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[return to "Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity"]
1. swebs+yy[view] [source] 2020-05-26 11:37:57
>>elsewh+(OP)
Does anyone know why this is happening? I just assumed Reddit, Youtube, Stackoverflow, etc were doing it because they were being paid by the DNC or various political action groups. But Wikipedia is a non-profit with a good chunk of money in reserve.
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2. DanBC+Qy[view] [source] 2020-05-26 11:41:00
>>swebs+yy
Lots of people try to eidt Wikipedia and are driven away by arseholes, and this is a problem that Wikipedia has been trying to fix for years.

Things came to a head last year when a prominent editor was harassing users for years and the English wikipedia failed to address it. It came to the attention of Wikimedia foundation who took action against the editor, and that caused a storm.

Personally I think they need to do a lot more than a CoC, especially if it's going to be applied by Wikipedia.

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3. finnth+n11[view] [source] 2020-05-26 14:33:41
>>DanBC+Qy
So wikipeda is moving out of the age of "how will we get anyone to show up?" into "to get even more people to show up, how do we force better customer service skills?"

I don't get why projects think a top-down straighten-up-and-fly-right edict is how you retain driveby contributors (I get why they do it, I don't get why they make that the primary/only change). That's a highly visible but overall small part of the barrier to entry. Online volunteer collaboration projects often assume anyone motivated to participate will self-train. Making the surface level language nicer only keeps people reading long enough to find out that they've walked into a busy office full of people working with tasks, process and goals they don't understand. Lots of the day-to-day in an office puts efficiency above approachability, and I don't think that's always wrong.

Surely WMF would have better results if they actually worked on the barrier to entry by explicitly adding to staffing(/recruiting volunteers) to onboard new editors. e.g. shepherd their work through onboarding-focused helpers until the newbie is ready to drop into the office proper. Use the failures of conversion to identify where there was a lack of handholding (and build a system for that), vs a lack of interest.

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