Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Jan Dittrich]

That looks very interesting!

Happy to already see Wikidata in the list which, I think, lends itself well
to small contributions. I'd be happy to exchange about easier contribution
possibilities there.

I also CCed Lydia, Wikidata's Project Manager.

Jan

2016-08-30 20:21 GMT+02:00 Dario Taraborelli :

> Forwarding a wikitech-l note from Moushira (cc'ed) and the WMF reading
> team, relevant to the discussion on microcontributions.
>
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I am writing to share with you an effort from the Android team to start 
> identifying
> themes of products
>  [0] that
> would allow readers to create micro-contributions that are welcomed and
> actually needed by fellow Wikipedia editors.
>
> The team has already identified 18 ideas as examples of tasks readers can
> do to help editors, we would like to expand the conversation to help us
> evaluate the importance of the idea*s*.  While thinking, the team already
> had criteria for evaluating the ideas
> ,
> but this is still missing community input on how ideas are evaluated and
> what would actually get high votes for being something that matters, in
> order for the team to start working on.Please feel encouraged to add
> more ideas and adjust criteria for evaluation if needed.
>
> This work is a continuation of the reading consultation
>  earlier
> done in April. The team is excited to continue the conversation early with
> the community in order to define product themes.
>
> Ideas promoted from this conversation will be designed in Android first,
> given the consideration of lower traffic and relative ease of
> implementation, but the team will be excited and watching for lessons
> learned in order to move ideas to the web.
>
> This work is made possible by Jon Katz, Reading team's senior PM, and
> Dmitry Brant, the product owner of Android.  Thanks for their thoughtful
> and collaborative approach".
>
> We will allow the conversation to run for a month, after which we can
> already start exploring ideas for implementation in Q3.  Please help
> spread the word across village pumps.
>
>
> Looking forward to your input --
>
>
> Best,
> Moushira
> Community Liaison for Reading team
>
> [0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_contributions
> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_
> contributions/Reading_team_thoughts
> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Interaction_Consultation
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi Bob,
>> Wikipedia is not English Wikipedia. It has its own problems and it could
>> do better as well. The point of a marketing approach is not only in
>> reaching more editors. Having people help with more content for instance
>> with micro tasks is achievable. The point must be that the work done makes
>> a difference. It is not something we have ever shown that  individual work
>> makes a difference even though we could do this. We could produce lists of
>> articles waiting to be written in domains. They could be our red links,
>> they could be the articles that exist in other Wikipedias. They could even
>> be items in Wikidata.
>>
>> The biggest point of our projects is not our contributors, it is what
>> they produce. What we could do is make sure is that this is easier
>> available. Has a better user experience. Take Commons or Wikisource I do
>> not use it because I do not know what to find and in what state I will find
>> it. This has technical issues but the main thing is that our audience is
>> hardly what we are interested in.
>>
>> In them days I asked loudly for Commons but I find it impossible to find
>> material for my blog so I gave up on Commons. I have done a lot of work on
>> Wiktionary but I found that there was too much repetition so I started
>> OmegaWiki and hoped for the WMF to adopt it.  Wikidata has much promise and
>> it could do a lot of good but that is where I am at the moment.
>>
>> With proper marketing we will improve the user experience for our
>> audience, they may cooperate in micro tasks and, we will as a consequence
>> grow an interest by some to edit text. They could stay if we do a better
>> job of maintaining a friendly space. That is not marketing not technology
>> but it is necessary. We are at a state where we have a technology that more
>> or less works for most editors in the bigger projects.
>> Thanks,
>>   GerardM
>>
>> On 28 August 2016 at 21:26, Bob Kosovsky  wrote:
>>
>>> I've been active with Wikipedia since 2006. My impression (which
>>> corresponds with data) is that 2008 was the year with the highest number of
>>> editors on English Wikipedia. While it may sound good on paper, in some
>>> ways it was a mess because of the frequency 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Dario Taraborelli]

Forwarding a wikitech-l note from Moushira (cc'ed) and the WMF reading
team, relevant to the discussion on microcontributions.

Hello Everyone,

I am writing to share with you an effort from the Android team to
start identifying
themes of products
 [0] that
would allow readers to create micro-contributions that are welcomed and
actually needed by fellow Wikipedia editors.

