laxst...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2016-04-04 17:02 GMT+03:00 Quim Gil <q...@wikimedia.org>: > > The first question to answer is what information are you looking for when > > you want to measure developers' "productivity". What would be the > > motivation of that estimation? What is the motivation behind this thread? > > One reason comes to me mind. My gut feeling is that we are not very > good at consistently giving recognition for technical work. One > possible reason is that we do not have clear and understandable > metrics or promote those metrics enough. Nor am I aware of any process > for awards and celebration (The Academy Awards would be an example in > another context, also Wikipedian of the year). > > As an example, I recall vaguely that during the Bugzilla times we used > to have regular emails on wikitech-l with list of people who closed > most bugs. > > Having some metrics for different activities could stir up some > healthy competition (also unhealthy if we are not careful) and of > course there is a lot of important work that is not visible from the > numbers only. > > I am not expert on this subject, but I think developers (especially > volunteers, but also others) are more likely to stick around if they > feel that their work is recognized and appreciated. For the latter we > already know that we should improve our code review process. > > -Niklas > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
