Leila, I am wondering if you can explain the project title "Voice and exit in a voluntary work environment". I don't quite see the connection to the project as proposed
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Voice_and_exit_in_a_voluntary_work_environment On reading the project, I see two almost separate items. One is the intent to survey all new users about their demographics. The second goal here is to form newbie teams of women based on a similar interests based on "20 questions". Regarding the demographics of new users. Is this intended to occur when they create a new account (rather than a new IP)? If so, will it be optional? I guess my concern is people will back off from signing up, either because they don't want to reveal the information, or because the process has just become too heavyweight. From a privacy perspective (I presume there will be a privacy statement), will the demographic survey remained linked to the user name? From the point of view of the science, it would be good if it was for tracking purposes but it's also a possible reason why people won't answer your questions if it is (or more to the point, if they think it is). I know myself when organisations approach me for demographic information (anonymously or linked to my username or real world identity), my reaction to such requests tends to depend on how much I care about them (and how much I trust them). If I am very involved in an organisation, I am generally happy to provide data that assists them in the stated purpose because I want them to be successful. When I am marginally engaged (the case with many a website that requires a signup), I am unlikely to provide demographic information in general and almost certainly not at the point of signup. I assume the link between the two parts of the project is that some/all of those new users whose demographic profile reveals they are women will then be approached to form teams based on the 20 questions. Will that occur before their first edit? I'm just thinking of the person sitting down to fix a spelling error going through signup, demographic survey, invitation to be in a team before and possibly 20 questions before we let them do the edit they came to do. I guess I am fearful that the experiment will drive women away if it is all too up-front heavy relative to the task they came to do. Not in the interests of diversity. Also, the word "organic" was mentioned. Not all new users are organic. Anyone who is signing up for a training class, edit-a-thon, university class exercise etc is NOT organic. Can I ask that when there is a research intervention, reasonable steps are taken to ensure that non-organic new users are not caught up in it. That means having some way to bypass the intervention and informing the course instructors (it's a user right) well in advance so they can ensure their groups are bypassed. Ditto any scheduled events/edit-a-thons. Mine are published on the Wikimedia Australia website. When you have 2 hours to teach Wikipedia (the typical time slot I get from organisations) and you have a prepared set of PPT slides, you want the Wikipedia interface to follow the sequence you are expecting. Trainees are confused by buttons being relabelled different to the PPT slides etc. And it's worse if it happens to only part of the group as they think they did something wrong. Anything that slows things up means you don't get finished in two hours and training has failed its goals. I got caught by the A/B testing of Visual Editor by new users. At that time, I had never seen or used the Visual Editor and a proportion of my training class were being shown it. It was a disaster and I nearly gave up training after that, it was just so embarrassing. I did not know it was happening. Nor did I have any way to get those users back into the source editor (which I was teaching at that time). While I think the VE is a good thing for Wikipedia, that was NOT the way to experiment with it. Also with events, because of the limit on signups per day from the same IP address, it is common to ask people to sign up in advance for which you provide information on the process. So the bypass of the intervention needs to be available for the signups occurring before the event so don't think it is sufficient to just provide an "on the day" signup solution. It has to work for the people doing it at their own desks days ahead. Given that the vast majority of participants in my groups are women, I don't think it’s in the interests of diversity to give them a bad experience by being inadvertently caught up in an experiment. Moving on to the newbie teams, how is this going to work? How will they communicate? Will you tell them about the Visual Editor which is NOT enabled by default for new users? As someone who has delivered training on both editors, the VE is an absolute winner for new users, particular women. I could not do Wikipedia edit training in the source editor in 2 hours (minimum 4). But the first thing I have to get them to do after sign-in is to enable the VE (by the way, use the Editing mode "show both tabs" as there is some bug that locks you out of the VE sooner or later if you chose the other ones). So while the VE is a winning strategy for training new users, there is a problem. It doesn't work on Talk pages, User Talk pages which means that new VE users can't access the TeaHouse and the Visual Editor Feedback page (as unbelievably dumb as that sounds!). I know from source editor training that new users don't grasp how Talk pages work. They live in a work of