On 10 September 2015 at 10:56, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > James, > > Yes, there is more to the story than can be told in the data that we have. > On the other hand, it seems to me that it's a bit harsh to respond like > that to WSC's attempt to share good news.
Then in my e-mail I have failed entirely, and I apologise. My point is that we should all be very cautious in mis-reading a single number (even sustained over a trend) as being "nice" when in fact we have no reason to suspect that it is necessarily "good news". It is not "good news" until we know that it is positive and can explain why. Shouting from the rooftops about events as "good news" without the solid evidence to back such a claim up risks damaging all the community efforts working to find and fix the issues at play. If we are going to improve the situation, we have a duty to ourselves to be honest and realistic about what we know, and what things we find tell us. We need to hold ourselves to the highest standards of truth, and not rush in with the first interpretation that comes to mind. Perhaps you can also think of > positive ways to interpret the data, such as that the increased speeds of > page loads may be having a desirable positive effect on the productivity of > highly active editors. > WSC has worked hard to come up with positive reasons. :-) I felt we needed to be more balanced, nuanced and realistic viewpoint. To use a metaphor, possibly this datapoint is a candle of light in a storm of darkness, but it might be the transformer exploding in sparks just as much as it might be a the end of the storm. However, since you asked, some positive narratives that might also or instead be true: - Faster load/save times make the site feel more responsive and so people can do more edits in the same amount of time. - Increased community quality criteria lead to many very-active editors taking up the baton and correcting dozens of articles each. - Simpler, more understandable community norms and processes mean some feel driven to improving their areas of the. - Cleaner, clearer designs for tools to make mass-edits more accessible and appealing to more users. - Decreased competition increases the reader demand and so eyes in some environments previously lacking, pushing more people over the line from "active" into "very active". However, all these narratives are merely speculation. I believe that Aaron H. is working on ways to measure the "value" of an > editor's contributions. When that work is done, I hope that we'll have a > better measure for how productivity is changing over time for different > cohorts of editors. > I too look forward to knowing more about the world, and measuring value, effort and types of edits as Aaron is trying to do would be a fantastic improvement in understanding the picture better, yes. This may take some time though, and Aaron and his team needs our support, not just heaping of expectations on him and their work. :-) Let's not count chickens before they've hatched. J. -- James D. Forrester Lead Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
