Merle von Wittich (WMDE)

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, Merle von Wittich (WMDE). Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

-- Meta-Wiki Welcome (talk) 10:41, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry!

I didn't meant to revert your edit to Talk:Wikimedia Diversity Conference. It was a misclick. Hope that my apology will be accepted. Sorry again! :( --Glaisher [talk] 04:10, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

kritik an meiner kommunikation in telegram-gruppen?

bitte schreibe mir keine eMails. ich habe eine benutzerseite: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sms2sms - diese kommunikation hinter verschlossenen türen, ist für mich als alter wikipedianer gänzlich inakzeptabel. Sms2sms (talk) 09:18, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Sorry I missed your message

Hello Merle,

I'm sorry I missed your message earlier. It was a super busy time for me and I wasn't keeping an eye on my messages. It is really sad that I saw it after it was over. However, if anything is needed, I'm super happy to help. --Reem Al-Kashif (talk) 00:53, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Hello Reem thanks for your feedback :) I will be happy to contact you again if we do further research. --Merle von Wittich (WMDE) (talk) 09:21, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Paid Editing??

Hi, I saw this survey "CentralNotice/Request/Survey about Paid Editing in German Wikipedia" and my eyes went very WIDE. Can you advise what it was about? And what the results were? Wakelamp (talk) 04:23, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Hey,

I'm copypasting parts of the project page to explain the background and everything. I'm happy to answer further questions (but I'm on holiday from Saturday until the end of October), either here, by email or even by call if necessary.

Since the end of 2020, there have been several major cases of paid editing in the german Wikipedia that come to light. You can find an overview about recent cases here. In November 2021, a "Meinungsbild" (I think the English equivalent is "Request for comment" was launched on the topic with the aim of banning paid writing for PR agencies. The RfC was rejected by 58.4 %, but has led to various community members increasingly looking for ways to deal with the issue.

A small working group of Wikipedians (supported by me) started to work on the topic. In addition to regular calls, there have also been two real live meetings this year. In preparation for the first meeting, this survey was conducted.

The survey itself was advertised through Central Notice in Wikipedia (and that's how you indirectly became aware of it). The aim was to get qualitative data (statements in the RfC and on project pages) as well as quantitative data on the topic.

Goal of the survey

It is uncertain to all those involved in the preparation of the meeting whether only a minority of Wikipedians have a problem with the issue of paid writing by third parties or whether the issue is a problem for many Wikipedians. The RfCs on the topic are not sufficient in this regard, as the voting results are always based on specific rule proposals and do not deal with the topic in general. In addition, only a fraction of active Wikipedians participate in RfC.

The results of the survey should provide input for the structuring of the meeting and for the content-related work items for the meetings.

The survey itself

The survey was not designed to ask any tendentious questions pro or contra paid writing, nor was it intended to find solutions for dealing with paid editing.

The survey questions were developed by the working group (with support from WMDE). I then organised the banner design and the Central Notice campaign. But always in agreement with the working group.

The survey was addressed to editors of the German-language Wikipedia who have reached "Sichter Status" (flagged revisions). Therefore, Wikipedians who have a certain amount of editing experience.

The results of the survey

You find the (german) slides about the result here.

Three takeaways:

• A lot of people responded to the survey. Central Notice is of course hard to miss, but we don't know of any comparable survey with the response in the German Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we could not do any "event logging" and therefore cannot evaluate the click-through rate and compare it directly to other WMDE central notice campaigns :(

• The longer a person has been in WP, the greater the awareness of the problem.
• Slide 21/ Question 8 was the biggest surprise: The result is not so relevant with regard to the topic. But it makes it very clear how many Wikipedians are unaware of governance and meta-topics. Especially when we consider that only people with a certain amount of experience were addressed via Central Notice.

Merle von Wittich (WMDE) (talk) 12:15, 13 October 2022 (UTC)