Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Peter Southwood]

I have seen little evidence either way.

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[mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of edward
Sent: 01 June 2014 01:14 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]


On 01/06/2014 12:00, Peter Southwood wrote:
> Phototypesetters  were typically professionals, therefore not strictly 
> comparable.
> There is a significant difference to learning a complex system because you 
> are going to earn a living from it, and learning the same system so you can 
> spend your free time doing unpaid work with it.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>

Which explains the gender bias, yes?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Risker]

On 1 June 2014 05:53, Ting Chen  wrote:

> Hello Risker,
>
> you have my sympathy, and let me tell you this: I am man and programmer,
> and when I edit articles nowaday I tend to ignore the info boxes and the
> templates at the end of each article. If I create a new article and I
> happen don't have a similar article with the templates and infobox already
> at hand, I simply create an article without both.
>
> And I think it is essential to tell the beginner to do the same: Don't
> bother with things that are too complicated, it is the content that counts.
>
> What I also do is help newcomers to wikify articles. I think it is an
> utterly bad habitate just to put a wikify template in a not nicely
> structured article instead of to do something by one self. It is usually
> just a few edits, two '''s, a few [[ and ]]s, and maybe a [[cateogry:...]]
> that can make the difference.
>
>


See now, here's the problem.  What you've described as "simple"  above is
actually complicated, and requires rather advanced knowledge of wikitext.
Categorizing of articles is a minefield that  even a lot of experienced
Wikipedians avoid.  Knowing that there are maintenance templates is not
something that a new user will know, so adding them is far beyond their
abilities.


And none of your suggestions deal with the fact that the information in the
editing window just doesn't look like the article; a new user will likely
have difficulty finding the typo that they were trying to fix.

Risker/Anne
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[edward]

On 01/06/2014 13:37, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
>>are more common in professions where women are underrepresented.

Why are they underrepresented?

ignotum per ignotius


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 06/01/2014 07:13 AM, edward wrote:
> Which explains the gender bias, yes?

At least in large part; Risker explained it more eloquently than I.
There is a bias against women because the skillsets currently useful to
be able to edit wikitext (programming, heavy markup languages) are more
common in professions where women are underrepresented.

I didn't mean to imply that women were less skilled, but that the pool
of potentially skilled editors had much fewer women in it than men.

-- Marc


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Mark]

On 6/1/14, 11:53 AM, Ting Chen wrote:
And I think it is essential to tell the beginner to do the same: Don't 
bother with things that are too complicated, it is the content that 
counts.


Yes, I think we need to publicize this more widely. People are usually 
surprised when I tell them that as a new editor it's perfectly fine to 
just ignore a wide range of formatting instructions and templates, as 
long as the essential content is there. All they really need is good 
text and *any* readable way of citing where they got the information 
from. There is no need to create an infobox, and you don't even need to 
deal with citation templates. Once I've convinced people they don't 
*really* need to learn how to use {{cite book}} and such, they tend to 
be more willing to contribute.


When I'm giving people a miniature intro for how to contribute 
referenced information to a Wikipedia article, I tell them to just put a 
plaintext reference in any format they're used to inside  
tags, like this:


"This is a sentence supported by a reference.Author, Book title, 
Publisher, year, pp. xx-xy"


As long as the essential information for the reference is included, this 
should be fine, and someone who knows the markup can prettify it later, 
if necessary. (If newbies contributing in this manner are getting bad 
reactions, then the message that this is a perfectly fine way to 
contribute should be better publicized to existing editors/admins, too.)


-Mark

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Thyge]

I agree with Ting's remarks about the importance of the social aspect.
Maybe we need a taskforce against rudeness. But looking into the social
aspect does not exclude improvements on the tech side.

I think that maybe instead of VE we should have an 'invisible editor',
meaning that if someone hits edit, no edit window with syntax shows up, but
the page gets open for marking/inserting some text and change it (like it
is done in wordprocessing programs). To place the change correctly in the
body text or in some highly complicated template should be done by the
wikimedia software without user intervention.

