Supportive communication and missing incentives on Wikipedia, and more

Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle (a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center) announced a new paper last week ("'Be Nice': Wikipedia norms for supportive communication", preprint available online). The abstract reads as follows:

Wikipedia is acknowledged to have been home to ”some bitter disputes”. Indeed, conflict at Wikipedia is said to be “as addictive as cocaine”. Yet, such observations are not cynical commentary but motivation for a collection of social norms. These norms speak to the intentional stance and communicative behaviors Wikipedians should adopt when interacting with one another. In the following pages, I provide a survey of these norms on the English Wikipedia and argue they can be characterized as supportive based on Jack Gibb’s classic communication article 'Defensive Communication'.

Gibb's 1961 paper distinguishes between "supportive" and "defensive" communication, as summarized by Reagle: "Supportive behavior/climates are characterized by non-judgmental description, problem orientation, spontaneity, empathy, equality, and provisionalism. Their 'defensive' opposites are evaluation, control, strategy, neutrality, superiority, and certainty." Using these twelve characteristics, Reagle classified the text of 104 pages from Wikipedia, including policies, guidelines, essays and humorous texts. Examples included Wikipedia:No legal threats, Wikipedia:Right to vanish, User:Dlohcierekim/apathy, Wikipedia:Thankspam, Wikipedia:Five pillars of evil, and Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, revert, revert. The majority was found to be in the "supportive" realm.

A book by Reagle based on his 2008 dissertation about Wikipedia is to appear next month ("Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia"). A Signpost review is in preparation.

An August 9 Newsweek article by Tony Dokoupil and Angela Wu argued that "Crowd Sourcing Loses Steam" because "most people simply don’t want to work for free", adding to the longstanding debate on whether user-generated content can replace that produced by paid workers (see e.g. Carr-Benkler wager). Among other examples, Newsweek named Wikipedia: "In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That’s when Wikipedia [...] began to falter as a social movement." This statement was apparently based on the statistical research by Felipe Ortega, which had led to debates about Wikipedia's future last year after it was covered in the Wall Street Journal (see Signpost coverage on 23 November, 7 December, and 30 November of 2009). Ortega criticized the Newsweek article for implying "additional conclusions that don't apply to Wikipedia".

Dokoupil and Wu appeared to argue that in the past, most Wikipedians had contributed to the project because it was seen as fashionable at the time:

The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.

Apart from Google's Kiswahili Challenge (where the company offered prizes for contributions to the Swahili Wikipedia), the article also cites the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative as evidence for its thesis that goodwill motivations are not enough: "Wikipedia’s new recruiting push will not rely merely on highfalutin promises about pooled greatness and 'the sum of all human knowledge.' Instead, the organization is hoping to get students to write and edit entries as part of their coursework."

Cliff Lampe, a professor at Michigan State University who was quoted in the Newsweek article, commented that "the reporter had an axe to grind, and I did my best to thwart the predefined narrative".

• A new tool called Linkypedia analyzes external links on the English Wikipedia to a given web site (providing more information than MediaWiki's own external link search function) intending "to help cultural heritage institutions that are putting content online to see how wikipedians are citing and annotating their stuff". It was mentioned in a talk at the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) annual meeting last week (summary, slides), which described the insertion of links into Wikipedia articles as an important SEO tool for archives.
• The August 7 print edition of The Independent incorrectly stated that the music festival The Big Chill initially had a different name, which happened to have some obscene connotations. On August 9, blogger Kat Arney noted the error and traced it back to the Wikipedia article about the festival, as did The Guardian's "Media Monkey" blog on the following day. The erroneous information had been inserted into the Wikipedia article without giving a reference on August 4, and has since been removed.
• On August 10, The Huffington Post listed 15 Surprising Facts about Wikipedia.
• On his "Information Is Beautiful" blog, David McCandless presented some of the "lamest edit wars" from Wikipedia's own list of them, in a visualization covering such examples as "should wee link to the article on Nintendo wii or the urine?" and "is it NPOV (Neutral Point Of View) to say an animal is 'cute'". The infographic was linked by many blogs during the following days, with one on CNET UK calling it "pure gold". On his "The Wikipedian" blog, William Beutler (User:WWB) harshly criticized it as "so lazy as to be misleading, glib as to be condescending, and generally unhelpful that I’m inclined to say that it sets back the public understanding of how Wikipedia works all by itself." For example, the size of each edit war in the graphic corresponded to the total edits of the article, not the edits expended in the edit war, and its position on the timeline matched the article's inception, not the time during which the edit war occurred. McCandless conceded that Beutler had made "fair points", but that the visualization was "light-hearted, playful" and that "[p]age edits [were] used as barometer of controversy".

