The conservatism of Wikimedians
Oliver Keyes (User:Ironholds) is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. The following article on the conservatism of the Wikimedia movement was adapted from an August 27 2011 post on his website, Quominus.org. Oliver previously spoke about related issues in his address to the 2011 Wikimania conference "Hippies with Guns: how ideological conflict shapes Wikipedia and what we can learn from it".
The views expressed are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.
The status quo
Above is one of my favourite images at the moment – a graphical representation of all the key words found in taskforce planning for the Wikimedia Strategy project, in which the community got together and basically crowdsourced a long-term strategic plan. The reason I find it interesting isn’t because of the words which are displayed prominently, but the words that aren’t; specifically, those looking to move the community forward neglected the word “community” (slightly to the right of “work”) and the word “social” (slightly above “working”, and, in comparative terms, dwarfed by the word “php”. Sigh.)
I’m not going to lie, this doesn’t surprise me. Wikimedians actually tend to put a fairly small amount of stock in changing things to boost the community or the social aspects of the movement. Whether it’s WikiLove, help reform or any other project to ameliorate the less pleasant aspects of the projects, the same refrain comes from an annoyingly large chunk of the community – “I managed to edit and contribute to the projects without [whatever is being proposed], so other people can too”.
The source of this is fairly clear – people don’t like change, and because existing editors are largely comfortable with the current situation (after all, they built it, either accidentally or deliberately, and since they’ve stayed around we can conclude they don’t mind it that much) they don’t really see that there’s so much of a problem. In a way, I reckon this is a result of our successes more than our failures; while new user numbers are dropping, we maintain an enviably high retention rate for existing editors. As a result, experienced users don’t see a problem. Why would they? Oh, sure, they hear rumours that user numbers are dropping, but all their friends are still here, so it can’t be that bad. Cries that “yes, all your friends are still here, but you just missed out on a thousand new ones” aren’t met or internalised well.
The problem
My problem with all of this isn’t just that there is genuinely a lot of stuff we need to do to Fix the Wiki that people don’t get, it’s that this position is based on a pair of fallacies that the individuals in question could, with a bit of effort, think through and avoid. When people say “I managed to edit and contribute to the projects without [whatever is being proposed], so other people can too”, what they’re saying is:
- The on-wiki system has remained the same
- The people we’re trying to recruit are the same as the people we already have
- The on-wiki system has remained the same
People drop ideas for reform on the grounds that they managed and therefore anyone else can. This is based on the fallacy that the system has remained the same since they started, which is of course not the case – except, possibly, for our newest users. Even users who are a year old are dealing with a completely different environment from the one they started off with; policy bloats, our tolerance for expansion has been reduced, and the community has become increasingly harsh and automated in its dealings with new users over time. The fact that the system in 2006 when Exampleexperienceduser joined was nice and characterised by decent, friendly communication and a million opportunities to expand the wiki does not mean that the current one is.
- The people we’re trying to recruit are the same as the people we already have
In other words – for the aforementioned statement to be true, the potential new editors now have to be largely identical in terms of motivation, interests and enthusiasm to the existing users. We can’t say that our current system works for new users because it works for established users unless there are actually similarities between the two groups.
Why this matters
The problem is that there aren’t. Early adopters of Wikipedia were, by-and-large, nerds. Utter nerds. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean that in a “it was 2001 and they were on the Internet” way. Longhairs from the 1960s and 1970s counterculture movement (cf. Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, recommended), early computer and Internet proponents, FOSS addicts, codejunkies, we had them all. Early adopters were people who saw a nascent project – or later on, an established project that everyone with any academic or political value ripped the hell out of – as something it was worth contributing to, for free. Early adopters were happy to use a pseudo-HTML markup scheme to contribute and delve deep into the raw guts of an article or talkpage to make their views or facts known.
