"Volunteer Wikipedia editing is not often treated as a "legitimate" volunteer activity contributing e.g. to professional development." Tat would be because Wikipedia is not a "legitimate" volunteer activity contributing e.g. to professional development. WP is a toy project; at its core, it is non-serious. It will continue to remain non-serious so long as WP:CONSENSUS is the one policy to rule them all. There are no guarantees of academic rigor. FAC, for example, is not a test of article quality, because it is ruled by WP:CONSENSUS. It is instead a test of contributor good faith. Contributors usually pass that test, but there is no backstop that guarantees high quality secondary research in cases where good faith does not exist. No really. None.Reflets.dans.l'eau (talk) 09:38, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think Wikipedia pretends to "academic rigor" in the procedural sense, but that does not mean it is not serious. In many fields educating the public about existing scholarship (i.e., not original research) is considered very important. Some universities formally reward public engagement. But even though Wikipedia is among the best ways to reach the public, it's rarely treated that way. Attribution and assessment remain important problems for interpreting the work of a Wikipedia editor, but then again, we know that simply trusting peer review will do the job can makepeopledangerouslycomplacent as well. Kim Post (talk) 07:00, 7 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above comment is certainly true in many respects. I wouldn't regard Wikipedia editing as any sort of indication of "professional development". It is essentially an anonymous exercise where the editor can expect no credit for their effort. It is also true that many articles that are mired in politics are exceptionally poor, primarily because much of the editing is done by those with an axe to grind (on both sides) leaving a mish-mash of an article. The issue of "retirement" is quite often triggered by "interpersonal conflict", although one suspects that that'snot the whole story. Nigej (talk) 19:17, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Might I recommend using a blockquote template/indent in the future? Would make it easier to distinguish the copied abstracts from the description and analysis czar 19:59, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The question about how to improve Commons is an interesting one, especially with Flickr going paywalled next year. -Indy beetle (talk) 20:03, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Anyone know of any good noticeboards to ask a question about recent WP research? None of our projectspace talk page appear particularly active and they're further fragmented into meta:Research:Index and related pages. czar 22:32, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe ask Tilman personally? That's what I did. ☆ Bri (talk) 23:28, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The best place to get informed responses to general questions (e.g. "has there been research about question X") is usually the Wiki-research-l mailing list. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:53, 4 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Look like we have gender balance within our vandal community. It's a start :) Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 22:28, 3 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
