Editing team/Community Conversations

Welcome! The Editing Team uses this page (and its sub-page) to organize the research we do to better understand the needs and challenges people experience when contributing to Wikipedia.

In this context, "people" refers to the volunteers the Editing Team is intentionally centering within a given project.

Active Research
In the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the Editing Team will be working on a set of improvements for the visual editor to help new volunteers from within Sub-Saharan Africa understand and apply the policies and guidelines necessary to publish changes they are proud of and projects consider useful.

We are using this page to expand and refine how we understand the needs and challenges people experience when contributing to Wikipedia so that we can ensure the people we are centering in this work benefit from the solutions we are working on.

Patterns
''This section will contain patterns that relate the salient pieces of information gathered in the "Notes" section below. Where "patterns" in this context means hypotheses, assumptions, needs, etc.''

Community Conversation: 28 October 2022

 * Attendees
 * Notes
 * Help is hard to find.
 * Newcomers have a difficult time navigating Wikipedia and finding/accessing the help they need on their own.
 * Feedback Senior Contributors sometimes hear from Juniors: all of the wiki pages look the same, which can make it difficult for them to remember/revisit pages they might have seen in the past.
 * Help pages and conversations with Senior Contributors are also long and filled with jargon (WP:SHORTCUTS) which – to newcomers – can feel exclusionary and disempowering.
 * Wikipedia uses unfamiliar terms for common functions (e.g. "Talk" instead of "Discussion" or "Inbox")
 * Most people don't know how to search and find the answers.  If you want information on how to add color to an article, you search for "Color" and you end up at the encyclopedia article Color instead of at Help:Using colours.
 * Difficult to decipher how and why policies are applied.
 * Inclusion decisions/content standards are applied differently to different people. This discourages people and causes them to feel excluded.
 * Some articles at the English Wikipedia remain that are short and unreferenced. Meanwhile, many Africans have the articles they write declined despite being longer and sourced. Without it being clear what is accepted and what isn't, people who receive unfavorable judgements are led to think they are not welcomed here.
 * English Wikipedia says "no" a lot.
 * When you get blocked, it's easy/intuitive to think "Oh no, I did something wrong", which can feel demoralizing and drive people away.
 * Contributing to English Wikipedia feels more difficult/unforgiving/hostile, than contributing to a project like Igbo Wikipedia which feels more accepting of honest mistakes  and inclusive of people who are still learning.
 * One of the challenges of contributing to Wikipedia is that many of the people who are in positions of power/authority, are not from/aware of/experienced with the topics people from SSA are writing about.
 * Why Contribute? Why English Wikipedia?
 * For many of us, English is our lingua franca; it's natural for us to write in English and thus contribute to a project that is rooted in it.
 * If not us, then who?  Nobody is better suited to work on content related to our local context than us, the people who are from and live within it.
 * A fulfilling and constructive counterpart to more common forms of social media.
 * Mobile is crucial.
 * The majority of new people who arrive at training events come equipped with a smartphone. That's it.

Community Conversation: 4 October 2022

 * Attendees
 * Bartosz Dziewoński, David Chan, David Lynch, Ed Sanders, Esther Akinloose, James McLeod, Justice Okai-Allotey, Joris Darlington Quarshie, Megan Neisler, Nicolas Ayoub, Peter Pelberg, Valerie Puffet-Michel,


 * Notes
 * Difference in social contexts
 * The English Wikipedia attracts people from around the world, many of whom do not have share a social context. This might help to explain why experienced volunteers, who are reviewing edits that add new content to the wikis about topics that are underrepresented within them, tend to have a difficult time intuitively assessing notably. As a result, these experienced volunteers may be more likely to delete content of this sort than they are to permit it.
 * Example: en:King Promise
 * Newcomers are pushed away from the projects when they see the effort they invested to create a new article "thrown away" by way of an experienced volunteer adding a speedy deletion tag to it. It would be more helpful if rather than deleting these articles Seniors moved these articles to the creators' sandbox.
 * Underrepresentation creates a vicious cycle
 * Contributing to English Wikipedia can feel stressful and the newcomers Joris has spoken with have been driven away because of this.
 * The lack of admins from Africa within English Wikipedia seems to perpetuate content inclusion / exclusion issues.
 * Volunteers from Africa feel tired/drained by being repeatedly asked to justify/explain a topic's notability to people in power who are not from the region.
 * The path to becoming an Admin at the English Wikipedia seems unclear
 * IP Blocks and Range Blocks
 * A blig issue that prevents everyone in the Africa region. From, individual editors to event organizers.
 * Ideas that could both help newcomers and free mentors up to focus on more scalable efforts
 * Providing trainings on tools that could help newcomer volunteers to contribute to en.wiki effectively
 * Clear workflows for resolving IP blocks and range blocks themselves
 * Editing Onboarding
 * The majority of the newcomers Joris has worked with started editing through an organized event/programs and few continue contributing after the fact. Maybe because these newcomers did not have access to the support and advice in the moments they needed it.

Community Conversation: 19 September 2022
Attendees Notes
 * Nicola Ayoub, Mohammed Bachounda, Imelda Brazal, Ilana Fried, Georges Fodouop, Peter Pelberg, and Liam Wyatt.
 * Challenges newcomers face:
 * The editing interfaces newcomers use lack education which lead to the problems shown in the slides we shared,
 * Add content by copying and pasting it directly from a source or adding content without citing a reliable source,
 * Newcomers mistakenly think that they EITHER need to copy the content from a source directly OR paraphrase content from the source without citing it (by fear of plagiarism).


 * Motivations for contributing to Wikipedia:
 * Correct information I considered to be false/incorrect about a topic I’m familiar with,
 * Ensure my/peoples' perspectives/experiences/culture/traditions/customs/food/dress/etc. are accurately represented within the wiki,
 * Experience the joy/satisfaction with adding information for the rest of humanity to see.


 * Challenges with sourcing knowledge
 * The knowledge does not exist digitally
 * The knowledge is not represented in, what mature/Western wikis consider to be, reliable sources of information (e.g. non-written knowledge for instance)

Note: the Editing Team gathers sources and references relevant to the projects they work on on Editing team/Research/References sub-page.
 * Things that Nico, Peter, and the Editing Team ought to remember:
 * Over time, "learning by doing" seems to be a more effective method for teaching newcomers how to contribute to Wikipedia
 * Over time, experienced volunteers at mature wikis have come to expect that every edit be "correct." Gone are the days of adding some text and someone else coming along to add a source to verify it. Newcomers have a high bar to meet.
 * Newcomers who are contributing to Wikipedia by way of participating in a campaign are likely to have different motivations/experiences than people who are arriving to edit by themselves.
 * The checks should not prevent people from contributing content…there is some information that simply cannot be sourced in a way the policies, as they are currently written, consider acceptable. We should not discourage contributions of this sort.

Talk Pages Consultation
A global consultation that took place between February to June 2019, to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to define better tools for wiki communication. This effort brought volunteers from 20 wikis together with staff from the Wikimedia Foundation to define a product direction for building better tools for on-wiki communication. This product direction was documented in Phase 2 of the Talk Pages Consultation and provided the basis for what would become the Talk Pages Project.