What we’re dealing with now in terms of potential volunteers is largely different. People bandy around the term “Facebook generation”, but it’s true; we’re dealing with a completely distinct group of people. 2011 users are likely to be people who have grown up with the Internet and with Wikipedia. If you’re at university now, Wikipedia will have been around since you entered secondary education, and possibly before that. It is no longer new and exciting, it is no longer a step into the unknown, and so the motivations of people who do try to contribute are likely to be pretty damn different. Moreover, the people we’re dealing with don’t want to have to deal with markup, or raw pagetext in this fashion; they aren’t used to looking under the hood. If they’re WordPress users they live in a world in which looking under the hood is not mandatory; if they’re Facebook users they live in a world in which looking under the hood isn’t even possible.
So we’re not dealing with the same system, or even the same people; we’ve got a bloated and increasingly unfriendly wiki on the one hand and a pool of potential recruits with vastly different motives and expectations from our norms on the other. This means that we can’t simply sit in our ivory tower and make judgements about whether Wikimedia is failing, or succeeding, or what our potential users expect; we have to go to those potential users and ask them. The problem is that the Foundation has been doing exactly that in a lot of places, trying to get information on what people want from the horse’s mouth, and when acting on the data (as with WikiLove) has largely been met with a big stubborn sign saying Do Not Want.
What we can do about it
Wikimedia is a fantastic movement. It’s the Whole Earth Catalogue for the 21st century, a smorgasbord of educational material and trivia that for the first time offers the potential for people to truly take their education into their own hands – after a fashion, anyway. But if we want to live up to the expectations, if we want these projects to continue, we have to start accepting the data people bring us and accepting that we might need to make some changes. We need to throw out our assumptions, throw out our fallacies and innate resistance to change, and seek to build a movement that people want to contribute to rather than one people don’t mind contributing to.
Discuss this story
OttawaAC (talk) 03:45, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As for your comments about markup, those are the words that cause me to believe, bluntly, that you don't know WTF you are talking about. Wikimarkup in itself is very simple & easy to learn: in almost 9 years of writing articles, for most of what I do I only use a dozen tags. IMHO, the only trick any newbie realy needs to know -- beyond the basics of spelling, grammar & punctuation -- is that to create a new paragraph one presses the enter key twice. Now, had you mentioned things like image syntax, or how user unfriendly our templates are -- lack of documentation, not well organized for end users, not consistent between projects -- I'd agree with you 100%. But because everyone says wikimarkup is hard to use, resources get thrown at that, & at creating helps for using templates.
Another area would be how to write better encyclopedia articles. You can find books on how to write in many different genres -- poetry, autobiography, novels & short stories, resumes -- but there's nothing on how to write an encyclopedia article. I know this because I've looked. It's not because the information is proprietary: from what I've learned, the editorial staff at Encyclopedia Britannica & World Book don't know either. AFAICS, the art of writing encyclopedia articles hasn't changed in a major way since 1800. Maybe we'd all benefit if the Foundation devoted some resources to that end.
BTW, I mention a few other areas worth investigating here. In case anyone is looking for a topic for a graduate thesis.
And some long-term editors burn out because they encounter a snot-nosed attitude like yours, & wonder WTF are they trying to improve articles when it's clear nobody cares. If established editors burn out, why should anyone care when the Foundation can send a team out to recruit three or four times more newbies to replace them? The myth of Wikipedia is that we all can be treated like hamburger because Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced creation; we're all doing this in our spare time with no cost to anyone. After all, properly-run oureach efforts -- funded with multi-million dollars grants from famous foundations -- will replace contributors as they burn out. And no one needs to pay all of these volunteers or deal with personnel issues, either.
Plus la change
Progressivism is about starting good changes, and conservatism is about stopping bad changes, and obviously we need both but I'm inclined to agree that the Wikicomplex in the past year or two has been too much on the side of preventing harm to the good things we've already got. Yes, I'm comfortable with the distinction between double square brackets for jumps and curly ones for templates and <ref> in angles but back in 2006 it took a little getting used to, even though I had been a nerd since long before anyone thought it might be a good word. And yes, I complained about the new default display skin, but after two months it grew on me. So, my fellow old-timers shouldn't worry so much.
