[erikpukinskis]

A key takeaway for me is that you can't just take crude metrics, make some inferences and run with them. Jimmy Wales has been running his organization under a wide reaching and completely wrong understanding. That's because he equates number of edits with importance of contribution.

It's a basic psychology 101 concept, but one thats easily missed: don't equate your operationalized variables with the phenomena you are trying to measure.

[billswift]

That's a danger with any management - it is all too easy to overvalue what is easy to measure and more or less ignore what is hard. I have read about problems caused by that in everything from the military through software engineering in the present. It is also referred to as "you get more of whatever you measure".