Positive Notifications for Echo

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Fabrice Florin

1 Feb 2013 1 Feb '13

8:02 p.m.

Hi guys, We would be grateful for your advice on how to give more positive notifications to new users after their first edits. We're looking for notification ideas that could lead new editors towards a "happy path" to encourage further contributions. Many studies have shown that positive reinforcement plays an important role in increasing a user's productivity, and we would like to provide at least one or two good solutions to support that goal in the first release of Echo at the end of March. Here are some of the ideas which we have brainstormed to date, on our Echo feature requirements page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Positive_notificati… They include: * Useful edit notification This feature would add a 'Mark as useful' button in article history and/or diff pages, to invite experienced editors to mark edits they find useful, so they can send positive feedback to new editors. This could be done through a simple text link next to each edit (e.g. next to 'Undo'): 'Mark as useful' (or 'Useful' for short). When an editor clicks on that link, this notification would be sent to the new editor: 'Kaldari marked your edit as useful on Golden-crowned Sparrow. <View your edit>' * Huggle/Cluebot Notifications This feature would hook into third-party anti-vandalism tools like Huggle or ClueBot. Some of these tools could be adapted to provide an "approve of edit" button (Huggle already has such a feature), which could send a notification to the user who made the 'good' edit saying something like "this was good! Keep it up". * Contributions since your last edit Another feature we discussed is giving new users a bundled notification that '20 people have contributed to this page since your last edit'. While this type of activity is currently handled by the watchlist, this type of 'contributions' notification could have a positive impact in getting the new user to go back to a page they edited earlier (particularly if they don't yet feel motivated to use the watchlist). * Positive notifications for active new users We have already identified a number of positive notification ideas for active new users, which include: WikiLove, Page Link, or Page added to WikiProject. While these positive notifications are likely to motivate active new users, a challenge we face is how to give positive reinforcement to new editors immediately after their first few edits, before they become active enough to start new pages or be noticed for a WikiLove message. What do you think of these first ideas? None of them may be perfect in their current formulation, but with your help, we could be improve them to provide a practical solution that helps engage new users to participate more productively. With everyone's guidance, we can do better than only send them negative notifications when their edits are reverted (which is like a slap in the face) -- or sending them no notifications whatsoever after their first edits (which is what we are doing now). Do you have other ideas for positive notifications we could be sending to new users? You are welcome to respond in this email thread, or add your comments or suggestions on this Echo talk page. Thanks for any tips or ideas you can provide to help us with this important editor engagement goal! All the best, Fabrice _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

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Luke Welling WMF

1 Feb 1 Feb

8:15 p.m.

Article Feedback integration, ie "A page you edited 'List of Ancient Jedi' was rated 4* for trustworthiness" "5 other people have contributed to the page you created 'The Wombles'" I think the best positive vanity metric would be "42 million people have read the page you created 'Dr Who'" but getting the data would be difficult. On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

