[Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

[Samuel Klein]

I agree that we need to recover from overly strict policies, treating
newbies the same way we treat veteran editors, and a sense that there's no
downside to quick deletion or aggressive "OBEY <cite>" messages.


To general ease of use:

Sue writes:
> Basically, there are a lot of people who would like to contribute to
Wikipedia, but who find us impenetrable.

I've been working with swahili-speaking students over the past week
introducing them to Wikipedia (as part of an article-writing contest sw:wp
is running this winter).  They're net-savvy, many maintain a blog, but
they're not geeks.  And they tend to be totally baffled by the Wikipedia
editing process, from finding the 'edit' tab to adding sections or images to
grasping the lifecycle of an article.  That has significantly changed my
impression of the current barrier to entry for using MediaWiki.

Cunctation writes:
> One essential problem is that once Wikipedia embraced the multipage
> multimedia-heavy Encarta style as what makes for a "good" article --
without
> a radical improvement in the editing technology -- the ease of editing has
> fallen drastically.

Well put.  *With* a radical improvement in editing technology (some other
tools out there do a fairly good job at being friendly while offering
sections, tables, media insertion, and even sidebars) this could make it uch
easier for people to create pages they are proud of, which would make it
easier to become a dedicated editor.

> Basically all of the policy trends -- agglomeration, deletionism,
hierarchy,
> protection, bureaucratization -- guarantee the decline of the Wikipedia
> community, if not the website itself.

Not all of them.  There are also trends towards WikiProject and Portal
growth, article assessment, categories, stub classification, infobox and
navigation template standardization, and wikibot scripts and frameworks.
These have all enhance the cohesion of the project, and supported the growth
of meaningful subcommunities that are comfortable working in their own
world.  They have improved the experience of browsing the site tremendously,
even as editing has become only more difficult.

We need to learn from our successes, and remedy our missteps -- being
focusing pessimistically on the latter is neither balanced nor helpful.

SJ


On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Sue Gardner <susanpgardner at gmail.com>wrote:

> I agree with you, David.
>
> The usability work is a necessary precondition to bringing in new editors.
> It's essential for us to remove obvious, simple usability barriers that are
> impeding people who want to help.
>
> But it's not the whole story, and I suspect that social barriers to
> participation will in the end prove much more difficult to overcome,
> compared with technical barriers.
>
>
> We know that new people's edits are increasingly reverted. Sometimes the
> reversions come without explanation; other times, they are explained curtly,
> unkindly, or using language (eg in templates) that newcomers don't
> understand.  The net effect is that new people end up discouraged, and they
> don't stay.
>
> In order to bring in and retain new editors, we need to make it possible
> for people to edit productively, without needing to develop deep expertise
> in our policies and practices.  Frank Schulenburg's "bookshelf" project will
> create a series of orientation materials for new people: that will help
> some. But there is lots of other work that needs to happen, in my opinion:
> we need to encourage friendliness, we need to make the editing experience
> more supportive and enjoyable for everyone (not just new people), and we
> need to simplify policies and practices to make it easier for new people to
> engage easily and usefully.
>
> People who want to help do some of this work should engage on the strategy
> wiki: there's a task force focused on community health that will be looking
> at these issues.  I can't post the URL (I'm on my Blackberry and between
> meetings) -- but if nobody posts it within the next few hours, I'll do it
> once I'm back at my laptop.
>
> Thanks,
> Sue
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Moran <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:28:24
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List<foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia
>
> Getting back to the content of the article: I get that inclusionism vs
> deletionism is a tired way to talk about divisions between camps of
> editors,
> and that everyone rolls their eyes when you start talking about it, but
> yeah, it's real.  Every single person I know who was once a producing
> contributor but who has now left the project (including me these days,
> functionally--my monthly edit numbers have gone from quadruple to single
> digits) did so because of having the same kind of arguments with the same
> people over and over again about what deserved to be in the encyclopedia.
> Which is anecdotal and statistically insignificant, I know.  But it is
> undeniable that Wikipedia, as a system, encourages (by its relative ease vs
> the alternatives) the removal of content, rather than the creation of good
> content, or the polishing of bad or mediocre content, the latter of which
> is
> a dreary chore.  To an extent, the destruction of content is as healthy and
> vitally necessary a part of the Wikipedia ecosystem as its reverse.
>
> I think a lot of attention is paid to the way the technical interface is
> hostile to newbies, and making that more user-friendly and democratic is
> certainly a concern that needs to be addressed.  But I think the tendency
> of
> older users, or certain editorially minded users, to squat on the project
> and bludgeon newer users with policy pages rolled up into sticks is just as
> much if not more responsible for driving away the new users we need to
> replenish our ranks.
>
> FMF
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > So the content of the WSJ article may be behind a paywall, but I just did
> a
> > cursory search of the researcher's 2009 Ph.D. thesis which was a
> > quantitative
> > analysis <http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis> of Wikipedia
> in
> > several languages.
> >
> > I didn't see any of the graphs from the piece or any conclusions in the
> > thesis which are equivalent to the statements made in the Journal, so
> this
> > must be new research.
> >
> > Steven
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net
> > >wrote:
> >
> > > Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > > > books are available for years the copy of
> > > > the day may be available in a library, but how about last years copy
> of
> > > the
> > > > WSJ ? Do you really think the WSJ can be found in every USA library
> ??
> > > >
> > > I don't know about "every" library, but libraries are about more than
> > > just books, and librarians are not unaware of the wonders of databases
> > > in our modern digital age. For those of us that use libraries, I
> > > encourage you to familiarize yourselves with the collections your
> > > library may be able to provide access to online. I've certainly relied
> > > on my library privileges for such sources many times in the course of
> > > editing Wikipedia, particularly news archives (including the Wall
> Street
> > > Journal).
> > >
> > > --Michael Snow
> > >
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