User:CaptainEek/Grand Unified Theory of Editor Time

"Editor time" is a frequently thrown around metric, but I think one we poorly understand. What follows is a physics inspired musing/metaphor on how editor time works, and what we do and don't understand about it. This is a bit half baked and sat in my sandbox for a long time, so please excuse me if it isn't the most concise. I've tried to highlight the key thoughts :)

Grand Unified Theory of Editor Time

An idea I have sometimes subscribed to is that editor time is strictly transferrable; i.e. each editor hour is fungible and could be used to do any task on Wikipedia. Given ten hours of editor time, it could be used to remove vandalism, or write policies, or create articles. But I admit that this theory of editor time is an incomplete one, much as Isaac Newton's theorems were useful as a starting point and at certain scales, but don't capture the granular reality of the quantum world. Indeed, I think we can realize that editor time is not strictly transferrable.

If I had ten hours of Wikipedia time, I alone will be choosing how to use them. I'll probably put most of them into doing backend business, and the remainder on writing about birds or history. For argument's sake, lets say I'm spending ten hours a month on birds, and ten hours a month on history. But lets say we decide that birds are no longer worth Wikipedia's time, and ban writing about birds. I now have ten spare hours that I used to use on birds. But it is unlikely that I will suddenly turn all ten of those hours into history writing time, or backend time. Indeed, many of those ten hours might instead be converted to non-Wikipedia time. Perhaps I put two more hours into history, but I lose the other eight. The amount of hours being spent on non-bird topics goes up, but the overall number of hours being put into Wikipedia goes down!

This phenomena is worth examining because I think that it underlies a lot of our decision making, and I think a lot of people implicitly or explicitly believe in this theory. We assume that if we remove a certain area of the 'pedia that folks will migrate to other areas. But this isn't strictly true. Now, I admit that I don't yet have a quantum theory of editor time which would more precisely determine the consequences of every action we took ;) But its obvious that there is some loss in transferring editor attention. Depending on who you ask, that might be a good thing. We've deprecated all sorts of ideas and projects and parts of Wikipedia over the years because we felt that it wasn't worth the time and hassle. I myself have called for deprecating various parts of Wikipedia, and have succeeded at some of those calls. I have worried about the time and energy we put into the maintenance and organization of Wikipedia. We eventually receive diminishing rewards, and must consider the opportunity cost of such work. But I sometimes think I've been too quick to assume that editor time is strictly transferrable.

I'm reminded of the spherical cow problem in physics. Many physics problems simplify various aspects in order to make the underlying calculation easier. For example, one might imagine that a cow is spherical, as it is much easier to calculate how a sphere reacts in a physics problem than a rather complicatedly shaped cow. Indeed, a physics problem might say that air resistance or friction are negligible on the cow, to ease calculation. But after enough of that, you're not really calculating how a cow interacts with the world, you're doing a theoretical physics problem with no real world application. Are we doing the same thing when it comes to RfC's that are really referendums on editor time? Just as a physics problem might tell us to assume friction is negligible, do our RfC's implicitly assume that editor time loss is negligible? Are we running RfC's on spherical cows?

If we run an RfC with the assumption that editor time is fungible, it might come to a very different conclusion than if we recognized the time loss that the RfC might bring. Again, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'll use the featured portal process as an example. We deprecated it in 2017; implicit in that decision was the idea that portals were not strictly the way forward and that featured portals were too great a drain on editor time. But its not like that was the last word, as the contentious ArbCom Portals case shows. In trying to save editor time, did the community ultimately spend more editor time?

Game theory posits that no war could ever be justified, as any rational decision maker would realize that a war would ultimately cost more than it was ever worth. But human history is full of wars, because humans aren't rational decision makers, and game theorists have failed to account for the fact that wars are about more than just money. I hesitate to describe RfC's as wars, since I think us Wikipedians are a pretty nice bunch, but they sometimes take on dimensions of great struggle. I disdain this; at one point I believe I've noted that Wikipedia isn't some cosmic battle of good and evil, to be won at any and all costs. Yet we approach RfC's as if they are battles for our future. And sure, sometimes they are. But I wonder if our incomplete working theories on editor time don't help contribute to that belief in cases where it really isn't. We're so worried about shrinking editor time that we feel we must apply it just the right places or else the whole endeavor fails. But that assumes editor time is fungible. If we're viewing an RfC as a fight for editor time, based on incorrect assumptions, might we too make irrational decisions?

I don't imagine to have the answer to this problem. After all, just as there is no Grand Unified Theory of physics, there is no Grand Unified Theory of Wikipedia. But clearly editor time isn't 100% fungible, and it isn't zero percent fungible. The issue is that we don't have a way to precisely calculate just how fungible it is (we're more of an art than a science anyway). But just because we can't calculate it doesn't mean we can assume it is close enough to 100% to be negligible. Time loss is real and must be considered. At the end of the day, we must remember that our editors are human beings, not editing machines. If they don't like what we're doing, they'll just leave. We're only volunteers after all.