User:Kim Bruning/Replace RFA (Take II)

The biggest issue facing wikipedia today is acculturation: the process by which new users pick up clue from old users.

A current problem with RFA is that it's the only time we measure clue.

Compounding the issue, many people at RFA require a certain amount of time to pass, hoping that people will have picked up clue by osmosis. We only have relatively few people certified to have clue, and our main basis for this certification is crossing our fingers that people will have picked it up after n amount of time.

That's ... not so good :-P

It turns out, however, that even just 1 month of mentoring with a competent mentor can instill more clue than some people ever manage to pick up in over a year. It stands to reason that mentoring should be encouraged.

Not only that, but mentoring people often instills as much clue in the mentor as in the mentored. Mentoring is a REALLY good idea.

And there's really only one carrot we have for mentoring: that's still those extra tools you get with the "admin" flag.

So how about we restructure the system. Since we'll be running two systems next to each other for a while, we'll need a different name for admins accepted through this program. Let's call them "full-access wikipedians". Even weak ..... theory says that changing the name of something can at times be beneficial.

To become a full access wikipedian, you need to have been mentored by an existing full-access wikipedian for at least 1 month, and you need to have the support of say, 10 other full-access wikipedians (and no opposition... or you need to convince the opposition over time, which is good practice for consensus and negotiation). This is not so hard, your mentor should easily be able to introduce you to those 10 other full access wikipedians. Those wikipedians might even be able to help out the mentor (and thus set up incidental 2-way and cross knowlege transfers as well), In this case, canvassing would not just be permitted, it could actually be entirely encouraged without becoming harmful.

This ensures that the mentor does not have some isolated view of how wikipedia works, and their teachings will be vetted by others.

It's also likely that these 10 other full-access-wikipedians could take on the role of advisors after a candidate has become a full-access-wikipedian themselves, so that knowledge transfer continues even after passing the key test.

We also need a reward for people who do mentoring. A mentoring barnstar for each "mentee" who actually becomes a full-access wikipedian would be the least we can do. An idea that might perhaps be controversial: it might be interesting to give a bureaucrat flag to anyone who has 10 such barnstars or more, as they are very likely to have enough clue to wield such a thing after a while.

Current admins can be grandfathered in, as still being admins (though they still keep their flag, they wouldn't have the "title" of Full-access wikipedian, they'd need to earn that like everyone else.)

Estimating we have 10 000 active wikipedians, and we expect full-access- wikipedians to mentor one person per month as part of their duties, we can expect to have everyone up to speed in just under a year. If you'd like to look at 100 000, that'd still only take 1 and a half years. This seems like a good deal.

month: 1 tutors: 10  tutees: 9990. month: 2 tutors: 20  tutees: 9980. month: 3 tutors: 40  tutees: 9960. month: 4 tutors: 80  tutees: 9920. month: 5 tutors: 160  tutees: 9840. month: 6 tutors: 320  tutees: 9680. month: 7 tutors: 640  tutees: 9360. month: 8 tutors: 1280  tutees: 8720. month: 9 tutors: 2560  tutees: 7440. month: 10 tutors: 5120  tutees: 4880. month: 11 tutors: 10000  tutees: 0.
 * 10 000 active wikipedians.

month: 1 tutors: 10  tutees: 99990. month: 2 tutors: 20  tutees: 99980. month: 3 tutors: 40  tutees: 99960. month: 4 tutors: 80  tutees: 99920. month: 5 tutors: 160  tutees: 99840. month: 6 tutors: 320  tutees: 99680. month: 7 tutors: 640  tutees: 99360. month: 8 tutors: 1280  tutees: 98720. month: 9 tutors: 2560  tutees: 97440. month: 10 tutors: 5120  tutees: 94880. month: 11 tutors: 10240  tutees: 89760. month: 12 tutors: 20480  tutees: 79520. month: 13 tutors: 40960  tutees: 59040. month: 14 tutors: 81920  tutees: 18080. month: 15 tutors: 100000  tutees: 0.
 * 100 000 active wikipedians.

