Wikipedia talk:Ambassadors/Steering Committee/Online Ambassador selection process/archive 1

Here are my thoughts:

Q: As a Wikipedia Ambassador you would be responsible for promoting the Wikipedia community's core values and educating new users about them. What do you consider those values to be?

I would change the second sentence to read: Will you commit to upholding Wikipedia's published policies and guidelines? [We want a commitment, not a treatise.]

Q: How have you been involved with welcoming and helping new users on Wikipedia? Please provide links to recent examples.

I'm not sure we need links to recent examples.

Q: What do you see as the most important ways to reach new potential editors or better help new users become active contributors?

I think this is too philosophical. We're just trying to find ambassadors. Let's not discourage people with a brutal questionnaire

Q: How much time would you like to commit, on a weekly basis, to being an Ambassador?

Again, I think this is too open-ended. I would just say "We expect you to be available to answer questions on an almost daily basis and to be able to spend at least [two] [three] hours per week assisting students.

I would also tell applicants that the program is run by the committee, and that, if an ambassador is not working out, the committee may ask the person to withdraw. -Ssilvers

Yeah, in the original questionnaire, Pete Forsyth and I discussed the tradeoff between not chasing people away with a too onerous series of questions, and using the questionnaire to set expectations and begin to introduce people to the idea of being an Online Ambassador. But at this point, that's not so necessary since we actually have examples of ambassador activity that applicants are likely to have seen. So a trimmer questionnaire makes sense. I'll implement some of your suggestions tomorrow. (In the meantime, of course, anyone should feel free to try to improve the questionnaire, or suggest other directions for it.)--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 23:33, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd be interested in hearing Sage's thoughts on the average response to these questions. Obviously I don't want individual answers unless the ambassadors offer them up, but I am curious how many of the questions seemed to be answered completely and thoughtfully. To offer an analogy, I used to run a
  raid environment and their fit for our organization. Given that we were a loose confederation of "volunteers" and not an employer, I was sensitive to the onerousness of the questions, but invariably the questionnaire produced few "false positives"--users who aced the questionnaire but did poorly in interviews or in the guild. I could not observe users who were scared off by the questions. However my general feeling was that philosophical questions have their place, as do specific requests for data or opinions. Thoughts? Protonk (talk) 23:48, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Hmm... I'd say none of the particular questions were especially effective for screening out people. The three sentence summary of Wikipedia efforts was the most helpful for orienting myself before starting to look through contributions. It was more the overall tenor of the answers from each person that was useful. But even then, the main thing in each decision was contribution history... looking through what people have been doing and how they interact with other editors. Seeing what the good candidates had to say was interesting and enjoyable, to me at least, but the people with the more interesting answers tended to be the ones where a questionnaire was completely unnecessary from my point of view, since they had strong editing histories and I was often familiar with them from their work anyhow.

  I guess I would put it back to you all who answered the questionnaire... was it a burden? Did it help get you in the mindset for what we're doing? Did you like answering (some of) the questions?--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 15:48, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Do we really need another committee, Online Ambassador Selection Committee, this seems like a bureaucracy in the making...

I propose that we have a consensus where a new candidate gets a certain % of support votes in order to be accepted. (Something similar to RFA) -Smallman

Color me uninterested in another RFA-like process. While I'd love to say that all future ambassador selections should be done just like the first, I think the foundation is trying to set this process up to not require multiple employees in order to function. If a committee means we avoid something like RFA, then I'm fine with that. An RFA like process is an invitation for wikipedians to treat the ambassador project like another hat, imbuing the process with all the politics and unpleasantness and what-not already at RfA/RfB/ACE. That's a pretty cynical view, but I don't think it is falsified by our experiences on the wikipedia namespace. -Adam (Protonk)

I couldn't agree more, RfA has become filled with people who constantly assume bad faith, that is the last thing that we need for Ambassador selection. -ADAM RONK

This was my thinking as well; having a handful of people screen out unsuitable applicants and deal with it all in a quick and low-key way seems like the most efficient option, in terms of time, good decision-making, and minimizing drama.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 23:33, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah...well I must admit that RFA is indeed being colored by Dramatica like debates rooted in bad faith. I'd like to see some kind of a consensus...but perhaps we could do it as an appeal procedure? Smallman12q (talk) 00:00, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Not only should no new RfA-like creatures be granted existence, the existing RfA should be tracked down and killed. RfA is undesirable. • 
  Ling.Nut 00:15, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Here's where I say something Churchillian about RfA being better than many of the alternatives for the scale, scope and history of the process. RfA is bad, but it is also a terrible fit for a small program--badness notwithstanding. That doesn't mean I want to stalk it and kill it on the project. :) Protonk (talk) 00:19, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[left] If there is to be a special committee other than the steering committee doing this, I suggest making it a very small committee - say, three members, and if any two of them agree that someone is OK, then admit them without further delay. If a person really turns out to be a bad ambassador, for whatever reason (and I doubt this will happen very often), the small committee can discuss, and again, if all three of them agree, they can tell the person that they think he/she ought to step down. If the person protests, they should be appeal to the full steering committee. -- Ssilvers (talk) 00:21, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Lately, I've been discussing some of the new applications with Fetchcomms and Sadads (the two Online Ambassadors on the steering committee). In addition to the sustainability issue (the need to devolve responsibilities from myself to volunteers), having a few others to confer with leads to better decision-making. Even with the three of us, I feel like it's a little too small of a group for me to feel really confident about decisions at the borderline. Your point about the low stakes is a good one, though; if people turn out to be ineffective or counterproductive as ambassadors, we can always ask them to step down or stick to certain areas of participation and not others.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 16:03, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