As it is now, even simple changes like correcting a typo or a date often
requires a lot of effort in locating it in the edit window. If it is hidden
inside a template, even a page search does not show it.
Regards,
Thyge


2014-06-01 11:53 GMT+02:00 Ting Chen :

> Hello Risker,
>
> you have my sympathy, and let me tell you this: I am man and programmer,
> and when I edit articles nowaday I tend to ignore the info boxes and the
> templates at the end of each article. If I create a new article and I
> happen don't have a similar article with the templates and infobox already
> at hand, I simply create an article without both.
>
> And I think it is essential to tell the beginner to do the same: Don't
> bother with things that are too complicated, it is the content that counts.
>
> What I also do is help newcomers to wikify articles. I think it is an
> utterly bad habitate just to put a wikify template in a not nicely
> structured article instead of to do something by one self. It is usually
> just a few edits, two '''s, a few [[ and ]]s, and maybe a [[cateogry:...]]
> that can make the difference.
>
> Personally, there are two reasons that I don't really care about info
> boxes and templates: First it is my own habitate as a user. For me the
> summary at the begin of an article tells me more than the info boxes. Info
> boxes are great for machines, for semantic web or things like that, but as
> a human I am more content with the summary. Second, I am sure that there
> will be at some time some nice and capable people who will put the
> necessary info boxes and templates in the articles I created. I never try
> to start a perfect article (I even never start an article in my own
> sandbox, people can always see my progress in the articles), I just do
> something and then leave it as I am able to.
>
> In all the discussions about editor retention and new comer barriers there
> is one thing that astonishes me again and again, and that is the whole
> discussion seems to be highly biased on the technical aspect, while the
> social aspect mostly tend to be neglected. People put a HUGE TON of hope in
> the visual editor as if it can resolve everything. But actually I think
> what VE can do is very limited, as far as our rules and our scope don't
> change.
>
> Nowaday Wikipedia articles (across all major languages) are highly biased
> in style and in content to academic thesis. How references are used and
> put, the criteria for references as valid, are almost one-by-one copied by
> the standards from academic thesis. Content without references are by
> itself considered as delete candidates. Both of these strongly put up
> constraints on who can put new content in Wikipedia and what content is
> considered as viable. I always feel sorrow, that both the Foundation and
> the community neglected the Oral Citation Project lead by Achal (
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oral_citations ). I believe it has the
> potential to revolutionary how anthropology (and maybe a lot of other
> sciences where field study is necessary) is done just like Wikipedia
> revolutionized how Encyclopedia can be done. And it can really give a lot
> of people, who did not enjoyed the academic training, the possibility to
> contribute their knowledge.
>
> The other major topic that I see neglected in this whole complex of
> discussion is how our rules are set up. They don't really put on a price or
> punishment against rude behavior. There are a lot of initiative to be
> welcoming and helpful, they are all great, but in the end, one rude comment
> can destroy efforts of two or three welcoming volunteers. Our rules only
> set in if the rude behavior is obvious, but not if they are acid and
> suttle. And people tend to ignore rude behavior if they come from a high
> performer editor.
>
> Change our attitude to non-academic-content and change our play rule on
> rude behavior is harder than change in technology, this is why people do so
> as if the VE is the holy grale. But it is not. By the start of the last
> strategic period, in the years 2009 and 2010, the Foundation conducted a
> lot of studies about why people leave our community, and Wiki-syntax is
> only one of at least three other reasons. VE is just a tool, tools can be
> used for good or for bad, it is the mind, that decides for which the tools
> are used.
>
> Greetings
> Ting
>
>
> Am 01.0

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[edward]

On 01/06/2014 12:00, Peter Southwood wrote:

Phototypesetters  were typically professionals, therefore not strictly 
comparable.
There is a significant difference to learning a complex system because you are 
going to earn a living from it, and learning the same system so you can spend 
your free time doing unpaid work with it.
Cheers,
Peter



Which explains the gender bias, yes?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Peter Southwood]

Phototypesetters  were typically professionals, therefore not strictly 
comparable.
There is a significant difference to learning a complex system because you are 
going to earn a living from it, and learning the same system so you can spend 
your free time doing unpaid work with it.
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org 
[mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Salsman
Sent: 01 June 2014 05:26 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

> (non-CS) engineer friends ... upon hitting that edit button, basically 
> went "Gak!  No way!"

Wikitext is simpler than what phototypesetter operators in the 1960s-1990s had 
to deal with, and they had a much better gender balance.

> Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only "computer science 
> professionals, highly computer-literate professionals (which excludes 
> most of Academia -- have you ever done IT support for a university?), 
> and westerners with enough leisure time to learn it the hard way".

There are abundant counter-examples.

>... selects strongly against women.

Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding wikitext 
than men?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[edward]

On 01/06/2014 10:53, Ting Chen wrote:

>>Nowaday Wikipedia articles (across all major languages) are highly 
biased in style and in content to academic thesis.


