Proposal:Continuous Quality Improvement

Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content.
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation

Summary

  • Quality is a process, not a destination.
  • Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
  • Institute training on the job.
  • Institute leadership.
  • Drive out fear.
  • Break down barriers.
  • Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for editors, asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity.
  • Not all quality can be measured.
  • quality is not software, gatekeeping, or error avoidance, but knowledge and content development

Body of Knowledge

  1. Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services;
  2. Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
  3. Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known (see also: epistemology);
  4. Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.

Proposal

  1. create quality teams. organize editors through teams and contests, to edit those articles that are tagged, such as was done at BLP. and seek out untagged in need of improvement, such as unsourced categories. as a part of the quality improvement process, institute tag elimination by article improvement, not by threat of article deletion.
  2. institute editor training, and mentoring. rather than tagging new editors' work, refer them to a quality circle, or mentor who will demonstrate better quality work, and provide positive reinforcement.
  3. institute admin training. woeful ignorance of human resource management. command style of leadership is not indicated, rather facilitator, coach is.
  4. institute continuous article improvement. reach back from Featured and B articles to stub articles. teams can either improve targeted articles greatly, or make many small changes across the board
  5. institute continuous article assessment. form teams to assess articles, and train editors to assess as a part of article creation

Motivation

by making article improvement the goal, not error fixing, or article tagging, or editor punishment, new editors might be motivated to remain, and improve quality.

Key Questions

  • is the goal of the foundation and every editor to improve the quality of wikipedia?
  • will the proposed process increase quality, or leave the work for others?
  • can we organize, and motivate the editors by respect rather than by fear and threats?

Potential Costs

Doing it the hard way. Culture change.

References

stolen from Deming [1]



Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Continuous Quality Improvement.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. Pohick2 00:40, 9 October 2011 (UTC)