Grants talk:Project/MSIG/Welcoming Newcomers Research Initiatives: Analysis, Tools, and Implementation

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Overall Positive Feedback[edit]

Projects that work to identify and establish processes for the upkeep of policy pages will always be welcome. Keeping those pages neutral and truly comprehensive means that a viable resource is kept relevant. This project aims to do this, and that is commendable! This project has the potential to give policy documents–the backbone of Wikimedia projects–the attention that they deserve. YPam (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback For Improvement[edit]

Editor retention at the local level is complex and not limited to a need the identified need for updating policy pages. The application team will need to demonstrate an understanding of these complexities and provide more clarity one how and why the project is choosing this focus.

Currently languages exist that have a comprehensive policy breakdown (Croatian, Armenian etc.), has the project team considered including these languages? In relation to this, has the team considered that translation support might also be required or this application, as it is nt currently included in the planning. YPam (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for posting the feedback, Yop. I’m really glad to see that there’s agreement on the importance of retention for Wikimedia projects. Policy and help pages are essential to manage the expectations on how to contribute, collaborate and more generally behave in Wikimedia. I must say that while these pages impact on retention, they are not the only factor and neither the only one this project will take into account (editor interactions will be tackled in research line 2).
I cannot agree more. Policy and Help pages (let’s not forget about them) are essential. While they serve a necessary and indispensible purpose, the growth in number of policies, guidelines, and documentation has been reported by several studies (Butler et al., 2008; Heaberlin & DeDeo, 2016)[1] [2]. This increased complexity is considered a cost with negative impact on production (Suh et al., 2009)[3]. I believe that by helping editors keeping them up-to-date, we can find a better compromise between their purpose and their potential to overwhelm newcomers.
In regards to the inclusion of languages, the main idea is to use a set of languages for initial research and prototyping (e.g., Catalan, Polish, Igbo, etc.) and then expand to the rest of them. We can assume that indicators that work for these languages in terms of showing what is going on in these pages would work for the rest. However, by taking into account cases as these you mention from the very beginning we may be able to find some other indicators that are valuable for these cases too and also bring interesting information about the rest. We will definitely take them into account and dig more into the variability and diversity of policy and help page development in an initial phase of the research. Marcmiquel (talk) 14:36, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  1. ↑ Butler, Brian; Joyce, Elisabeth; Pike, Jacqueline (2008). "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy". Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '08 (New York, New York, USA: ACM Press). doi:10.1145/1357054.1357227. 
  2. ↑ Heaberlin, Bradi; DeDeo, Simon (2016-04-20). "The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network". Future Internet 8 (4): 14. ISSN 1999-5903. doi:10.3390/fi8020014. 
  3. ↑ Suh, Bongwon; Convertino, Gregorio; Chi, Ed H.; Pirolli, Peter (2009). "The singularity is not near". Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration - WikiSym '09 (New York, New York, USA: ACM Press). doi:10.1145/1641309.1641322. 
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