There is good reason for this: 'anyone can edit'. In an encyclopedia 
produced using the 'one best way' approach, there is sparse use of 
references and citations. Take this article on the syllogism 
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-syllogism written by Henrik 
Lagerlund. I don't spot any references, and generally SEP is sparing in 
their use. Henrik doesn't need to supply references, because he is an 
expert in his field, and because there is a traditional peer review 
process supporting SEP.


In Wikipedia by contrast, 'anyone can edit', and there is no equivalent 
peer review process, and so the only control is insistence on citations.


This is part of what makes it difficult for newcomers. I remember well 
the period 2006-7.  The growth of Wikipedia was tremendous. Before that, 
it was possible to manage the occasional 'idiosyncratic' contributors. 
Towards the beginning of 2007 it became impossible. Then two things 
happened. (i) It became much easier to get the 'idiosyncratic 
contributors' blocked. Before that, you had to make a very strong case 
to a non-involved admin. After that, it progressively became more like 
shoot on sight. (ii) The policies on citation became increasingly 
established and enforced. This made it much easier to gain control of an 
article. 'Idiosyncratic' contributors found it difficult to find 
reliable sources for whatever version of flat earth theory they were 
promoting, and got discouraged. There was also (iii) an easy way to 
control the quality of an article was to impose a sort of change freeze 
on any contribution, good or bad. I still maintain contact with the few 
editors left on the Philosophy and NLP articles, and they tell me this 
is how they achieve it.


Of course, all this will have the effect of deterring contributors. But 
the underlying reason is the trade-off between quality and 
participation. If you have a large user base under the 'anyone can  
edit' policy, then you are going to have quality control problems. If 
you address the quality problem by any of the three methods above, then 
you will have to limit participation in some way. No brainer.


I would advise anyone with an interest in this to read Aaron Halfaker's 
seminal paper on this. The links are in his post here 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-May/072267.html .



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Fæ, 01/06/2014 07:39:

As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found
this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New
women users seem little different to men


I, too, failed to see any difference in dozens (mainly female) 
librarians editing, when watching them for several hours multiplied by 
several days. Of course said librarians are not representative of the 
general population, as pointed out by others in this thread.


Anyway, it would be nice to see a conclusion to 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Gender_micro-survey , data was 
collected almost a year ago. Personally I was and am disturbed by the 
assumption that women might be less editing-capable, but I'm interested 
in actual data.


Nemo

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Ting Chen]

Hello Risker,

you have my sympathy, and let me tell you this: I am man and programmer, 
and when I edit articles nowaday I tend to ignore the info boxes and the 
templates at the end of each article. If I create a new article and I 
happen don't have a similar article with the templates and infobox 
already at hand, I simply create an article without both.


And I think it is essential to tell the beginner to do the same: Don't 
bother with things that are too complicated, it is the content that counts.


What I also do is help newcomers to wikify articles. I think it is an 
utterly bad habitate just to put a wikify template in a not nicely 
structured article instead of to do something by one self. It is usually 
just a few edits, two '''s, a few [[ and ]]s, and maybe a 
[[cateogry:...]] that can make the difference.


Personally, there are two reasons that I don't really care about info 
boxes and templates: First it is my own habitate as a user. For me the 
summary at the begin of an article tells me more than the info boxes. 
Info boxes are great for machines, for semantic web or things like that, 
but as a human I am more content with the summary. Second, I am sure 
that there will be at some time some nice and capable people who will 
put the necessary info boxes and templates in the articles I created. I 
never try to start a perfect article (I even never start an article in 
my own sandbox, people can always see my progress in the articles), I 
just do something and then leave it as I am able to.


In all the discussions about editor retention and new comer barriers 
there is one thing that astonishes me again and again, and that is the 
whole discussion seems to be highly biased on the technical aspect, 
while the social aspect mostly tend to be neglected. People put a HUGE 
TON of hope in the visual editor as if it can resolve everything. But 
actually I think what VE can do is very limited, as far as our rules and 
our scope don't change.


