There are a number of help spaces on Wikipedia at present that have been successful, but we believe there are gaps in these spaces that ultimately do not allow editors to get the help they need. We want to make mentorship accessible to both learners and mentors by breaking down ways of contributing to Wikipedia into manageable pieces, matching editors to their peers based on an editor's learning needs and matching them to a peer with the appropriate experience. Teaching is therefore focused on specific editing goals rather than on a comprehensive understanding of Wikipedia.
Some initial research we have done in addition to existing work has indicated some issues with regard to mentorship that we intend to address in this project:
One major reason that new editors become frustrated and leave Wikipedia is because their edits are reverted.[1]
In 2011, the median time for an editor to become adopted through the adopt-a-user program was around 4 days.[2]
In other online communities, isolating users outside the mainstream yields negative results with regard to work quality and connection to that community.[3]
In a recent and preliminary poll of about 25 editors who contribute to various help spaces on Wikipedia, we found that these mentors:
...were motivated to mentor because they wanted to share their knowledge and help editors with their needs.
...were mostly experienced in policy, article development, and formatting.
...are confident in what they are teaching, and feel that their expertise is helpful for the learners they teach, but are uncertain about what learners want to understand or what their goals are.
...interacted with a specific learner about 2-3 times per month.
...felt that mentorship did improve learners' experience of Wikipedia generally.
References
^Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2013). The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(5), 664–688. doi:10.1177/0002764212469365
^Musicant, D. R., Ren, Y., Johnson, J. A., & Riedl, J. (2011, October). Mentoring in Wikipedia: a clash of cultures. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (pp. 173-182). ACM. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~chingren/pdf/papers/wikisym-2011-Mentoring.pdf
^Farzan, R., Kraut, R., Pal, A., & Konstan, J. (2012). Socializing Volunteers in an Online Community: A Field Experiment (pp. 325–334). Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work., Seattle, WA.
On our talk page, we will be providing monthly updates written by one of the grantees to keep you informed of how things are progressing, problems we encounter, and decisions we make along the way. We will usually update around the 15th of each month between now and the end of our grant.