The team has already identified 18 ideas as examples of tasks readers can
do to help editors, we would like to expand the conversation to help us
evaluate the importance of the idea*s*.  While thinking, the team already
had criteria for evaluating the ideas
,
but this is still missing community input on how ideas are evaluated and
what would actually get high votes for being something that matters, in
order for the team to start working on.Please feel encouraged to add
more ideas and adjust criteria for evaluation if needed.

This work is a continuation of the reading consultation
 earlier done
in April. The team is excited to continue the conversation early with the
community in order to define product themes.

Ideas promoted from this conversation will be designed in Android first,
given the consideration of lower traffic and relative ease of
implementation, but the team will be excited and watching for lessons
learned in order to move ideas to the web.

This work is made possible by Jon Katz, Reading team's senior PM, and
Dmitry Brant, the product owner of Android.  Thanks for their thoughtful
and collaborative approach".

We will allow the conversation to run for a month, after which we can
already start exploring ideas for implementation in Q3.  Please help spread
the word across village pumps.


Looking forward to your input --


Best,
Moushira
Community Liaison for Reading team

[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_contributions
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Readers_contributions
/Reading_team_thoughts
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Interaction_Consultation




On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Gerard Meijssen  wrote:

> Hoi Bob,
> Wikipedia is not English Wikipedia. It has its own problems and it could
> do better as well. The point of a marketing approach is not only in
> reaching more editors. Having people help with more content for instance
> with micro tasks is achievable. The point must be that the work done makes
> a difference. It is not something we have ever shown that  individual work
> makes a difference even though we could do this. We could produce lists of
> articles waiting to be written in domains. They could be our red links,
> they could be the articles that exist in other Wikipedias. They could even
> be items in Wikidata.
>
> The biggest point of our projects is not our contributors, it is what they
> produce. What we could do is make sure is that this is easier available.
> Has a better user experience. Take Commons or Wikisource I do not use it
> because I do not know what to find and in what state I will find it. This
> has technical issues but the main thing is that our audience is hardly what
> we are interested in.
>
> In them days I asked loudly for Commons but I find it impossible to find
> material for my blog so I gave up on Commons. I have done a lot of work on
> Wiktionary but I found that there was too much repetition so I started
> OmegaWiki and hoped for the WMF to adopt it.  Wikidata has much promise and
> it could do a lot of good but that is where I am at the moment.
>
> With proper marketing we will improve the user experience for our
> audience, they may cooperate in micro tasks and, we will as a consequence
> grow an interest by some to edit text. They could stay if we do a better
> job of maintaining a friendly space. That is not marketing not technology
> but it is necessary. We are at a state where we have a technology that more
> or less works for most editors in the bigger projects.
> Thanks,
>   GerardM
>
> On 28 August 2016 at 21:26, Bob Kosovsky  wrote:
>
>> I've been active with Wikipedia since 2006. My impression (which
>> corresponds with data) is that 2008 was the year with the highest number of
>> editors on English Wikipedia. While it may sound good on paper, in some
>> ways it was a mess because of the frequency of vandalism. Nowadays I know
>> there are more automated techniques for detecting vandalism, but if you
>> want to increase the number of users just to make the stats look good,
>> you're going to get more dubious data into the encyclopedia as well as
>> frustration from editors who dislike spending their time on so much
>> maintenance (although I'm sure there are some editors who would jump at the
>> chance to make corrections all day).
>>
>> I suspected from the 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi Bob,
Wikipedia is not English Wikipedia. It has its own problems and it could do
better as well. The point of a marketing approach is not only in reaching
more editors. Having people help with more content for instance with micro
tasks is achievable. The point must be that the work done makes a
difference. It is not something we have ever shown that  individual work
makes a difference even though we could do this. We could produce lists of
articles waiting to be written in domains. They could be our red links,
they could be the articles that exist in other Wikipedias. They could even
be items in Wikidata.

The biggest point of our projects is not our contributors, it is what they
produce. What we could do is make sure is that this is easier available.
Has a better user experience. Take Commons or Wikisource I do not use it
because I do not know what to find and in what state I will find it. This
has technical issues but the main thing is that our audience is hardly what
we are interested in.

In them days I asked loudly for Commons but I find it impossible to find
material for my blog so I gave up on Commons. I have done a lot of work on
Wiktionary but I found that there was too much repetition so I started
OmegaWiki and hoped for the WMF to adopt it.  Wikidata has much promise and
it could do a lot of good but that is where I am at the moment.