Nowaday Wikipedia articles (across all major languages) are highly 
biased in style and in content to academic thesis. How references are 
used and put, the criteria for references as valid, are almost 
one-by-one copied by the standards from academic thesis. Content without 
references are by itself considered as delete candidates. Both of these 
strongly put up constraints on who can put new content in Wikipedia and 
what content is considered as viable. I always feel sorrow, that both 
the Foundation and the community neglected the Oral Citation Project 
lead by Achal ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oral_citations ). I 
believe it has the potential to revolutionary how anthropology (and 
maybe a lot of other sciences where field study is necessary) is done 
just like Wikipedia revolutionized how Encyclopedia can be done. And it 
can really give a lot of people, who did not enjoyed the academic 
training, the possibility to contribute their knowledge.


The other major topic that I see neglected in this whole complex of 
discussion is how our rules are set up. They don't really put on a price 
or punishment against rude behavior. There are a lot of initiative to be 
welcoming and helpful, they are all great, but in the end, one rude 
comment can destroy efforts of two or three welcoming volunteers. Our 
rules only set in if the rude behavior is obvious, but not if they are 
acid and suttle. And people tend to ignore rude behavior if they come 
from a high performer editor.


Change our attitude to non-academic-content and change our play rule on 
rude behavior is harder than change in technology, this is why people do 
so as if the VE is the holy grale. But it is not. By the start of the 
last strategic period, in the years 2009 and 2010, the Foundation 
conducted a lot of studies about why people leave our community, and 
Wiki-syntax is only one of at least three other reasons. VE is just a 
tool, tools can be used for good or for bad, it is the mind, that 
decides for which the tools are used.


Greetings
Ting


Am 01.06.2014 08:55, schrieb Risker:

On 1 June 2014 01:39, Fæ  wrote:


On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman  wrote:
...

... selects strongly against women.

Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
wikitext than men?

(Probably drifting to "Increase participation by women")

As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found
this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New
women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and
though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax,
given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article
creation quite happily.

There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues
associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual
difficulty of "namespaces" which mean that some webpages behave
differently to others. None is something that appears to "select
strongly against women", thoug

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[David Gerard]

On 1 June 2014 03:40, Marc A. Pelletier  wrote:
> On 05/31/2014 08:27 PM, James Salsman wrote:

>> Individual editors' skill with wikitext should be independent of
>> almost all of the systemic biases from which we suffer [...]

> Seriously?
> I have (non-CS) engineer friends that, upon hitting that edit button,
> basically went "Gak!  No way!"


I'm a Unix sysadmin and I frequently hit it and go "Gak! No way!"
Wikitext is not humanly usable.

The question is not whether we need a better interface, it's the implementation.


- d.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Risker]

On 1 June 2014 01:39, Fæ  wrote:

> On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman  wrote:
> ...
> >>... selects strongly against women.
> >
> > Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
> > wikitext than men?
>
> (Probably drifting to "Increase participation by women")
>
> As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found
> this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New
> women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and
> though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax,
> given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article
> creation quite happily.
>
> There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues
> associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual
> difficulty of "namespaces" which mean that some webpages behave
> differently to others. None is something that appears to "select
> strongly against women", though the encyclopedia's way of defining
> notability can make it harder to create articles about pre-1970s
> professional women, purely because sources from earlier periods tend
> to be biased towards men.
>
> If there are surveys that wiki-syntax is more of a barrier for women
> than men (after discounting out other factors), perhaps someone could
> provide a link?
>
>

Fae, I don't know if wiki-syntax in and of itself is more of a barrier for
women than men.  What I do know is that wiki-syntax is a lot harder today
than it was when I started editing 8 years ago, and that today I would
consider it more akin to computer programming than content creation.  That
is where the barrier comes in.

The statistics for percentage of women employed in computer-related
technology is abysmal; we all know that. Even organizations that actively
seek out qualified women (including Wikimedia, I'll point out) can't come
close to filling all the slots they'd willingly open, because there simply
aren't that many qualified women.  They're not filling the seats in college
and university programs, either.

Eight years ago, only about a quarter of English Wikipedia articles had an
infobox - that huge pile of wiki-syntax that is at the top of the
overwhelming majority of articles today.  There were not a lot of
templates; certainly the monstrous templates at the bottom of most articles
today didn't exist then.  The syntax for creating references was
essentially  insert url ; today there is a plethora of complex
referencing templates, some of which are so complex and non-intuitive that
only a small minority of *wikipedians* can use them effectively.  I know
wiki-syntax, and I have found it increasingly more difficult to edit as
time has gone on.  I don't think it's because I'm a woman, I think it's
because I'm not a programmer - and women who *are* programmers are only a
small minority of all programmers, so it follows that women are less likely
to have the skills that will help them sort through what they see when they
click "Edit".