...why there are any requirements for being an Online Ambassador. If somebody wants to help out, they are probably the right person for that; isn't this how wikis work anyway? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 00:31, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• I agree, with minor quibbles. I think the requirements should be a) Six months fairly active editing, and b) no blocks in the past two months (during which the editor was fairly active). That about sums it up. I suppose if someone turns out to be a lemon, the Head Honcho, whomsoever that may be, can very gently suggest that User:EditorWhoIsALemon stop being an ambassador. My .02. • 
  Ling.Nut 01:30, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply
  ]

• Indeed. I'd go as far as to say - maybe a year, and three months, respectively. Also, I'd add a criteria of providing a public answer to some questions such as "why do you want to help, what is your experience with teaching, what do you thing about teaching with Wikipedia" and such; partially for the benefit of students/teachers so they can read that and select the ambassadors whose attitude seems most fitting towards them. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 15:02, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Two reasons. First, selection is simply a proxy for bringing interested people into contact with a program and having them give some social commitment. the "requirements" are the opposite of onerous. I suspect that if someone applied with 200 mainspace edits and gave a good reason why they thought they would be helpful they would be accepted. Asking them to put their name forward is more of a means to select who might be interested rather than hoping that editors patrolling the recent change log might be interested. Second, I think there is a slight difference between an editor and someone you want in direct personal (and sustained) contact with editors who have a unique relationship with wikipedia. Students editing wikipedia articles for their classes aren't here avocationally, as the vast majority of us are. They are there to use wikipedia as a medium for their classwork. Their needs are therefore somewhat different from those of a new avocational editor. A bad match between avocational editors can be fixed by either side disengaging or by one editor leaving the project. That's a bad outcome for wikipedia, but it is a totally unacceptable outcome for a class or a student. So I think we can justify some minimum requirements and some selection process. Protonk (talk) 01:33, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suspect that in the end it sorta doesn't matter, because any/every system will work just fine. But
    Ling.Nut 03:17, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    • WP:BUREAU is a joke. Wikipedia is a giant bureaucracy; few years ago an academic study found that policy pages are growing quicker than anything else, articles included... Sadly, I am afraid Ling.Nut is right, and we will end up with a bureaucratic, non-transparent process. Still, I'd implore the involved editors to go against the trend. We don't need a secret committee or a complicated voting system here. Really, we don't. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 15:02, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply
      ]
      • Let's not conflate bureaucracy with non-transparency. Of course, Piotrus, your proposed no-requirements system has neither factor. But based on the goals of the project (to come up with a system of ambassadorship that scales and can spread internationally), the comparison between what we're doing and the less-structured things that have been tried before (WP:SUP and adopt-a-user, in particular), and my experience so far this term, I'm pretty sure that some level of role-definition and systemization (i.e., bureaucracy) is necessary for the ambassadors program—and in fact, a little bit more than we've had so far, as leadership devolves from staff to volunteers. Per Protonk (and my observations about how effective we've been at meeting students needs so far--pretty good, but room for improvement), I think it's clear that some level of commitment on the part of Ambassadors is necessary, as is a certain level of competence with helping people and giving good wiki advice. So a small, fast-acting committee is just about the least bureaucratic way meet enforce those requirements.
      • As to transparency, in general I agree that it's a high priority; the staff working on this, as well as everyone on the steering committee, puts a high value on transparency. In this particular case, though, where the alternative is public discussion that will tend to be dispiriting and negative for the applicants who aren't right for the ambassador role--a public black mark, similar to, if less unnecessarily awful than, a failed RfA--I think the costs of complete transparency (more bureaucracy and social harm) . Instead, this system would be fairly transparent to the applicant--the committee would let the applicant know why they weren't accepted, as I have done with the ones I didn't accept--without being harmfully transparent to the applicant's peer editors. In short, something along the lines I proposed is the the best thing I could think of to balance efficiency and transparency against the goal of creating a really great, scalable ambassadors program.
      • Ling.Nut, I would say "Informal, transparent, reversible"... those are means to goals, not goals themselves. They are very powerful means, as Wikipedia itself attests, and in giving some initial shape to the Online Ambassadors part of this program, I've tried to be mindful of them. But they aren't the best means to every goal, especially given the structured, non-voluntary contexts (school and university classes) we're connecting with.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 17:00, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• As someone who has been in the #wikipedia-en-help IRC help chat for about a year, I can easily say that the amount of unclueful users who appear "experienced" based on edit count and time here is way more than one would imagine. To maintain some sort of professionalism, we cannot have a lax attitude on evaluating candidates. I especially like the criteria of having worked with content (that is what the students are doing), as well as having had somewhat-significant experience helping new users. As long as a candidate meets one of these expectations, and has a clean record, I have no issues with them as an ambassador. What we do not want are people who don't write articles and don't know how to go around helping new users, being ambassadors when students may have their grades affected by poor advice. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 19:28, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]