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.
- 10 000 active wikipedians.
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 .
- 100 000 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 .
- 10 000 wikipedians, and mentorship takes 4 months
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.
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. <scratching head> Well, that might explain why Wikipedia: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 edit
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 edit
Please comment!
Notes edit
Some notes after asking for comments:
- How would this prevent things like the CAMERA exploit? It wouldn't per-se, it's not the primary goal, the primary goal is to achieve 100% acculturation. Even so, at higher acculturation levels, such an exploit would likely be discovered earlier. Also the fact that you need the support of 10 trained full-access-wikipedians should not be discounted as a strong form of vetting.
- Is this intended to replace RFA?: Sort of: rather, I have a somewhat different goal, and replacing RFA is a good way to reach this key goal
- The actual goal is to reach 100% Acculturation. Current Acculturation levels might be as low as 0.1% or worse. Acculturation is the #1 problem for wikipedia today.
- A lot of mentoring today is like "answer question 3.3 at RFA like so to pass". Possibly true. In thise case, there's no RFA, both the seed mentors, and the people checking them would be invited people such as Angela, Jimbo Wales, Erik Moeller, Sannse, Mackensen, etc... (I hope I can get at least some of those to help out). So this would be the closest thing to a reboot without actually rebooting, in some ways....
- Q: Why are acculturation and RFA linked? A: RFA is our only choke-point, nothing before or after lets us check people, and the admin flag is our only real carrot. If I'm wrong (and I desperately want to be wrong), please tell me. if you can think of extra carrots, please tell me too.