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Wikipedia's communication norms analyzed

"[C]onflict at Wikipedia is said to be “as addictive as cocaine”." Like cocaine it is only addictive to those who are addicted to it. Disputes occur, they are resolved or not, sure there's always scope to "chime in" on ANI, Arbcom cases, RFCs, heated deletion debates - but most stuff just happens, or happens and gets reverted when it shouldn't have. Rich Farmbrough, 18:28, 17 August 2010 (UTC).[reply]

• "Reagle classified the text of 104 pages from Wikipedia ... The majority was found to be in the "supportive" realm."
• I found that conclusion hard to believe, until I looked at his paper. As it turns out, all of the 104 articles come from the WP: space, none from the Talk: space.
• That's like assessing a corporation's workplace culture by reading its policies and procedures manual. Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 04:11, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't quite see why it was necessary to look at his paper to avoid that misunderstanding; IMHO the Signpost article did state that the paper was about norms. Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:48, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, you're right, I misunderstood what he was referring to. Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 08:19, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia"—let us hope the first two words will be hyphenated, at least. Faith collaboration sounds like Sunday morning at the pulpit. Tony (talk) 07:38, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Newsweek: Wikipedia contributors need materialistic incentives

At the Campus Ambassador Training, the Foundation people said they had also tried to diffuse the Newsweek reporter, but she would not falter in her insistence on the statement that the Foundation must be giving some type of additional incentives to the Ambassadors to get them to participate, such as beer or pizza or money (none of which we are receiving from the Foundation). The whole room was laughing at such a bizarre statement, everyone who was in the room had applied for the position because either: a) they were active wikipedians, b) they were active participants in previous experiences that used Wikipedia in the classroom or c) they were part of programs at their respective University that wanted to make it easier to work with Wikipedia in the classroom. Silly reporters with Objectives! Whatever happened to an objective press!Sadads (talk) 11:55, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

When was editing Wikipedia cool? Why didn't I get the memo? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 18:39, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Haha, Sadads (talk) 18:42, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I guess the institutional memory doesn't go back far enough to know the answer to Cryptic's question. Back around January 2006, there was a significant share of new users who were attracted to Wikipedia because it was "cool". They were identifiable by their inordinate attention to their users pages (which led to the Userbox Wars), lots of edits to Talk pages, & few edits to articles -- all of which were so poor that they were immediately reverted. I'm sure a larger than usual share of newbies were bitten & driven away from Wikipedia at the time, although some of these wannabes wised up & became productive members. It's the same dynamic which encourages people to be "artists": they indulge in the wild, unconventional Bohemian lifestyle to the fullest, while failing to produce a single painting, sculpture, novel or even a single line of poetry. (Real artists spend most of their free time alone, working on their art. And since art doesn't pay very well -- if at all -- most of their time is consumed with the job that pays their bills. So, in the end, they don't get to enjoy that Bohemian lifestyle much; many don't even have much of a life.) -- llywrch (talk) 16:33, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If Wiki started giving out incentives to contributors it would create one hell of a mess. First of all previous contributors would start applying for their incentive in lieu and given the number of active contributors, even incentives of a penny per 1000 words would get very expensive, very quickly. It would also bring about a situation where people are editing just to get the incentive, irregardless of expertise or knowledge which would lead to huge amounts of irrelevant info being added to pages. Lastly, it would be the death of Wiki as we know it. The only way (that I can see) to combat these problems would be to charge a subscription fee to either editors (which could be offset against good contributions) or users. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kendroche (talk • contribs) 14:53, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think the Swahili-language experiment, if it was that, proved to be pretty ineffective. New contributors claimed their prizes and left the project as fast as they came in, as I recall. The volunteer model seems to work, fortunately. Carrite (talk) 16:28, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Edit wars visualization

Regardless of the point of that edit war visualization, not recognizing that Cute was actually a piped link to Knut (polar bear) is pretty sloppy. Seriously, 21 total edits? That should have been a hint to double-check that you're using the correct data. Reach Out to the Truth 15:42, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

16 Strange Things

• At the Huffington Post the editorial content of the "15 Surprising Facts ..." post has been "removed due to editorial consideration". But the post-page and the readers' comments on it remain. D-uh! VivekM (talk) 14:58, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]