Mandate
@Randomran and all:
I think from reading these thoughts and ideas from this task force that bad behavior may actually be the single largest factor inhibiting or blocking quality content.
- bad conduct keeps conscientious users from contributing
- bad conduct obscures the truth
- bad conduct interferes with the mandate of Wikipedia
- bad conduct interferes with the content itself
- bad conduct keeps Wikipedia from being a welcoming community for new users and for less experienced users
Randomran, isn't quality also your task force's highest priority, in truth, when trying to make the Wikipedia community healthier? Why else make the community healthier than to make the user experience better and the content of a higher quality?
You wouldn't be working on a good strategy if you didn't recognize how everything is interconnected. But I think the value of giving us different focuses is that we might notice different things. If we all focus on the same issues equally, we limit the value of the process. I think that's equally as bad as pigeonholing us into avoiding each other's issues.
Anyway, I'm here to help shed some light on the community health angles, and I agree community health is a big factor that inhibits quality content. Just don't lose sight of the underlying quality issue as you work on that.
Yep, agreed. While I see that these things are interconnected, I really want to leave community health issues, as much as possible, to the community health task force, or encourage you to at very least work in close cooperation with them. It doesn't make sense for every task force to emerge with exactly the same set of recommendations, all centered around community health. We recognize that community health is a problem. That's why there's a task force with highly skilled and motivated people working on it. I know that it feeds your discussions on quality, but please monitor their stuff and know that they're working on it, and drawing almost exactly the same conclusions you are. My hope is that you can feel freed of that particular aspect and move on to the other things that affect quality of content.
I must say the following. You guys seem to assume that only English wikipedia exists, and nothing else. However, I believe that whereas the content quality issues are more or less shared by all projects, other issues like for instance hostile behavior are very much different and can not be discussed as the main focus of this taskforce. I would therefore suggest to concentrate entirely on the quality content issues.--Yaroslav Blanter 19:31, 7 December 2009 (UTC)