It's exactly why I've been following and keeping up with the development of
VisualEditor - because I believe it will make it easier for those who
aren't particularly technically inclined to contribute to the project.  I
believe it's the route to attracting a more diverse editing population,
including but not limited to women.  And I think that it's pretty close to
being ready for hands-on use by those who are new to our projects, now that
it can handle pretty well most of the essential editing tasks.  It's not
perfect, but it's getting there.

Risker/Anne
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Fæ]

On 1 June 2014 04:26, James Salsman  wrote:
...
>>... selects strongly against women.
>
> Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
> wikitext than men?

(Probably drifting to "Increase participation by women")

As someone who has run editathons on women focused topics, I found
this an odd comment that does not match anecdotal experience. New
women users seem little different to men in the issues that arise, and
though I have found myself apologising for the slightly odd syntax,
given the standard crib-sheet most users get on with basic article
creation quite happily.

There are far more commonly raised issues such as the complex issues
associated with image upload (copyright!), or the conceptual
difficulty of "namespaces" which mean that some webpages behave
differently to others. None is something that appears to "select
strongly against women", though the encyclopedia's way of defining
notability can make it harder to create articles about pre-1970s
professional women, purely because sources from earlier periods tend
to be biased towards men.

If there are surveys that wiki-syntax is more of a barrier for women
than men (after discounting out other factors), perhaps someone could
provide a link?

Fae
-- 
fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[James Salsman]

> (non-CS) engineer friends ... upon hitting that edit button,
> basically went "Gak!  No way!"

Wikitext is simpler than what phototypesetter operators in the
1960s-1990s had to deal with, and they had a much better gender
balance.

> Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only "computer science
> professionals, highly computer-literate professionals (which excludes
> most of Academia -- have you ever done IT support for a university?),
> and westerners with enough leisure time to learn it the hard way".

There are abundant counter-examples.

>... selects strongly against women.

Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
wikitext than men?

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 05/31/2014 08:27 PM, James Salsman wrote:
> Individual editors' skill with wikitext should be independent of
> almost all of the systemic biases from which we suffer [...]

Seriously?

I have (non-CS) engineer friends that, upon hitting that edit button,
basically went "Gak!  No way!"

Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only "computer science
professionals, highly computer-literate professionals (which excludes
most of Academia -- have you ever done IT support for a university?),
and westerners with enough leisure time to learn it the hard way".

This is, optimistically, 1-2% of the world, only a small fraction of
which are women.

There's no way to *not* have a catastrophic systemic bias with those
demographics that pretty much excludes the vast majority of academia,
most cultures, and selects strongly against women.

-- Marc


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[James Salsman]

> "being able to figure out wikitext" might be a good attribute,
> but making it a requirement pretty much sacrifices any hope
> we have of getting rid of our systemic bias

Individual editors' skill with wikitext should be independent of
almost all of the systemic biases from which we suffer except perhaps
math articles with sections ordered by utility to the typical reader.
The effect, if it exists, should be stronger on the Simple English
Wikipedia.

I'm not opposed to further improvements and measurements of the Visual
Editor, but I am opposed to the absence of honest cost-benefit
evaluations of supplemental opportunities for increasing
participation.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Rui Correia]

"even finding the glaring typo you saw in a reference is nearly impossible
after you hit the edit button." -- Marc

Yes, it was, as references were getting longer and longer (almost to the
point of including the author's likesa and deslikes and what he or she had
for breakfast. That was 'solved' by the new , that is really not
the easiest to figure out. And oddly enough, I don't ever see anywhere any
form of a tutorial on changes - such as the new ref method, hoveing
footnotes, etc.

Other then clicking edit on another page to see how it is done, there is no
gjuidance whatsoever.

Rui

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 05/29/2014 08:57 PM, James Salsman wrote:
> but it was misplaced because being able to figure out wikitext
> is an excellent attribute in new editors

I think that statement fails on two aspects: for one, saying that the
enthusiasm 'was misplaced' is rather premature as VE itself is rather
incomplete - we do not yet know its potential.

Secondly, and more importantly in my mind, "being able to figure out
wikitext" might be a good attribute, but making it a requirement pretty
much sacrifices any hope we have of getting rid of our systemic bias.
The vast majority of the planet cannot - or will not - have the time and
resources to learn an arcane and overcomplicated mishmash of markup
languages; yet many of those have knowledge and skill to share.