With proper marketing we will improve the user experience for our audience,
they may cooperate in micro tasks and, we will as a consequence grow an
interest by some to edit text. They could stay if we do a better job of
maintaining a friendly space. That is not marketing not technology but it
is necessary. We are at a state where we have a technology that more or
less works for most editors in the bigger projects.
Thanks,
  GerardM

On 28 August 2016 at 21:26, Bob Kosovsky  wrote:

> I've been active with Wikipedia since 2006. My impression (which
> corresponds with data) is that 2008 was the year with the highest number of
> editors on English Wikipedia. While it may sound good on paper, in some
> ways it was a mess because of the frequency of vandalism. Nowadays I know
> there are more automated techniques for detecting vandalism, but if you
> want to increase the number of users just to make the stats look good,
> you're going to get more dubious data into the encyclopedia as well as
> frustration from editors who dislike spending their time on so much
> maintenance (although I'm sure there are some editors who would jump at the
> chance to make corrections all day).
>
> I suspected from the outset of Wikipedia's creation that the project would
> mirror the well-known "life cycle of email lists" as I've always believed
> Wikipedia is a "social encyclopedia."  I feel this well-known meme
> accurately reflect's Wikipedia's evolution so I repeat it here as a tool
> from which to learn:
>
> *1. Initial enthusiasm* (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot
> about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
>
> *2. Evangelism* (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list,
> and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
>
> *3. Growth* (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads
> develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).
>
> *4. Community* (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of
> information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as
> less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other;
> newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and
> expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and
> sharing opinions).
>
> *5. Discomfort with diversity* (the number of messages increases
> dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start
> complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if
> *other* people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2
> agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is
> wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads
> themselves; everyone gets annoyed).
>
> *6a. Smug complacency and stagnation* (the purists flame everyone who
> asks an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies
> are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor
> issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited
> to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously
> congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).
>
> *OR*
>
> *6b. Maturity* (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants
> stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many
> people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives
> contentedly ever after).
>
>
> I feel Wikipedia is at stage 6 (both a and b). Unless there's a
> significant change in functionality and design, 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I agree with pretty much all that Bob says here, except one important
point: This is probably correct for Wikipedia in English, and maybe a few
other very big languages.

A rarely remembered fact: most people don't know English.

In other languages there's much work to do in writing articles on math,
history, geography, medicine and what not (and dictionaries and textbooks
and public domain works), but a lot of potential people who would do it
fall into two categories:

1. People who know English and can read the English Wikipedia article and
don't notice that an article in their language is missing.
2. People who don't know English and can neither translate from the English
Wikipedia nor other English-only sources.

The upcoming Task List feature in Content Translation (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96147 ) will try to address this by
giving people a more convenient way to see the gaps and fill them, although
it will be only a technical tool, which cannot solve everything by itself.
As Bob notes, targeted outreach to experts will be needed as well.

בתאריך 28 באוג׳ 2016 22:27,‏ "Bob Kosovsky"  כתב:

I've been active with Wikipedia since 2006. My impression (which
corresponds with data) is that 2008 was the year with the highest number of
editors on English Wikipedia. While it may sound good on paper, in some
ways it was a mess because of the frequency of vandalism. Nowadays I know
there are more automated techniques for detecting vandalism, but if you
want to increase the number of users just to make the stats look good,
you're going to get more dubious data into the encyclopedia as well as
frustration from editors who dislike spending their time on so much
maintenance (although I'm sure there are some editors who would jump at the
chance to make corrections all day).

I suspected from the outset of Wikipedia's creation that the project would
mirror the well-known "life cycle of email lists" as I've always believed
Wikipedia is a "social encyclopedia."  I feel this well-known meme
accurately reflect's Wikipedia's evolution so I repeat it here as a tool
from which to learn:

*1. Initial enthusiasm* (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about
how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).

*2. Evangelism* (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list,
and brainstorm recruitment strategies).

*3. Growth* (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads
develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).

*4. Community* (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of
information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as
less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other;
newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and
expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and
sharing opinions).

*5. Discomfort with diversity* (the number of messages increases
dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start
complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if
*other* people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2
agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is
wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads
themselves; everyone gets annoyed).

*6a. Smug complacency and stagnation* (the purists flame everyone who asks
an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are
rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues;
all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a
few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously
congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).

*OR*

*6b. Maturity* (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants
stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many
people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives
contentedly ever after).


I feel Wikipedia is at stage 6 (both a and b). Unless there's a significant
change in functionality and design, the days of 2008 will never return, and
we should stop bothering to think it's possible to replicate them (because
their existence was due to the novelty of the project).

