WSC,
I think that we'd need to be very careful about lowering the bar for BLPs
on ENWP, because there are innumerable non-notable professionals who seem
to pay people to add their biographies (and/or small organizations) to
Wikipedia, and I am more happy to keep them out of the world's encyclopedia
unless they've done something that's more significant than publishing an
occasional scholarly article, owning a small consultancy, and receiving a
few professional distinctions like "adjunct professor of cardiology at XYZ
University". I'm not saying that we can't lower the bar, but we'd want
to
be very careful about doing so in order to avoid giving marketers and PR
people a wider opening for using Wikipedia as a marketing and PR platform.
I'm very supportive of improving the user experience for aspiring
contributors who use mobile devices, but I am not optimistic that this will
lead to a substantial increase in the population of ENWP Wikipedians who
can become proficient with the details of our many policies, are willing to
persist through negative experiences with other contributors (including
vandals, overzealous patrollers, POV-pushers, etc.), and volunteer their
time for high profile roles like WikiProject coordinator or ENWP
administrator. Perhaps non-English Wikipedias do better with editor
retention; I'm also thinking that Commons might be a good place for new
contributors to start if and when mobile editing becomes more user-friendly.
I think that making reversions feel less hostile would be good for
diversity and good for editor retention in general, so I'd suggest that WMF
prioritize working on that point. I'm also hoping to improve user
onboarding with my video project and in collaboration with the WMF Growth
team. I generally appreciate how Kerry is thinking about these problems;
she and I have both given feedback to the WMF Growth team.
Regards,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )