User:Jorm (WMF)/Collaborative Systems

Abstract
This document is intended to serve as a springboard for discussion about design and features for MediaWiki collaboration and discussion toolsets. This document is not a design document. I want to talk about user behaviors, pain points, and desires.

History
In my initial approach to the issues regarding discussion and talk pages on Wikipedia, I started with the assumption that the problem I was working on could be summed up thus:

How do we make it easier for new users to join the discussion?

I approached the problem with the following framework:


 * Standard "talk" pages are an extremely high barrier-to-entry for new users.
 * Talk pages are not user-friendly in any way, shape, or form
 * Talk pages are not always for discussion
 * Wikipedians have developed many habitual behaviors (both good and bad) to overcome the deficiencies of Talk pages
 * New users often only want to bring attention to issues within Articles; many people do not feel that they have the "right" to edit pages
 * New users have difficulty attributing responses on Talk pages to unique individuals; they often see communication there as coming from Wikipedia "as a whole"
 * The Wikipedia community is often perceived as aggressive and overly bureaucratic

With that in mind, I began working with the following requirements:


 * The barrier to entry must be low
 * The system must encourage positive interaction and promote community health
 * The system should enforce the idea that discussion occurs between individuals and not Wikipedia
 * The system must be flexible (e.g., it must allow for edge-case usage, like with the Administrator's Notice Board)
 * The system should not break existing tools, gadgets, and bots, if at all possible

However, as I have examined the issues over the past several months, I realized that I was thinking mostly from the angle of "how do I get new users to join the collaboration?" Focusing purely on that angle was incorrect.

I now believe the actual question that should be asked is this:

How do we increase participation and collaboration?

The change in the question is subtle but important. A collaboration system must be designed to increase participation in two ways:


 * It must allow for new users to enter the community, and
 * It must encourage existing users to remain.

Increasing collaboration is a difficult nut to crack as it is an ephemeral concept. We can encourage people to be better spellers through software (for instance, requiring a spell checker to run before saving) but encouraging people to work together isn't as cut-and-dried.

Evaporative Cooling
There has been much discussion regarding an overall decrease in the number of editors. A primary reason for this, in my opinion, is a process called Evaporative Cooling.

Users remain within a community only as long as they feel their needs are being met. When there are many high-value contributors, the overall tone and productive mode is high. For simplicity's sake, we can call our high-value, helpful, and productive community members the "A-List".

Members of the A-List provide value to other members of the A-List as well as providing value to those in B- and C-List members. B-List members learn from A-Listers, for instance, and in turn provide value to C-List members, and so forth.

When a member of the A-List retires from the community (for whatever reason), the overall value of the A-List lowers. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that other members of the A-List will not find their own needs met, and thus leave themselves.

In turn, members of the B-List will find that the value they are gaining is lowered, and they, too, begin to leave, and so forth.

This is a natural entropy to communities of any kind. However, most of the time, healthy communities will have a funnel of new members to replace those lost through natural attrition.

The nature of Wikipedia's community makes attracting and retaining new members difficult. Many people clearly find the barrier-to-enter too high.

Slowed growth of a new user base also tends to decrease value for A-List community members. A-List people tend to view themselves as caretakers and mentors, deriving a lot of satisfaction from teaching new users. Retaining new users well past the initial hump will possibly lower the overall cooling effect.

It is my belief that we must therefore make it easy for new users to collaborate. This can be easily done in software.

Echo Chambers
Without new voices, communities will often become "echo chambers". This does not mean that everyone agrees with each other; rather, the communication style becomes infested with jargon, in-jokes, and a "shorthand" for historical discussions - a kind of insider's "dialect."

Further, with community stagnation comes community frustration. Discourses can easily become circular without new opinions being raised. This can cause existing community members to become "fed up" more quickly. Disagreements become arguments and then attacks.

This tends to lower the overall quality of discourse, which make the problem of attracting new members even more difficult. New users perceive a community as being overly hostile and unwelcoming.

It is my belief that we must therefore work to de-emphasise the use of dialect. It may be possible to do this through software.

Warrens and Plazas
Xianhang Zhang has an excellent essay in which he discusses the tendency for communities to be organized into "Plazas" and "Warrens".

He describes them thusly:

"In the plaza design, there is a central plaza which is one contiguous space and every person’s interaction is seen by every other person. In the warren design, the space is broken up into a series of smaller warrens and you can only see the warren you are currently in. There is the possibility of moving into adjacent warrens but it’s difficult to explore far outside of your zone. Plazas grow by becoming larger, warrens grow by adding more warrens."

Wikipedia is almost overwhelmingly "warren-centric". Each article can be considered its own warren. Pages are part of even more warrens: categories, for instance, and even WikiProjects.

This is useful: warrens are often self-contained sub-communities and have smaller dialects. This lowers the barrier-to-entry.

However, small communities are often "dead ends" and can easily become echo chambers. A new member of a warren may quickly exhaust the community's ability to provide value (which leads to rapid cooling).

Cross-warren movement and collaboration on Wikipedia is often handled through WikiProjects. However, WikiProjects are often overlooked by new users despite sometimes prominant "advertising" on the talk pages.

It is my belief that a discussion system should encourage and promote cross-warren collaboration. Currently, there is no mechanism within the software to promote collaboration in this way and I believe this should be addressed.