Instead, I think Wikimedia projects should cultivate those individuals with
specialized knowledge.  A lot of these people are in specialized
communities (for example educators, medical professionals,
researchers/scholars, devoted amateurs).  These are communities which
formerly looked down on Wikipedia but now are reconsidering their formerly
negative opinions of the encyclopedia. I feel the as-yet small successes in
the medical and GLAM communities (I am sure there are others) show great
promise. Being part of the GLAM community, I know there are outreach
efforts underway to others within that community. Being part of WM NYC, I
know there's a lot of librarians 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Bob Kosovsky]

I've been active with Wikipedia since 2006. My impression (which
corresponds with data) is that 2008 was the year with the highest number of
editors on English Wikipedia. While it may sound good on paper, in some
ways it was a mess because of the frequency of vandalism. Nowadays I know
there are more automated techniques for detecting vandalism, but if you
want to increase the number of users just to make the stats look good,
you're going to get more dubious data into the encyclopedia as well as
frustration from editors who dislike spending their time on so much
maintenance (although I'm sure there are some editors who would jump at the
chance to make corrections all day).

I suspected from the outset of Wikipedia's creation that the project would
mirror the well-known "life cycle of email lists" as I've always believed
Wikipedia is a "social encyclopedia."  I feel this well-known meme
accurately reflect's Wikipedia's evolution so I repeat it here as a tool
from which to learn:

*1. Initial enthusiasm* (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about
how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).

*2. Evangelism* (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list,
and brainstorm recruitment strategies).

*3. Growth* (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads
develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).

*4. Community* (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of
information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as
less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other;
newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and
expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and
sharing opinions).

*5. Discomfort with diversity* (the number of messages increases
dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start
complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if
*other* people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2
agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is
wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads
themselves; everyone gets annoyed).

*6a. Smug complacency and stagnation* (the purists flame everyone who asks
an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are
rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues;
all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a
few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously
congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).

*OR*

*6b. Maturity* (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants
stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many
people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives
contentedly ever after).


I feel Wikipedia is at stage 6 (both a and b). Unless there's a significant
change in functionality and design, the days of 2008 will never return, and
we should stop bothering to think it's possible to replicate them (because
their existence was due to the novelty of the project).

Instead, I think Wikimedia projects should cultivate those individuals with
specialized knowledge.  A lot of these people are in specialized
communities (for example educators, medical professionals,
researchers/scholars, devoted amateurs).  These are communities which
formerly looked down on Wikipedia but now are reconsidering their formerly
negative opinions of the encyclopedia. I feel the as-yet small successes in
the medical and GLAM communities (I am sure there are others) show great
promise. Being part of the GLAM community, I know there are outreach
efforts underway to others within that community. Being part of WM NYC, I
know there's a lot of librarians involved in chapter activities--and most
of those activities take place in libraries or museums (often museum
libraries).

Until this year, the WMF showed no real interest in continuous engagement
and dialogue with the community that edits the projects. I totally agree
with the person who said WMF needs to have a marketing department.  This is
especially true for the kinds of research which marketers report on and are
typical of any organization, profit or non-profit. That would be a first
step: Understanding who are the variety of its users/editors from which it
can then create action items to determine how it can increase the number of
users by going after specific market segments.  This would not eliminate
the "anyone can edit" ethos, but could be a more effective means to
increasing users rather than appealing to a broad public.

Bob



Bob Kosovsky, Ph.D. -- Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
blog:  http://www.nypl.org/blog/author/44   Twitter: @kos2
 Listowner: OPERA-L ; SMT-ANNOUNCE ; SoundForge-users
- My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Mark J . Nelson]

Ah if it's just semantics that's fine, as long as someone is actually
researching that part of it. :-) In my area (which is actually games
research), 'gamification' usually means something more specific,
although the definition keeps shifting admittedly. But more often the
trend of adopting explicitly 'game-mechanic' type elements such as
points, level progression, competition, etc. into non-game tasks, which
are seen as having a motivational quality (with somewhat mixed research
results, obscured by a whole mass of charalatan gamification consultants
pushing it). What you describe I'd associate more with concepts like
'microtasks', 'dashboards', and generally UX, which can be pared with
gamification but are a separate cluster of ideas.

Best,
Mark

Andre Engels  writes:

> That really depends on how you define 'gamification'. To me, the
> gamification is not the leaderboards, but exactly the elements you
> mention - the splitting of the whole into simple microtasks plus
> giving out those microtasks to users for a large part at random. In
> fact, I usually play the 'distributed' version of the wikidata game,
> and as far as I know there is no scoring or leaderboard there at all,
> but I would still say the whole is gamified.
>
> Andre Engels
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Mark J. Nelson  wrote:
>>
>> Dario Taraborelli  writes:
>>
>>> *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.
>>
>> I agree on these interfaces, but at least in my use of them, and that of
>> the other people I know who use them, the 'gamification' part is a red
>> herring and not why we use them: the important part is the interface and
>> its functionality. The confusing point/leaderboard system (which I never
>> check) isn't really a draw, but the tools are actually useful to do
>> things that are tedious otherwise, and at least somewhat enjoyable to
>> use. It's useful that it tries to find e.g. new articles that might
>> match an existing Wikidata topic but are unlinked, and presents
>> side-by-side information that helps quickly eliminate some false
>> positives, with a fast interface where you just press '1', '2', or '3'
>> on the keyboard to move on.
>>
>> So a different way of looking at this category is: interfaces to make
>> microcontributions non-tedious, and easy to curate in a
>> "dashboard-style" way. Those interfaces might or might not have some
>> gamification layer too, but I don't think that's the important part.
>>
>> Best,
>> Mark
>>
>> --
>> Mark J. Nelson
>> The MetaMakers Institute
>> Falmouth University
>> http://www.kmjn.org
>>
>> ___
>> Wiki-research-l mailing list
>> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l


-- 
Mark J. Nelson
The MetaMakers Institute
Falmouth University
http://www.kmjn.org

___
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Andre Engels]

That really depends on how you define 'gamification'. To me, the
gamification is not the leaderboards, but exactly the elements you
mention - the splitting of the whole into simple microtasks plus
giving out those microtasks to users for a large part at random. In
fact, I usually play the 'distributed' version of the wikidata game,
and as far as I know there is no scoring or leaderboard there at all,
but I would still say the whole is gamified.

Andre Engels


On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 1:12 PM, Mark J. Nelson  wrote:
>
> Dario Taraborelli  writes:
>
>> *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.
>
> I agree on these interfaces, but at least in my use of them, and that of
> the other people I know who use them, the 'gamification' part is a red
> herring and not why we use them: the important part is the interface and
> its functionality. The confusing point/leaderboard system (which I never
> check) isn't really a draw, but the tools are actually useful to do
> things that are tedious otherwise, and at least somewhat enjoyable to
> use. It's useful that it tries to find e.g. new articles that might
> match an existing Wikidata topic but are unlinked, and presents
> side-by-side information that helps quickly eliminate some false
> positives, with a fast interface where you just press '1', '2', or '3'
> on the keyboard to move on.
>
> So a different way of looking at this category is: interfaces to make
> microcontributions non-tedious, and easy to curate in a
> "dashboard-style" way. Those interfaces might or might not have some
> gamification layer too, but I don't think that's the important part.
>
> Best,
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark J. Nelson
> The MetaMakers Institute
> Falmouth University
> http://www.kmjn.org
>
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l



-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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Wiki-research-l mailing list
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Mark J . Nelson]

Dario Taraborelli  writes:

> *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.

I agree on these interfaces, but at least in my use of them, and that of
the other people I know who use them, the 'gamification' part is a red
herring and not why we use them: the important part is the interface and
its functionality. The confusing point/leaderboard system (which I never
check) isn't really a draw, but the tools are actually useful to do
things that are tedious otherwise, and at least somewhat enjoyable to
use. It's useful that it tries to find e.g. new articles that might
match an existing Wikidata topic but are unlinked, and presents
side-by-side information that helps quickly eliminate some false
positives, with a fast interface where you just press '1', '2', or '3'
on the keyboard to move on.

So a different way of looking at this category is: interfaces to make
microcontributions non-tedious, and easy to curate in a
"dashboard-style" way. Those interfaces might or might not have some
gamification layer too, but I don't think that's the important part.

Best,
Mark

-- 
Mark J. Nelson
The MetaMakers Institute
Falmouth University
http://www.kmjn.org

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I respectfully disagree. There are two issues here. The most important one
is that marketing may have multiple objectives and gaining more people as
editors is not restricted to any of our projects. Secondly it is not
restricted to editors it also applies to readers. It should be glaringly
obvious that both Commons and Wikisource are a treasure trove of material
that is hardly used.

We should not be beholden to "commercial partners" for our marketing. We
have our own objective; sharing in the sum of all knowledge and we could do
so much better. Commercial partners do not necessarily share our objectives
and it is therefore silly to suggest their cooperation. Also yes, we need
more competent editors but in many of our projects we need editors first
and make them competent later.

We do need marketing because we mostly suck at reaching out and giving
proper attention to the people we so desperately need. One obvious point is
that in order to grow the "other" projects and languages we need to realise
that Wikipedia is English oriented. I am only heard, if at all, on meta
matters when I use English.
Thanks,
  GerardM

On 28 August 2016 at 12:03, Stuart A. Yeates  wrote:

> I completely disagree with this criticism of the WMF.
>
> It seems to me that the main barriers to getting gamification happening in
> relation to en.wiki are cultural / organisational issues not marketing ones.
>
> If the editing communities genuinely wanted huge influxes of complete
> newbie editors, I have no doubt that the commercial partners who benefit
> from wikipedia could send them our way pretty trivially. What the editing
> communities want / need is new minimally-competent editors, and crafting
> them from complete newbies (typically called on-boarding) is very costly.
>
> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onboarding for an overview of the
> complexities.
>
> cheers
> stuart
>
> --
> ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
>
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> You are absolutely right. Both approaches have promise. It is however a
>> marketing job, not a research job to realise their potential. Marketing is
>> where the WMF sucks.
>> Thanks,
>>   GerardM
>>
>> On 27 August 2016 at 22:49, Dario Taraborelli > > wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>> 
>>> 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 
>>> 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 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Edward Saperia]

I get where you're coming from, but a great way to inspire the projects to
improve their onboarding processes would be an endless influx of newbie
editors.

*Edward Saperia*
Founder Newspeak House 
email  • facebook  •
 twitter  • 07796955572
133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG

On 28 August 2016 at 11:03, Stuart A. Yeates  wrote:

> I completely disagree with this criticism of the WMF.
>
> It seems to me that the main barriers to getting gamification happening in
> relation to en.wiki are cultural / organisational issues not marketing ones.
>
> If the editing communities genuinely wanted huge influxes of complete
> newbie editors, I have no doubt that the commercial partners who benefit
> from wikipedia could send them our way pretty trivially. What the editing
> communities want / need is new minimally-competent editors, and crafting
> them from complete newbies (typically called on-boarding) is very costly.
>
> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onboarding for an overview of the
> complexities.
>
> cheers
> stuart
>
> --
> ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
>
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> You are absolutely right. Both approaches have promise. It is however a
>> marketing job, not a research job to realise their potential. Marketing is
>> where the WMF sucks.
>> Thanks,
>>   GerardM
>>
>> On 27 August 2016 at 22:49, Dario Taraborelli > > wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>> 
>>> 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 
>>> 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 ...

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Stuart A. Yeates]

I completely disagree with this criticism of the WMF.

It seems to me that the main barriers to getting gamification happening in
relation to en.wiki are cultural / organisational issues not marketing ones.

If the editing communities genuinely wanted huge influxes of complete
newbie editors, I have no doubt that the commercial partners who benefit
from wikipedia could send them our way pretty trivially. What the editing
communities want / need is new minimally-competent editors, and crafting
them from complete newbies (typically called on-boarding) is very costly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onboarding for an overview of the
complexities.

cheers
stuart

--
...let us be heard from red core to black sky

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 5:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen 
wrote:

> Hoi,
> You are absolutely right. Both approaches have promise. It is however a
> marketing job, not a research job to realise their potential. Marketing is
> where the WMF sucks.
> Thanks,
>   GerardM
>
> On 27 August 2016 at 22:49, Dario Taraborelli 
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> 
>> 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  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 > > 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
>> 
>>
>> ___
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>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>>

Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Dario Taraborelli, 27/08/2016 22:49:

How making the edit button 10x larger is not a solution to
this problem is a topic I'll reserve to a separate thread.


You might want to include screenshots of the popups which are currently 
run to point people to the edit button.