Perhaps the above is too optimistic, say people only mentor one person per 4 months on average, as well as outflow, etc and there's only 10 000 people interested in mentorship.
 * 10 000 wikipedians, and mentorship takes 4 months

month: 1 tutors: 10.0  tutees: 9990.0. month: 2 tutors: 12.5  tutees: 9987.5. month: 3 tutors: 15.625  tutees: 9984.375. month: 4 tutors: 19.53125  tutees: 9980.46875. month: 5 tutors: 24.4140625  tutees: 9975.5859375. month: 6 tutors: 30.517578125  tutees: 9969.48242188. month: 7 tutors: 38.1469726562  tutees: 9961.85302734. month: 8 tutors: 47.6837158203  tutees: 9952.31628418. month: 9 tutors: 59.6046447754  tutees: 9940.39535522. month: 10 tutors: 74.5058059692  tutees: 9925.49419403. month: 11 tutors: 93.1322574615  tutees: 9906.86774254. month: 12 tutors: 116.415321827  tutees: 9883.58467817. month: 13 tutors: 145.519152284  tutees: 9854.48084772. month: 14 tutors: 181.898940355  tutees: 9818.10105965. month: 15 tutors: 227.373675443  tutees: 9772.62632456. month: 16 tutors: 284.217094304  tutees: 9715.7829057. month: 17 tutors: 355.27136788  tutees: 9644.72863212. month: 18 tutors: 444.08920985  tutees: 9555.91079015. month: 19 tutors: 555.111512313  tutees: 9444.88848769. month: 20 tutors: 693.889390391  tutees: 9306.11060961. month: 21 tutors: 867.361737988  tutees: 9132.63826201. month: 22 tutors: 1084.20217249  tutees: 8915.79782751. month: 23 tutors: 1355.25271561  tutees: 8644.74728439. month: 24 tutors: 1694.06589451  tutees: 8305.93410549. month: 25 tutors: 2117.58236814  tutees: 7882.41763186. month: 26 tutors: 2646.97796017  tutees: 7353.02203983. month: 27 tutors: 3308.72245021  tutees: 6691.27754979. month: 28 tutors: 4135.90306277  tutees: 5864.09693723. month: 29 tutors: 5169.87882846  tutees: 4830.12117154. month: 30 tutors: 6462.34853557  tutees: 3537.65146443. month: 31 tutors: 8077.93566946  tutees: 1922.06433054. month: 32 tutors: 10000.0  tutees: 0.0.

32 months is a long time. (2.6 years). And it takes a full year to ramp up to 100 mentors. Well, that might explain why Lectures was taking a while,  it might have needed to still ramp up. Also, this shows that more incentives might also be a powerful tool.

What happens if our early tutors all did lecturing, and kept (on average) at least 2 people in their lectures at all times (over time)?

month: 1 tutors: 10.0  tutees: 9990.0. month: 2 tutors: 30.0  tutees: 9970.0. month: 3 tutors: 90.0  tutees: 9910.0. month: 4 tutors: 270.0  tutees: 9730.0. month: 5 tutors: 810.0  tutees: 9190.0. month: 6 tutors: 2430.0  tutees: 7570.0. month: 7 tutors: 7290.0  tutees: 2710.0. month: 8 tutors: 10000.0  tutees: 0.0.

Hmm, interesting. :-D I wonder about lecture pooling too, then... I might do more statistics over time.

Conclusion
To conclude: Acculturation is the current biggest issue for wikipedia. Failure to acculturate will kill us, so all else being equal, subverting some other system to help us do acculturation is preferable.

We've looked at implementing an honour-based system where we reward mentoring people. And we've looked at some optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.

A mentoring system would be likely to succeed, though it takes time to ramp up (over a year, in a bad case), so people should be patient, and not immediately be disappointed if it doesn't seem to have an effect early on.

Request
Please comment!