In 2004, when articles were mostly unformatted, that argument made
sense.  Most anyone with minimal computer skills (and that's already a
very restricted slice of the population) could edit a page to fix a typo
or add a statement or two without much difficulty.

Nowadays?  Not so much.  For the untrained eye, even finding the glaring
typo you saw in a reference is nearly impossible after you hit the edit
button.

-- Marc


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[James Salsman]

Rui Correia wrote:
>...
> tell me whether we are bleeding new or old members.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_lifecycle

and

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_classes

agree: we lose experienced editors at about the same rate we always
have, but what plummeted after 2007 is the rate at which we attract
new editors. That's why there was so much enthusiasm for the Visual
Editor, but it was misplaced because being able to figure out wikitext
is an excellent attribute in new editors (analogously, being able to
figure out that wikitext has ambiguities equivalent to the halting
problem would have been an excellent attribute in VE architects)
None of the other technical solutions (Huggle, Wikilove, two click
thanking, etc.) have made a dent in the numbers, so it is time to
consider this the social problem that it is, and not just some
technical problem that can be coded around with a fancy new feature,
fewer bots, or addressed with nicer template warnings. Since the
typical editing tasks continue to transition from creating new
articles to maintaining the accuracy of old articles, that is even
more reason to want to attract highly educated editors who will be
able to overcome technical learning curves and social hurdles with
their own minds, not a Mediawiki extension.

Consider the supply and demand of both editors and their leisure time
by educational attainment:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/cognitive-surplus-visualized/

There is no shortage of new editors to attract. But how much free time
do those potential new editors have? For the typical highly educated
potential male editor, or the potential female editor of any
educational attainment level in the vast majority of the
English-speaking world, things have been getting a lot worse:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-31%20at%204.40.28%20PM.png

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/Screen%20Shot%202013-05-31%20at%201.43.10%20PM.png

(from 
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/how-did-work-life-balance-in-the-us-get-so-awful/276336/
in case those URLs expire)

These are all pertinent to whether strategic priorities should include
direct action to improve the extent of leisure time among highly
educated people in the developed world. Do that, and there will be
plenty of new Mediawiki and Wikidata extensions to choose from as
potential symbiotic solutions to both editor recruitment and the
transition from creation to maintenance. If I had more free time, I
would do this one:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Develop_systems_for_accuracy_review

That is on topic, because if we had that feature, maintaining accuracy
would be a lot easier in that it would take less volunteer time. But I
don't think for a minute that any of the external strategic priorities
I've listed would do less if they came to fruition.

Best regards,
James Salsman

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Fæ]

n 29 May 2014 15:43, Lila Tretikov  wrote:
> We have deeper graphs. I want to be sensitive to our product team's time,
> but I am sure they will share when they can.

Hi Lila,

As well as WMF teams, there are quite a few volunteers about who pull
reports from the database or through the API and generate interesting
reports, tables and charts to support projects they are interested in.
For a bit of fun I manually generate this report of active Commons
contributors with more than 10,000 edits
.

It might be an idea to think of how you can encourage unpaid
volunteers to try playing around with generating reports and creating
bots to maintain them so that, as a community, more volunteers can do
it themselves and produce test examples in an agile fashion, and
reduce the burden on WMF teams to respond to requests.

I find the labs, API and database user guides okay, but not easy, for
a non-technical person to work out what they need to do to get
started. Noting that the the API sandbox was a *great* well designed
feature to add to the wikis. In practice, as an older guy with a
technical but non-internet background, it took me nearly a year to
become not-too-terrible at doing bot-stuff (and I still have not got
around to working out how to run SQL queries via Python to the
Wikimedia database), for the very few contributors that are interested
in what happens behind the scenes, this is a tough barrier to
overcome. I have been asked to help with a workshop on GLAM related
automated uploading at Wikimania. I'm dreading it, as having tried
several times, I find it really hard to explain to another Wikimedia
how to go about this stuff in an understandable step by step fashion,
without listening to myself and realising how it awkwardly sounds like
explaining how to do a DNA analysis using kitchen tools from someone
who watches CSI but cannot remember the periodic table.

Fae
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Fæ]

On 29 May 2014 15:31, Rui Correia  wrote:
> Neither of those answers my question. I doesn't tell me whether we are
> bleeding new or old members. The reason for an editor of either group to
> leave are different. All that that graph shows is that there has been a
> frightful drop since 2007.

