On 11 March 2012 09:30, Charles Matthews <[email protected]>wrote:
> On 11 March 2012 08:56, Oliver Keyes <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > A low barrier to contribution is not a problem. What we are trying to fix > > is the overwork of patrollers and the fact that new editors go into the > > article creation process unaware of what to expect and ignorant of > policy, > > which understandably ends up leading to disappointment. > > > > Still not happy with this formulation. I think the sentences contradict > each other. You are trying to fix, you say, > > *potential disappointment of new editors; > *overwork of patrollers. > > Unless you discourage some contributors, the volume of contributions would > be the same? The nature of the contributions would not necessarily be the > same. I would certainly be leading off with "To avoid disappointment at the > outcome of our process, please take a moment ...". > > > That would be an excellent way to word it. I disagree that numbers and quality have to necessarily conflict; what we have at the moment is an interface that is: *Unfamiliar *Unintuitive *Failing to provide sufficient guidance on what is desireable in a new article. The third element is, arguably, the source of at least part of the woes that come with new page patrol; quality is not high. What we want to do is test the hypothesis that by better educating new editors and potential editors, we can dissuade people from writing bad articles and encourage good-faith new editors to put a bit more work into theirs. Now, I fully agree that, on its own, this would bring down the raw numbers of new articles. I think that's a given. That's where the other problems with the interface - how unfamiliar it looks to other websites, how confusing it is - comes in, combined with the lack of guidance. I would hypothesise (and again, that's what this is; testing hypotheses) that this brings down the number of new contributions before people have typed a word: it's confusing, it's unfamiliar, and it's scary - I wouldn't be suprised to find that those people who actually write articles are a tiny number compared to those who intend to, or those who are unaware they can but could if they were *made* aware. If we provide better guidance and make it a nicer environment, we could see raw numbers increase as well as quality. Now, as said a few emails back, and repeatedly here: this is just an experiment. It could be both quality and numbers go up, it could be one goes up and the other goes down, it could be we have no impact whatsoever. But quality and numbers are not, by default, in conflict; the very lack of guidance that leads to people writing articles in ignorance may well be leading to others not writing them at all. -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
