A more social and personal editing experience

As far as my experience on Wikipedia goes, users have been ruled by or chose to maintain anonymity at the expense of social interaction and sometimes proper collaboration. The "mysticism" that surrounds editors around here does not help in creating a fun editing atmosphere and it further enforces the impenetrable and exclusive community character that is felt by newbies leading them to feel alienated and unwelcomed.

I could not help but feel that the trends shown on the chart roughly correspond to social networking websites popularity boom, one can not deny after all that socializing is a rudimentary need, one that can not be satisfyingly fulfilled in the Wikipedia community. I think Wikipedia could learn from the hits of social networking websites, Newbies and old-timers alike should be given an option to better present themselves through a more social network-like profile page and have the ability to socialize and share with more ease. The step announced by the foundation are a step in the right way, even though they came a little late and i wish they help making WP a more satisfying experience for readers and editors alike.63.216.112.56 08:33, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with this. I have built working relationships with other editors, and we even occasionally agree in advance to "tag team" in starting new articles, but you have to fight the system to do that. OTOH, I strongly believe in the notion of an anonymous editor from the reader's perspective, whose personal expertise is irrelevant, and I would not be comfortable with an editor community that was so social there was no room for the editor who prefers to remain under the radar.

Perhaps we need an editor's community space that is separate from the current talk page, where people can ask for help, suggest areas that need work, and generally chat. Perhaps we need several of these, loosely federated, around different topics (TV, medieval and renaissance, gaming, [Language] lit). I'd love to see structures less formal than projects - "Hey, gang, who wants to help me knock out some improvements on our articles on medieval paleography over the next few weeks - I have some cool new examples I can scan!". - PKM 18:23, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that many of the articles I have written acquired one or more "within the scope of the XXX project" banners. However, I have never figured out what that meant. I tried to work out how to join these projects (the ones that sounded closest to my interests), thinking that somewhere there would be a mailing list where the group would do some coordination around article-writing (or something) or that I might get advice from them. But, after the banner appears, nothing more happens.

So now I get rather annoyed by these project banners, because it seems to be just about "empire building". Someone somewhere is thinking "Oh, I am a Big Cheese because I've claimed all these Wikipedia pages as being under my control." I've been tempted to delete them (but haven't for fear of the Big Cheese).

So, I would love to know where you go to build working relationships with other editors. I am very happy to collaborate with others, but I can't find them.

Kerry - posting a note on your English Wikipedia talk page.

PKM, thank you but I don't think you grasped what I am asking.

I went to the project you mentioned, but like every project I have visited, I cannot find how to be part of the community. How do I sign up for the mailing list? I tried adding the recommended wiki text to my userpage to say I was a member of a project, hoping that maybe that would somehow initiate my membership but still nothing happened.

Apparently I am part of projects but I don't know how to communicate with them. How can I collaborate with people I cannot talk to?

PS I am also a Women of A Certain Age. And my interest in Lucy Osburn is because (many years ago in a decade far far away - I like SF too) I was in Osburn House at school (named in her honour). I was recently a small player in raising money to Digitise The Dawn, a late 19th century feminist newspaper in Australia. So I am interested in Australian Women's Biography.

http://digitisethedawn.org/

There isn't a mailing list, but you can talk to us here.

If you add your name to the member's list, we'll know you are interested, and you can also post on the talk pages of other project members.

There's also some discussion on the WWI task force talk page if that interests you.

Sorry to be stupid, but I still don't get it. That's a page. How do I know if someone has answered me? It is like my Talk Pages. I knew you had written something there only because you told me in this thread. But otherwise I would not have known. How would I know if someone had written something new on the page you pointed me to? How would I know if my question was answered? I tried to write on a page like that once but I got a message about edit conflict, so I don't even understand how to write on one.

I'll answer on your talk page.

I'd say something stronger than "cumbersome". I'd say "inefficient" and "ineffective". Wiki pages are great tools for shared information. They are not communications tools. From what you describe, I have to be logged into Wikipedia to see these updates and I then have to constantly visit various pages and read the entire thing to check to see if things are changed.

I am involved with a lot of projects (outside of Wikipedia) and a mailing list seems to be the most basic tool that every project uses. I find Google Groups works fine for many projects (people receive new messages via email but the WWW page maintains an archive of discussion).

Since you say this is a new project, would it be worth the experiment of creating a mailing list to see if it makes the project more effective?

Please ask the project members on the project discussion page. I am the wrong person to ask. I personally loathe mailing lists, and I don't like having my email full of notifications from WP, Facebook, Yammer, Twitter, and all the other tools I use, but that's my personal style.  :-) I know most people feel differently.

Actually, this cuts both ways. The old boys club divided in camps who form shifting battle lines based on camaraderie and personal antagonisms (even if originating from content disagreements), aka the "warlord encyclopedia", is a real issue. So, shifting Wikipedia closer to an Anonymous versions of Facebook may not be such a great idea as long as "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog".

Keeping in mind the ultimate goal of the project, having a system where individual edits are anonymous, so you really can only comment on the edits, would help with that, but then there's the issue of how to correlate and filter out the unhelpful edits, easily. (For instance, assuming that all newcomers will eventually embrace NPOV is totally unrealistic. Cranks and PR guys do edit there.) Right now, the main way to deal with that is the implicit reputation system given by the edit history. However, experience with mega-socking banned users, who can muster more IP addresses than you can shake a block at shows that ultimately keeping bad content out is only marginally dependent on self-identifying long term user histories. In other words, content-based (instead of username-based) user histories can work. (Something like the wikiscanner is also worth considering.)

WP:OWN is a real issue on many articles these days, because the number of editors per article continues to decrease, and the golden rule for small scale conflicts on Wikipedia is: whoever has most time on their hands wins unless blocked or banned. There are even elaborate essays on how to bias a given Wikipedia page or topic area to your heart's content (or pocket advantage), while not getting kicked out of the game.

Of course, bureaucracy being what it is on Wikipedia, there's little hope for significant change, even if it were supported by a ton of empirical evidence. The social environment that Wikipedia created is self-reinforcing, meaning that mostly people who agree with how stuff happens stick around, and they in turn reinforce the social interaction patterns that drew them in initially. Defeat in detail applies to the trickle of newcomers who think otherwise.