Kaggle contest aims to boost Wikipedia editors

I'll quote myself from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/28/data-competition-announ... about the competition:

Reading more, I’m pretty troubled by the selection of data: http://www.kaggle.com/c/wikichallenge/forums/t/674/sampling-...

What’s the point of predicting only about recent editors, whose ranks have already been thoroughly harrowed by the endless tightening of policy and rise of deletionists? Wikipedia already has a horrendous reputation for screwing over contributors, so anyone who does much editing (and whose departure would be noticed by the criterion) is self-selecting now.

just the other day cryonics researcher Mike Darwin told me he had no interest in contributing because he was sure all his contributions would be reverted under an extremely narrow reading of WP:RS, and wondered whether his BLP article could just be deleted since he certainly wasn’t going to edit it into an article worth a damn

Despite the flippant title, this seems like a very good idea.

I believe that positive feedback of this kind is the sort of thing that allows wonderful sites such as stackoverflow to exist.

The competition itself seems accessory, though. The real interesting bit is that Wikipedia is essentially adding its own "like" or "+1" button. I hope it keeps the term "love" button, even if it does seem out of place (at first!) for stuffy old Wikipedia.

Now that I think about it, maybe this will begin a push to have Wikipedia seen as less of a stuffy old place filled with angry pedants and more of a "community garden" of knowledge. Not that I'm advocating less editorial integrity, its just that Wikipedia really needs more measures to lessen the perceived hostility (once you get inside the place), so this seems like a little start towards that end and a big plus to me.