> ------------------------------ > > Message: 6 > Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:11:57 +0100 > From: Oliver Keyes <scire.fac...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours on the article feedback tool > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List > <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: > <capyupwa34cujyan_vv_chgyxwfct3ejnb4d-nrav_u20qej...@mail.gmail.com > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > No, the data will remain; you can find it at > http://toolserver.org/~catrope/articlefeedback/ (we really need to > advertise > that more widely, actually). > > To be clear, we're not talking about junking the idea; we will still have > an > "Article Feedback Tool" that lets readers provide feedback to editors. The > goal is more to move away from a subjective rating system, and towards > something the editors can look at and go "huh, that's a reasonable > suggestion as to how to fix the article, I'll go do that" or "aw, that's > really nice! I'm glad they liked it so much" > > O. > > As someone who was never exactly a fan of the Article Feedback Tool I'm glad to hear that the current version is to be canned. The sort of subjective ratings it could produce were never going to be useful at improving articles, certainly not useful enough to justify the screen space. My fear was that it might divert people from improving articles to complaining about them. Since we skipped a key stage in the testing we will never know whether it did that. I didn't realise at the time that it was going to abuse our readers trust by collecting shed loads of data that we weren't going to use.
We took a big risk in implementing the Article Feedback Tool without first testing to see whether it would do more harm than good. It is hard to tell in hindsight whether it has been negative or neutral in effect. Yes recruitment of new editors has fallen sharply - September's new editors on EN wiki are down to levels not seen since 2005 http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution but things were on the decline anyway so we don't know whether and to what extent the Article Feedback tool exacerbated the trend. My concern about turning it into something that collects more meaningful comments is that this could exacerbate the pernicious trend from improving articles to tagging them for others to improve. I appreciate that there are various competing theories as to why the community went off the boil circa 2007, but for me and anyone else who considers that the trend to template rather than improve articles has been a major cause of community decline, an "improved" version of the Article Feedback Tool is a worrying prospect. Can we make sure that any new generation Article Feedback tool is properly tested, and that testing includes: 1. Implementing it on a random group of articles and comparing them with a control sample to see which group of articles had the more edits from newbies; 2. Whether the collecting of feedback on ways to improve the article generates additional comments or diverts some editors away from actually fixing the article. 3. Which group of articles recruited the most new editors to the pedia. Please don't implement it if the testing shows that it diverts people from fixing articles to pointing out things that others can fix. On a broader note I suggested some time ago that for the community to give meaningful input into article development we need a process for the community to give feedback on the priority of various potential developments. Wikimania does something like that in the way the program is put together. The image filter "referendum" came close in that it asked people to rate the image filter for importance, unfortunately it didn't include other proposals so that people could put them in order of relevant importance (we also need a quite separate question for whether you think something is worth doing at all). In your new role as liaison between the community and the development team please could you initiate something like that, so that those of us who would give a higher priority to global watchlists or enhancing catalot so that it works on uncategorised articles can say so? Regards WereSpielChequers _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