Hi guys, We would be grateful for your advice on how to give more positive notifications to new users after their first edits. We're looking for notification ideas that could lead new editors towards a "happy path" to encourage further contributions. Many studies have shown that positive reinforcement plays an important role in increasing a user's productivity, and we would like to provide at least one or two good solutions to support that goal in the first release of Echo at the end of March. Here are some of the ideas which we have brainstormed to date, on our Echo feature requirements page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Positive_notificati… They include: ** Useful edit notification<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Use… * This feature would add a 'Mark as useful' button in article history and/or diff pages, to invite experienced editors to mark edits they find useful, so they can send positive feedback to new editors. This could be done through a simple text link next to each edit (e.g. next to 'Undo'): 'Mark as useful' (or 'Useful' for short). When an editor clicks on that link, this notification would be sent to the new editor: 'Kaldari marked your edit as useful on Golden-crowned Sparrow. <View your edit>' ** Huggle/Cluebot Notifications<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Hu… * This feature would hook into third-party anti-vandalism tools like Huggle or ClueBot. Some of these tools could be adapted to provide an "approve of edit" button (Huggle already has such a feature), which could send a notification to the user who made the 'good' edit saying something like "this was good! Keep it up". ** Contributions since your last edit<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Contributio… * Another feature we discussed is giving new users a bundled notification that '20 people have contributed to this page since your last edit'. While this type of activity is currently handled by the watchlist, this type of 'contributions' notification could have a positive impact in getting the new user to go back to a page they edited earlier (particularly if they don't yet feel motivated to use the watchlist). ** Positive notifications for active new users<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Positive&g… * We have already identified a number of positive notification ideas for active new users, which include: WikiLove, Page Link, or Page added to WikiProject. While these positive notifications are likely to motivate active new users, a challenge we face is how to give positive reinforcement to new editors immediately after their first few edits, before they become active enough to start new pages or be noticed for a WikiLove message. What do you think of these first ideas? None of them may be perfect in their current formulation, but with your help, we could be improve them to provide a practical solution that helps engage new users to participate more productively. With everyone's guidance, we can do better than only send them negative notifications when their edits are reverted (which is like a slap in the face) -- or sending them no notifications whatsoever after their first edits (which is what we are doing now). Do you have other ideas for positive notifications we could be sending to new users? You are welcome to respond in this email thread, or add your comments or suggestions on this Echo talk page<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_req… . Thanks for any tips or ideas you can provide to help us with this important editor engagement goal! All the best, Fabrice _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

Chris McMahon

9:38 p.m.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

What about "20 people have visited your user page at User:Yourname this week" or similar? I think it points up the interconnectedness of wiki users. In general, I think notifications about people and what people do will be more welcome than notifications about pages and what is done to them. This is true of the suggestions I've read, but I think it is worth noting specifically.

Oliver Keyes

10:26 p.m.

So, I feel strongly that Huggle and ClueBot integration is frankly all the positive notification we need for edits alone. I can gather some data on it, but I'm pretty sure they cover the vast majority of incoming edits. I'm also wary of sticking another interface element in page histories or diffs (already crammed), since it increases the footprint of Echo and the chances people might grumble about it. On 1 February 2013 21:38, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

Steven Walling

2 Feb 2 Feb

12:20 a.m.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

I think Oliver is probably correct that hooking in to these pre-existing queues is the right approach. The one question I'd have is: what volume of edits are actually being marked as helpful? I would say focusing on one method where we know users are getting positive feedback, and then iterating on that, is a good approach. Also: am I correct in assuming that we have the "marked as patrolled" notification for page creators? I would say that adding the "mark as helpful" button is a larger change than you think, and likely to cause a stir. I would proceed with caution there, because in addition to the noise you'll generate from putting _anything_ new on histories and diffs, we need to build a positive feedback mechanism that is going to work in the long term, and which we think experienced users will actually use in a large scale way. This is not a trivial ux problem, as you can see from the tale of the MoodBar/Feedback Dashboard story: we can always get newbies to generate a new queue of activity. But changing the habits of experienced editors with lots to do is hard. -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/

Oliver Keyes

11:17 a.m.

On 2 February 2013 00:20, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

today. I think it's less 'mark as helpful' and more 'mark as non-problematic' at the moment, but they're for all intents the same (An edit that does not need reverting).

...

I would say focusing on one method where we know users are getting positive feedback, and then iterating on that, is a good approach. Also: am I correct in assuming that we have the "marked as patrolled" notification for page creators? I would say that adding the "mark as helpful" button is a larger change than you think, and likely to cause a stir. I would proceed with caution there, because in addition to the noise you'll generate from putting _anything_ new on histories and diffs, we need to build a positive feedback mechanism that is going to work in the long term, and which we think experienced users will actually use in a large scale way. This is not a trivial ux problem, as you can see from the tale of the MoodBar/Feedback Dashboard story: we can always get newbies to generate a new queue of activity. But changing the habits of experienced editors with lots to do is hard. -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

Liam Wyatt

3:33 a.m.