Nemo

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
You are absolutely right. Both approaches have promise. It is however a
marketing job, not a research job to realise their potential. Marketing is
where the WMF sucks.
Thanks,
  GerardM

On 27 August 2016 at 22:49, Dario Taraborelli 
wrote:

> 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
> 
> 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  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 
> 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
> 
>
> ___
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>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Edward Saperia]

I had a famous game designer talk about this at Wikimania 2014:
http://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/wikipedia-is-a-game/

*Edward Saperia*
Founder Newspeak House 
email  • facebook  •
 twitter  • 07796955572
133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG

On 27 August 2016 at 08:13, Pine W  wrote:

> Thinking big here: popular internationalized computer games can have 10+
> million unit sales. Some of the most popular online games have millions of
> monthly active users. I'm wondering if the research community, including
> Design Research, can envision a way for Wikimedia to scale up from 80,000
> active monthly users to 8,000,000 active monthly users.
>
> What would we need in order to stimulate and nourish this kind of growth?
>
> What can we learn from popular internationalized games about design that
> could benefit Wikimedia on a large scale?
>
> Pine
>
> ___
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>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Dario Taraborelli]

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

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  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 
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

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[rupert THURNER]

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
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Amir E. Aharoni]

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.

בתאריך 27 באוג׳ 2016 10:14,‏ "Pine W"  כתב:

> Thinking big here: popular internationalized computer games can have 10+
> million unit sales. Some of the most popular online games have millions of
> monthly active users. I'm wondering if the research community, including
> Design Research, can envision a way for Wikimedia to scale up from 80,000
> active monthly users to 8,000,000 active monthly users.
>
> What would we need in order to stimulate and nourish this kind of growth?
>
> What can we learn from popular internationalized games about design that
> could benefit Wikimedia on a large scale?
>
> Pine
>
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Pine W, 27/08/2016 09:13:

What would we need in order to stimulate and nourish this kind of growth?


https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Make_Wikimedia_projects_scale

Nemo

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[WereSpielChequers]

We already have hundreds of millions of users. A large proportion of people
who use the internet will use Wikipedia in a given month, they use it by
reading bits of it. Finding out what the barriers are for the thousands of
millions who don't use Wikipdia would be useful. No doubt there are some
who are aware of Wikipedia but didn't feel a need to consult an
encyclopaedia in the last month, and some who are not currently in the
market for an encyclopaedia because they are too young, too senile, or
locked up. But research into why people don't use Wikipedia would be
useful. Our mission is to make the sum of all knowledge available to all,
finding out how we get to the next 400 million people, and indeed what
proportion of humanity would use an encyclopaedia if it was available to
them would be a great use of research.

Of those hundreds of millions only a tiny proportion, perhaps 0.02% are
"active editors", and that on an absurdly generous definition of active (5
edits in one month).

Theory tells us that as quality continues to improve so those readers who
fix a typo or some vandalism when they see it have been editing less and
less frequently. We know that the edit filters have lost us many of the
vandals who used to be such an important part of the raw editing figures of
the site (it never ceases to amuse me that the threshold to count as an
active editor was exactly the same as the typical vandal needed to get
through four levels of warnings and then get blocked). We also know that
the rise of the Smartphone and to a lesser  extent the tablet has lost us
editors, to most tablet users and almost all smartphone users Wikipedia is
a read only website not an interactive one. But it would be good to test
that as even the most obvious explanation is only a hypothesis until
someone has tested it, better still some sort of quantification of those
various issues would be very helpful.

How we replace typo fixing and vandalism reversion as entry level
activities to editing is one of the challenges of the community, any
research on that would be very useful.

On 27 August 2016 at 08:13, Pine W  wrote:

> Thinking big here: popular internationalized computer games can have 10+
> million unit sales. Some of the most popular online games have millions of
> monthly active users. I'm wondering if the research community, including
> Design Research, can envision a way for Wikimedia to scale up from 80,000
> active monthly users to 8,000,000 active monthly users.
>
> What would we need in order to stimulate and nourish this kind of growth?
>
> What can we learn from popular internationalized games about design that
> could benefit Wikimedia on a large scale?
>
> Pine
>
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> Wiki-research-l mailing list
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[Wiki-research-l] Thinking big: scaling up Wikimedia's contributor population by two orders of magnitude

[Pine W]

Thinking big here: popular internationalized computer games can have 10+
million unit sales. Some of the most popular online games have millions of
monthly active users. I'm wondering if the research community, including
Design Research, can envision a way for Wikimedia to scale up from 80,000
active monthly users to 8,000,000 active monthly users.

What would we need in order to stimulate and nourish this kind of growth?

What can we learn from popular internationalized games about design that
could benefit Wikimedia on a large scale?

Pine
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