The reports do include things like "recently absent wikipedians".
Perhaps you would like to write down a few criteria for the ideal
report you would like to see, and then those more aware of what
statistics are available could then either point to something
equivalent, or knock out a quick report for it?

My assumption is that you would like to see something like a monthly
snapshot of stats for all accounts that (a) have ceased making
contributions in the last {1 to 6} months (b) tabulated by whether
they were 'newbies' or not. I am unsure if there is an agreed way of
measuring newbies, but something like "with fewer than {10, 100, 1000}
total contributions" might be meaningful.

A more general question - Is there an on-wiki page for folks to
suggest and discuss additional reports like this, email being a
non-good way of discussing this sort of thing? I can see
 might be an
appropriate place, but it seems a very quiet page and the majority of
Wikimedians would probably be happier talking on meta or similar.

Fae
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Lila Tretikov]

We have deeper graphs. I want to be sensitive to our product team's time,
but I am sure they will share when they can.

The short answer -- I believe -- the the community tends to gravitate
towards its current state and loose new editors at a higher rate. This is
not unusual in general of course -- what is concerning is the delta in
those rates. So we also need to understand the differences in the loss
between now and say 5 years ago when rules of engagement, dynamics and
overall state of the internet where different, and how that influenced
retention.

Again, I am still learning, and our PMs may correct me on this :)

L


On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 7:31 AM, Rui Correia  wrote:

> Hi Frederico
>
> Neither of those answers my question. I doesn't tell me whether we are
> bleeding new or old members. The reason for an editor of either group to
> leave are different. All that that graph shows is that there has been a
> frightful drop since 2007.
>
> Rui
>
>
> 2014-05-29 15:28 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) :
>
> > Rui Correia, 29/05/2014 15:01:
> >
> >  Do we have any figures on retention of new editors?
> >>
> >
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%
> > 3ASearch&profile=advanced&search=retention&fulltext=
> > Search&ns202=1&profile=advanced
> >
> >
> >  How long does the
> >> average new editor stay? What percentage of new editors stays on for 6
> >> months; one year; two years? Do we have these figures for all languages?
> >>
> >
> > In the end what retention matters for is http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/
> > TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
> >
> > Nemo
> >
> >
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> _
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> Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Work Consultant
> Bridge to Angola - Angola Liaison Consultant
>
> Mobile Number in South Africa +27 74 425 4186
> Número de Telemóvel na África do Sul +27 74 425 4186
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[rupert THURNER]

On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 4:28 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
 wrote:
> Fæ, 29/05/2014 16:07:
>
>> Perhaps we should have some more memorable on-wiki short-cuts to link
>> and find these reports?
>
>
> I suggested Erik Zachte that we could override the default
> [[MediaWiki:statistics-footer]] (which is empty) on all Wikimedia wikis to
> link relevant WikiStats reports, but he's too humble. ;)

yes please!

rupert

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Rui Correia]

Hi Frederico

Neither of those answers my question. I doesn't tell me whether we are
bleeding new or old members. The reason for an editor of either group to
leave are different. All that that graph shows is that there has been a
frightful drop since 2007.

Rui


2014-05-29 15:28 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) :

> Rui Correia, 29/05/2014 15:01:
>
>  Do we have any figures on retention of new editors?
>>
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%
> 3ASearch&profile=advanced&search=retention&fulltext=
> Search&ns202=1&profile=advanced
>
>
>  How long does the
>> average new editor stay? What percentage of new editors stays on for 6
>> months; one year; two years? Do we have these figures for all languages?
>>
>
> In the end what retention matters for is http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/
> TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
>
> Nemo
>
>
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Mobile Number in South Africa +27 74 425 4186
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Fæ, 29/05/2014 16:07:

Perhaps we should have some more memorable on-wiki short-cuts to link
and find these reports?


I suggested Erik Zachte that we could override the default 
[[MediaWiki:statistics-footer]] (which is empty) on all Wikimedia wikis 
to link relevant WikiStats reports, but he's too humble. ;)


Nemo

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Fæ]

On 29/05/2014, Federico Leva (Nemo)  wrote:
...
> In the end what retention matters for is
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm

That is an incredibly useful report.

If like me, most people find this a hard table to remember how to
locate, a link to a project-specific version can be found at the
bottom of the Special:Statistics page, for example:
* English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
* Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

You can navigate around the statistics report to find report cards and
graphs of many handy types, for example


Perhaps we should have some more memorable on-wiki short-cuts to link
and find these reports?