email, Facebook, Twitter and everything else, none of which uses anything as completely unstructured as Talk pages (unstructured in the sense of the tool -- the source editor -- has no builtin "reply" or "forward/share" as they are expecting). As a consequence, I hand out my Wikimedia Australia business card to everyone who attends my events so they can email me with their questions/problems after the event. Even if they know about Talk, they mostly use my email address because they understand how to communicate via it. It also has the practical benefit that they can attach screenshots which they cannot do in Talk (not because it's technically impossible but because they don't know about uploading images and how to add them in a Talk page, remember it's not VE enabled). On the subject of VE and User Talk, can I ask you all to add {{VEFriendly}} to the top of your User Talk page. It allows VE users to write there using VE, which is a small friendly thing to do. See it on mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kerry_Raymond As a serious statement, if we want to increase female participation in Wikipedia, making the VE enabled as the default for new users is a simple intervention that will probably produce more results than any other simple intervention. So if there are to be newbie teams, they will probably need to interact by other than Talk pages (whether they are VE Users or not). And teams should probably form around the editor they use (they can't help each other otherwise). Also, dealing with newbies all the time, I can say that a lot of them do come along with a "mission" in their head, often involving a new article, often of doubtful notability. I don't teach how to create new articles in the 2 hour training, instead I explain why as new users they should not attempt it. Since they always ask, I say "have at least 100 edits to existing articles before trying to create a new article". Generally the new article is not promotional (as a lot of Article for Creation articles are) but more often it's an obituary, school history, local club/society, etc. I find new people understand and agree with the "no advertising" principle, they are happy to add facts and not opinions with citations about the school or the junior athletics club (generally to the school history book they just wrote or to the club's website) but they don't grasp notability at all well. It's worth being aware that a newbie team is likely to have one or more "mission-oriented" members which might affect team dynamics. But I am a little unclear what the teams will work on (there was mention of suggestions in their topic space). My sense of why new users give up is a combination of the mechanics of editing (which VE helps with) and finding their edits reverted (or substantially removed/changed), which can occur both because of our myriad of policies (of which Articles for Creation is a "solution") and Manual of Style issues and WikiProject conventions and gatekeepers and random WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT reverters. These things are incredibly discouraging both as a rejection of the effort makde in the contribution but also because it rarely is it explained what they did wrong and HOW TO FIX it in terms they understand and via communication mediums they understand and respond in (given they generally don't understand Talk and most don't understand edit summaries where the reason is often hidden). Also, I do believe that there are people who will happily exploit the newbie lack of knowledge to enforce their views on things (WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT). Where possible I try to put their User page and the articles I am aware they have been editing on my watchlist so I can try to intervene to help them move forward with an explanation of what happened and what to do about it. I see the risk for newbie teams is their combined lack of knowledge of policy and how to deal with issues. For this reason alone, I am doubtful this intervention will work (but will be delighted if it does). I think new users (or teams of users) do need a more experienced mentor, and I do understand that this creates a workload on an existing community member. Also, I do have some concerns about the "framing" of the project. The framing is "women are failing at Wikipedia, we have to fix the women". I suggest that this is analogous to the 1960s argument that if women want to do men's jobs, they should learn to accept nude photos of women in the lunchroom and locker room language. I would suggest an alternative framing that "Wikipedia is failing women, we have to fix Wikipedia". The Wikipedia environment is toxic and this is a massive turn-off to women. It is rude, it is impersonal, it is arrogant. The fear of "creating a burden on the community" illustrates this point nicely. If the community cared about attracting more editors (whether women or not), then they would (to some extent) be willing to be mentor new contributors. The fact that the community appears to resent this as a "burden" suggests that the community does not care about attracting new editors. Indeed, I think for existing contributors, the clubhouse of Wikipedia (and their status within it) is probably more important than its wider mission. I would be very much inclined to suggest that before embarking on a large scale roll-out of the experiment, maybe just do some "qualitative" work around forming some teams of new women users first and see if it works. Kerry _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
