Talk:Wikimedia Foundation/Feb 2010 Letter to the Board
Contents
| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Data inconsistency in growth targets? | 0 | 19:32, 12 December 2010 |
| evidence for the proposed measure of community strength? | 9 | 17:37, 31 March 2010 |
| No mention of 'volunteer recognition' | 6 | 22:30, 4 February 2010 |
| Visitors vs content | 5 | 02:46, 27 January 2010 |
Wikimedia wants to achieve 15% annual growth in the 2010-2015 in order to reach its goal of 680 million global readership.
It plans to accomplish this by achieving 12% growth in Global South (emerging markets) and 4% growth in Global North (developed markets).
How do these numbers make sense? How can you achieve 15% overall growth when growing by only 12% and 4% within the constituent segments?
Is there any evidence that "positive growth in active contributors" is a better measure of community strength than the ratio of active admins to active contributors? If so, what is that evidence?
There are strong arguments to the contrary from induction. Admins already complain that they are overworked and stressed by frequent difficult content disputes and occasional personal threats. As the ratio of admins to contributors decreases, that workload and the stress associated with it is certain to increase.
The problems with conflict of interest editing described in this letter are very real. There is no evidence that merely trying to grow more contributors while active admin participation plummets is making that problem any better. Merely trying to grow contributors without attending to the relative number of active admins is likely contrary to the goal of community strength.
What's the definition of "active" for this graph?
Wow - that's a pretty strict definition of active... it's about 300% more strict than we're using anywhere else on this wiki (5 edits per month).
Do you believe the trend would be any different at a different activity threshold? If so, why?
I have to say, I've never been so keen on 5 edits per month being the definition of active. That's incredibly few edits. I know it's always really hard to draw lines and any number one comes up with is going to be arbitrary. But five edits is just a little over one a week. And, really, how much can be achieved making one edit a week? Five edits would barely constitute one sweep of a day's changes on a watchlist of a thousand articles.
Obviously ONE edit could be the drafting of an entire new article or an entire draft policy that becomes a tremendous boon to the project, but I suspect people that do that kind of thing are also people who make a large number of edits.
All that said, I don't propose we change it now!
There is some evidence that using the 5 edits per month will show less attrition, based on other attrition statistics.
Incidentally, Erik Zachte added some history on the "active" stat on the active contributors page.
What's missing for me in this letter is any mention, even in passing, of volunteer recognition. I really feel this would be an important step towards encouraging new and existing volunteers.
HI Bodnotbod -
That letter is meant to highlight the three major buckets of work to be done. Details of those priority areas (including volunteer recognition) can be found at Strategic Plan 2010-2015/Priorities.
Also, we seeded the Strategic Plan 2010-2015 page with some stuff, but it's just a draft. If it's important to highlight things like volunteer recognition, then we should have a discussion about that. This current phase is all about evaluation and prioritization for the movement.
I an others have repeatedly raised this issue. I intend to raise it again, and the reasons I believe it has been unfairly shut out (specifically, repeatedly against the facilitators' own instructions) in person on Saturday.
Again, it hasn't been shut out. It's a HUGE component of the plan.
It wasn't mentioned in this one, single document from the E.D. to the Board. I hardly think that means it was "shut out". :)
Which part of what plan? Please link to what you are referring to.
Sorry, quite right - I should have linked to Strategic_Plan_2010-2015/Priorities, which includes volunteer recognition in the second set of priorities (note, by the way, that these are not hierarchically numbered, but convenience numbered... things in Priority 1 are no more or less important than Priority 2... it's just a construct for keeping track of them)
The letter emphasizes the desire to increase the readership. However, that raw number does not seem to account for how many pages each reader views and for how long. I believe such a detailed figure would be hard to come by, but the emphasis should be on the later. It is more important to have 1 million readers spend a month on Wiki than having 2 million people spending a week on Wiki. What we need to do is increase our quality so that people coming to Wiki will have a pleasant experience the first time and continue.
To do this, Wikis will have to 1. provide well-written content and 2. content catering to what people want. Part of my previous concern was a de-emphasis on Africa and China. My concern this time is about what we should emphasize, and I feel that if we stress well-written content and also pertinent content (two different things with some overlap), then we can appeal to the readers more and hook them.
Remember, reputation is key to getting new readers, and our reputation will go up if we are able to keep people satisfied for a longer period of time. As such, I would stress that an emphasis should be put on attaining high-quality and pertinent works and finding a way to remove any problems that get in the way of these works. Ottava Rima 17:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
A very high priority is, in fact, being placed in exactly that place. Priority 2 for the strategic plan includes a component to deal specifically with article quality and content. :)
Ah, but many experts that have proven themselves to make high quality work have been pushed out of projects by people who have little in terms of content work or anything dealing with content. This would need to be addressed by WMF and there would need to be some bureaucratic changes at various Wikis. Ottava Rima 18:03, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
Ah, but see, now that's a different problem than the one you initially identified, isn't it? :) You're dealing with governance issues on individual wikis now, which the Wikimedia Foundation has long made clear it does not intend to delve into. Wikis are self-governed.
Except when it comes to issues like BLP and other matters that the WMF has the various Wikis abide by. I have dealt with various issues in which the WMF has made it clear that there should be various things fixed or dealt with. Now, what I am saying is that it is one thing to label it as a priority and another to do what is necessary to fulfill the priority. We need some teeth for the proposal.
As an aside: The fact that we don't currently have numbers on things such as how long readers spend on various pages is a huge deficiency, and it's one that the first priority (ops) tries to address. In general, we need to have a better infrastructure for measuring our performance in different areas. Obviously, our challenges are more complex given privacy concerns, but they are definitely overcomeable.
