Similarly to EdoArad, I am afraid that without some incentive/gamification structure, there would be a lack of motivation for users to edit an EA wiki. I haven’t read any science on motivations but I want to share my personal point of view. Personally, I don’t feel very motivated to edit the priority wiki because:
I will probably receive no comments or feedback on what I wrote
I don’t know who and when will read whatever I write there
Even if someone reads it, it’s unlikely that they will notice that it was me who wrote it. That means that writing there won’t improve my career prospects or social status.[1] No one will come to me at the EAG or something to talk about this thing that I wrote.
Note that none of these problems apply to the EA forum which is why it feels much more motivating to write here.
I used to edit Lithuanian Wikipedia and these things didn’t apply there either because:
I knew that many people were reading pages I was editing. It was very useful and motivating to check pageview statistics.
There was a community, editing wikipedia felt like a collaborative project because:
There were often discussions on talk pages and a skype channel
I knew that admins and some other users on the Lithuanian wikipedia are looking at the recent changes page (which is much less eventful for smaller wikis) and that my new contributions will not go unnoticed. It was irrational for me to try to impress these people whom I have never met in real life but the human brain is wired to care about this kind of stuff (or at least my brain).
People would give other people “awards” which were just pieces of html that you could put on your user page. E.g. see awards for this random wikipedia user. Receiving such awards made me feel like my effort was appreciated.
We also had an “article of the week” which was a new article written that week that would be featured on the frontpage. I often tried to get my article featured and then it would get a lot of views. It’s almost like gamifying contributions
Best articles on wikipedia are marked as featured or good. It was motivating to try to get my articles one of these statuses.
I’m not sure if I’m suggesting to have any of these motivation structures for an EA wiki though. It would probably not reach the critical mass where doing some of this stuff would start making sense. If it did reach the critical mass, I’d be afraid to put too many of these motivation structures in place. We don’t want EAs are spending too much time editing an EA wiki instead of doing more direct things to help the world. But maybe there is some middle ground here.
It’s probably obvious but I feel like I should clarify here that I’m not saying that I contribute to the EA forum only to get social status, etc. I do want to make an impact. But it’s difficult to motivate myself every day just by the thought that what I do might make an impact. Hence it’s good to put myself in situations where I care to do the same things that make an impact for other reasons. It’s like going to an exercise class because you know that you will be ashamed to not do exercise there when everyone around you is doing it. It’s not like you do exercise to impress those strangers, you do it to get fit, but it’s difficult to motivate yourself by the thought of getting fit alone.
I’m wondering if we can address the problem with the same framework as for having better list of concrete projects? Let’s say, we have a list of articles suggested for contribution, like this one, but maybe with some additional info on prioritization. A person picks the article the same way as a project and mark it somehow as “Taken” and then “Done”. So we can trace their contribution based on this selection process and assign status points correspondingly. So, essentially, “Writing article” is just a possible type of a project, and the rest workflows are the same. Which suggests that we need to think more about project-based contribution. Perhaps it worth referencing Effective Thesis here as a similar initiative.
And having something slack for wikipedia contributors doesn’t seem like a problem at all.
Alternative approach could be adopting MediaWiki and integrating it with existing user rating system. I don’t know how backend for EA Forum is organized, but something like OpenID could be a relatively painless solution.
Similarly to EdoArad, I am afraid that without some incentive/gamification structure, there would be a lack of motivation for users to edit an EA wiki. I haven’t read any science on motivations but I want to share my personal point of view. Personally, I don’t feel very motivated to edit the priority wiki because:
I will probably receive no comments or feedback on what I wrote
I don’t know who and when will read whatever I write there
Even if someone reads it, it’s unlikely that they will notice that it was me who wrote it. That means that writing there won’t improve my career prospects or social status.[1] No one will come to me at the EAG or something to talk about this thing that I wrote.
Note that none of these problems apply to the EA forum which is why it feels much more motivating to write here.
I used to edit Lithuanian Wikipedia and these things didn’t apply there either because:
I knew that many people were reading pages I was editing. It was very useful and motivating to check pageview statistics.
There was a community, editing wikipedia felt like a collaborative project because:
There were often discussions on talk pages and a skype channel
I knew that admins and some other users on the Lithuanian wikipedia are looking at the recent changes page (which is much less eventful for smaller wikis) and that my new contributions will not go unnoticed. It was irrational for me to try to impress these people whom I have never met in real life but the human brain is wired to care about this kind of stuff (or at least my brain).
People would give other people “awards” which were just pieces of html that you could put on your user page. E.g. see awards for this random wikipedia user. Receiving such awards made me feel like my effort was appreciated.
We also had an “article of the week” which was a new article written that week that would be featured on the frontpage. I often tried to get my article featured and then it would get a lot of views. It’s almost like gamifying contributions
Best articles on wikipedia are marked as featured or good. It was motivating to try to get my articles one of these statuses.
I’m not sure if I’m suggesting to have any of these motivation structures for an EA wiki though. It would probably not reach the critical mass where doing some of this stuff would start making sense. If it did reach the critical mass, I’d be afraid to put too many of these motivation structures in place. We don’t want EAs are spending too much time editing an EA wiki instead of doing more direct things to help the world. But maybe there is some middle ground here.
It’s probably obvious but I feel like I should clarify here that I’m not saying that I contribute to the EA forum only to get social status, etc. I do want to make an impact. But it’s difficult to motivate myself every day just by the thought that what I do might make an impact. Hence it’s good to put myself in situations where I care to do the same things that make an impact for other reasons. It’s like going to an exercise class because you know that you will be ashamed to not do exercise there when everyone around you is doing it. It’s not like you do exercise to impress those strangers, you do it to get fit, but it’s difficult to motivate yourself by the thought of getting fit alone.
I’m wondering if we can address the problem with the same framework as for having better list of concrete projects? Let’s say, we have a list of articles suggested for contribution, like this one, but maybe with some additional info on prioritization. A person picks the article the same way as a project and mark it somehow as “Taken” and then “Done”. So we can trace their contribution based on this selection process and assign status points correspondingly. So, essentially, “Writing article” is just a possible type of a project, and the rest workflows are the same. Which suggests that we need to think more about project-based contribution. Perhaps it worth referencing Effective Thesis here as a similar initiative.
And having something slack for wikipedia contributors doesn’t seem like a problem at all.
Alternative approach could be adopting MediaWiki and integrating it with existing user rating system. I don’t know how backend for EA Forum is organized, but something like OpenID could be a relatively painless solution.