Saturday I spent a couple hours helping cute young art students with a Wikimedia outreach project at the Museum of Modern Art and though they are brighter than I ever was, some of the concepts struck them a bit odd, mostly because the concepts are leftovers from the nerdism of my beloved 20th century. Confession, the ages of the three under my special care added up to about my own age. Anyway if changes can be made that attract that kind of mind but lose a similar number of my own kind, it's sure to be a net profit for the enterprize, and I don't think the good folks who work on changing our software will so egregiously bungle the job as to drive me or many of my useful but somewhat stodgy kind away. Jim.henderson (talk) 23:58, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Llywrch's argument has two main components I'd like to address. The first is that long-term editors don't enough recognition for their work, and that whether you know, they should be doing the work out of the goodness of their hearts or not, that continued organization of the site to aid community-building and pats on the back (beyond trinkets like barnstars but real, substantive things like emotional support, "space" to vent, etc.) does increase retention. I agree with this. The second component is that somehow this premise (that wikimedia needs to be a more pleasant place for all editors, old and new alike), forms a sound basis for barring implementation of changes to wikipedia to make it more accessible, because doing so might be one more offense to old-time editors. I can't agree with this, and will explain why.
The benefit to wikipedia in new editorship from adapting accessiblity measures such as WYSIWYG (which I'll use as my key example here) will far outweigh the likely small decrease in editorship that will accompany the adoption of a WYSIWYG GUI. Some will resign in protest. But so what? The fundamental problem of maintaining long-term editors and keeping them happy will not be solved by holding back a GUI (In contrast, implementing a GUI will solve several huge usability problems - in this way, innovations which are held back because they would be a mere inconvenience for frequent editors cause much greater pain for the general public). With this in mind, veterans using their influence to starve public outreach initiatives as a means to draw attention to their problems will not help wikipedia overall.
If we really should be all about fixing those problems of retention, we should run more studies and campaigns to analyze and promote retention among long-term editors. We can do this in parellel or addition to the current work being done, it is not one or the other. We shouldn't be seeking to quash efforts to solve other problems of wikipedia out of... what, jealousy? There are a lot of problems that motivate editor attrition, and I don't think WYSIWYG happening on wikipedia, for example, is really high up on that list; so I'm not convinced there's a sound basis for opposing it on those grounds. Again, at worst it may lead to a minor amount of attrition in the context of an the astronomical improvement in accessibility. (as for "WTF" ironhold is talking about in re: usability, Llywrch, try to recall the Usability and Experience studies. That's the best data we have and it supports the idea that wikimarkup is not always intuitive and functions as among the most significant obstacles between being on the outside to getting to try out investing one's time editing on wikipedia.)
If you're really concerned about editor attrition you should be thinking about how to publicize it as an issue (within the community) and solve those bigger, certain problems of recognition, support, and emotional burn-out. Those interested in working on retention should orient themselves to creating programs to address those major causal factors of attrition, rather than wasting their time voting down other solutions to other problems and obstructing any progress on any subject whatsover until WMF or other wikipedians pay funding and attention to their particular pointed agenda (this isn't the U.S. Congress). We can solve multiple important problems at once. Lets do that. Let's not pretend the solutions of retention are the same things as the problems of accessability. --Monk of the highest order(t) 05:44, 14 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting but
It isn't that we haven't changed, its that we've changed in the wrong direction. The wiki changed radically around 2007/2008 with a big shift from improving articles to tagging them for hypothetical others to improve. If we really we want to get back to an open and collaborative wiki we should replace most of the article templates with hidden categories and foster a spirit of only using maintenance templates as an admission of failure; For example you've tried to categorise something but can't find the right category, just as at the moment you'd add a hoax tag if you're pretty sure something is a hoax but you want a second opinion. The other big change from that era was the inflation of standards at RFA which has directly made us a more closed and less welcoming community. That change was not consensus based but a ratcheting effect of blocking minorities; Once we have over 30% who will oppose over some arbitrary requirement then RFA gets a bit more difficult even if two thirds were prepared to support candidates who didn't have that level of editcountitis or other newly increased criteria. ϢereSpielChequers 11:19, 14 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]