On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling <[email protected]> wrote:
> It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An > arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members > funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long > way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when > their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), > others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake. I do agree that better mechanisms for dispute resolution, dealing with topic warring, article ownership, and plain old incivility are needed. But I don't believe that those issues are at the heart of the "editor retention problem" as you seem to suggest, but rather, that they tend to occur later in the editor lifecycle, among a subset of editors which in fact already has survived many of the primary factors that deter new editors and are therefore relatively likely to retain. The new editor experience is characterized more by templating and assembly line style enforcement of existing policies than it is by incivility, topic warring, article ownership and incivility. I'm wondering whether the key findings in Halfaker's recent "rise and decline" paper resonate with you: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/ Existing data like the above supports strongly the notion that well-intentioned, good faith contributors are much more heavily discouraged in 2012 than they were in 2004 or 2005, but this can be explained in significant part with the influx of bad faith contributors that have necessitated increasingly heavy handed ways to control against bad edits (Huggle, Twinkle, AbuseFilter, etc.) -- which catch good faith editors in the crossfire -- as well as increasing expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality edit / page creation. In an environment where most folks who show up want to help, it's easy to be welcoming and supportive of new contributors. As Wikipedia had to deal with more and more spammers, crackpots and assholes, while simultaneously being more and more scrutinized in terms of quality and reliability, new users have increasingly been seen as "guilty until proven innocent" and are dealt not so much in a deliberately uncivil, but more in an assembly line robotic fashion that's highly discouraging. Templating with standard messages, no matter how friendly, is much more common than explicit incivility toward a new user and lack of any form of personal encouragement or gratitude. If that is correct, then the answer -- at least for very new users -- isn't first and foremost a more "disciplined" enforcement of existing policies. Rather, new editors are simply treated in a manner that's discouraging more than it is encouraging, without that treatment being in violation of any policy -- indeed, with various policies in fact calling for precisely such discouraging actions to be taken in order to preserve quality, to enforce notability and sourcing policies, etc. The answer, then, is to find ways to make the new user experience more encouraging and pleasurable, such as: * simplifying the interface so that we can at least get rid of technical reasons that lead to early edits being unsuccessful and reverted (Visual Editor, talk page replacement, notifications, etc.); * making it easy to find things to do that are relatively low-risk (something the E3 team is experimenting with right now) so that new editors can have a more ladder-like experience of becoming good contributors; * guiding the new user in a clear and instructive manner, and pointing them to places where they can get help from another human being (cf. Teahouse) More disruptive technical solutions could include: * safer alternative work/collaboration spaces that don't suffer from the contention issues of the main article space (sandboxes on steroids) * easier ways for new users to re-do an edit that has been reverted (cf. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Improve_your_edit ) * real-time mechanisms for coaching, collaboration (chat, real-time collaborative editing) and mentor matchmaking More disruptive policy-level changes would include rethinking some of the more problematic quality-related policies, especially notability. That's not to say that we should ignore the deeper social issues that arise in maintaining a universal encyclopedia in a radically open manner (and indeed, the community has learned, evolved and continually improved its ways of dealing with those issues). But most new users give up well before encountering those issues. When new editors complain about Wikipedia being mean, they complain more often about reverts, templating, deletion nominations, etc. -- none of which are in fact inherently "uncivil" according to Wikipedia's own policies, but rather part of its overzealous immune system. In other words, rudeness is in the eye of the beholder. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
