2 ms·
> Scaling the onboarding of new Wikipedia volunteers with guided mentorship. Depending on what's meant by "mentorship": this is the bit I'm most keen to see. M
by niam 1y ago
> Scaling the onboarding of new Wikipedia volunteers with guided mentorship.
Depending on what's meant by "mentorship": this is the bit I'm most keen to see. Much of the criticism lobbed at Wikipedia nowadays seems to come from how much of a pain it is to contribute (which perhaps leads to second-order criticisms about censorship, even if that's not the intention).
It's often been the case that the person most-worthy to speak on a subject is not the most worthy steward of a Wikipedia page on it. Any attempt to make those two people one-and-the-same seems welcome.
If this "mentorship" takes the form of UI hints, I think they'd go a long way. Having volunteers take an AI course, on the other hand, might be useful but might also be a complete waste of time.
- gwbas1c 1y agoI was afraid that mentorship was the point where human-to-human interaction is needed most. I suspect what you're getting at is that "mentorship" is really code for using AI to step in when people are making the wrong kind of changes to a Wikipedia page. (IE, introducing bias, promoting products, edit wars, ect.) I'm curious to see how this plays out.
- niam 1y agoYeah that's exactly it. I wonder too if it could be used to help the edit reviewing process, but I can imagine it runs a risk of becoming an accountability sink[^1] if reviewers can merely defer their judgement to what the bot says is OK to purge. It might have a chilling effect on edits if everyone, including procedure hawks, can rely on it in that way. I'm not enough of a contributor there to know. [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694