Fae
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Rui Correia, 29/05/2014 15:01:

Do we have any figures on retention of new editors?


https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&search=retention&fulltext=Search&ns202=1&profile=advanced


How long does the
average new editor stay? What percentage of new editors stays on for 6
months; one year; two years? Do we have these figures for all languages?


In the end what retention matters for is 
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm


Nemo

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[Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]

[Rui Correia]

[Chaging subject line as (1) topic has moved on (2) need to ensure
visibility by rising above the Lila/ Wil never ending story frenzy.]

Hi James

Do we have any figures on retention of new editors? How long does the
average new editor stay? What percentage of new editors stays on for 6
months; one year; two years? Do we have these figures for all languages?

New editors should be allowed space to grow. Wikipedia is so rich in
developing all kinds of scripts, templates etc, that it would be easy to
create something to inform others that someone is a new editor. Pages by
new editors should be left alone for a day or two. There is nothing more
disheartening than getting all excited about contributing only to find that
someone comes along and either deletes your first attempt or nominates it
for deletion. I've have seen this happen WITHIN MINUTES of the seminal
version being posted, followed up by 'warnings' on the editor's talk page.
I've seen edits reverted because the formatting of the source was wrong. It
should be a basic pillar that before reverting, we see if we can improve/
fix the problem. Undoing a newcomer's work and leaving something like
WP:MOS as an edit summary is not helpful - if you are going to cite a WP
policy, then do so by pointing directly to the specific page where the new
editor can read about it. I know it is time-consuming to fill in edit
summaries, especially if one is doing a series of identical edits to a
whole lot of pages. But we can use technology to speed this up - on a blank
edit summary, a prompt will suggest earlier text and you can select an
applicable one. On an edit summary with a reference to the section of the
page this does not work - so we need to find a way around this, like
splitting the field.

No amount of ink about how welcoming WP is to new editors, IT IS NOT. For
reference, this section has some interesting facts,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Contributors.

We are also losing established editors, mostly because of edit warring.
There are blocks coalescing around all kinds of themes and issues and these
defend their turf.

Pages that contain controversial details should display a specific notice -
not difficult to do, given the array of templates already in use. Some
pages are the result of a compromise reached after acrimonious debate. An
editor - old or new - who was not involved in discussions will not know
this and might make an edit that detonates the powder keg and starts the
war all over again. It would be so easy to display a notice on the EDIT
PAGE saying something like "Hi, if you were planning to edit .[ x
detail] ... please read (link) the discussion and resolution on this. I am
pretty convinced it would work far better than having thousands of pages
locked ([semi-]protected). Some pages just require a simple message on the
EDIT PAGE such as (example) "In the English Wikipedia we use the spelling
*Braganza* and not *Bragança* when referring to the House of Braganza.
Please do not change this.".  There are 1,300 pages where Braganza is
mentioned, imagine how many headaches we could spare ourselves.

Some editors seem to derive pleasure from the constant reverting/
protecting - you soon get to know who the 'group' is and can read on their
talk pages comments and jokes about a "here we go again" scenario. It is as
if they actually lie in wait for the next unwary editor to come along and
make a change.

At the same time, there are hundreds of thousands of pages that do not meet
20% of the quality criteria and nobody does anything to remedy them. Yet,
do something like move the page, change the infobox and immediately the
'owners' come out of the woodwork to revert.

Someone cited Ukranian in this thread and I would like to pick up on that.
There is a tendency at the higher levels to equate Wikipedia with the
English Wikipedia and all else are something else. This includes the level
of involvement by the Foundation etc in the non-English Wikipedias, often
with the justification (excuse?) that each is independent. And of course
each language WP will use this independence to its advantage when
convenient, as a reason why this or that is being done differently. In the
same breath, content that is specifically marked as referring to the En-WP
is then regurgitated as if it reflects the whole WP, as here, in the
Portuguese WP:
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confiabilidade_da_Wikip%C3%A9dia#Avalia.C3.A7.C3.B5es

Independence is well and good, but not when for example the Portuguese WP
votes/ debates/ discusses/ relaxing sourcing policies. If WP is to be
judged on its reliability then on a number of key elements it must be held
to one standard with criteria that apply across the board. We can't have
different standards on reliability of sources, notibality, etc.

To shrug it off as an issue of the Portuguese WP is to bury our heads in
the sand, to shirk responsibility, because such issues are symptomatic of
the problems facing the WP as a whole and