I'd like to give a giant +1 to Chris's suggestion - telling (potential) editors how many other people have read the article is a big motivator. It's logical really, we know this from the Education outreach projects and also from all the GLAM content donations: people REALLY are motivated by the fact that *their* writing and multimedia is being seen by lots of people. Currently that information is rather hidden away in a link to the toolserver via the History tab. If you could bring that information more to the fore it could be really satisfying. For example: "30 people have looked at your article since you made your edit." or, "350 people have seen this article in the last month" or even "6 other editors have changed this article and 500 people have read it since you last helped edit it". Perhaps you could even give some more complex breakdowns with pageviews by continent? Just like making the timestamp more visible (and changing it to a relative number e.g. 6 hours since last edit), making the pageviews more visible are good ways of conveying the idea of how *immediate* and how *global* editing Wikipedia is. -Liam wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

Oliver Keyes

11:18 a.m.

On 2 February 2013 03:33, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

I'd like to give a giant +1 to Chris's suggestion - telling (potential) editors how many other people have read the article is a big motivator. It's logical really, we know this from the Education outreach projects and also from all the GLAM content donations: people REALLY are motivated by the fact that *their* writing and multimedia is being seen by lots of people. Currently that information is rather hidden away in a link to the toolserver via the History tab. If you could bring that information more to the fore it could be really satisfying. For example: "30 people have looked at your article since you made your edit." or, "350 people have seen this article in the last month" or even "6 other editors have changed this article and 500 people have read it since you last helped edit it". Perhaps you could even give some more complex breakdowns with pageviews by continent? The problem with this (or potential problem) is twofold: first, with a

large number of pages it could get spammy. Second, to my knowledge the toolserver and stats.grok.se sites are not run off any kind of live data; they're reliant on database dumps. We'd either be plugging into third-party services of unknown viability or need to make a request to analytics for them to make this kind of data more internally available and transparent, which could be a pile of work.

...

Just like making the timestamp more visible (and changing it to a relative number e.g. 6 hours since last edit), making the pageviews more visible are good ways of conveying the idea of how *immediate* and how *global* editing Wikipedia is. -Liam wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

_______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

Sage Ross

11:43 a.m.

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

On 2 February 2013 03:33, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:

The problem with this (or potential problem) is twofold: first, with a large number of pages it could get spammy. Second, to my knowledge the toolserver and stats.grok.se sites are not run off any kind of live data; they're reliant on database dumps. We'd either be plugging into third-party services of unknown viability or need to make a request to analytics for them to make this kind of data more internally available and transparent, which could be a pile of work.

The traffic dumps have been running pretty reliably on a daily basis, so it's close enough to live for this purpose. Making that more internally available and transparent would be well worth a modest pile of work, as this is data that we know is very powerful motivation for many contributors (new and experienced alike). It would take some experimenting to see what kinds of traffic-related data are effective in Echo notifications, but the basic concept has a lot of potential. (And getting article-level traffic data integrated into our internal infrastructure would be an important step forward even beyond usage in Echo.) -Sage

Benoît Evellin

12:43 p.m.

Hi everybody I have various observations for all of your ideas. * Useful edit notification : this idea may be a good one, if the wording illustrates a Jedi/padawan relation instead of an editor-in-chief/freelance relation. We want equality between all editors. We all know that is not true, so we mustn't dig the trench deeper. * Contributions since the last edit : I completely agree with Chris experience and Liam suggestions. Be careful again in the wording : articles are the property of no one. * positive notifications and bot notifications : how will it work on Wikipedias without theses features ? Benoît 2013/2/2 Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com>

...

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 2 February 2013 03:33, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I'd like to give a giant +1 to Chris's suggestion - telling (potential) > editors how many other people have read the article is a big motivator.

It's

> logical really, we know this from the Education outreach projects and

also

> from all the GLAM content donations: people REALLY are motivated by the

fact

> that *their* writing and multimedia is being seen by lots of people. > > Currently that information is rather hidden away in a link to the > toolserver via the History tab. If you could bring that information

more to

> the fore it could be really satisfying. For example: > "30 people have looked at your article since you made your edit." or, > "350 people have seen this article in the last month" or even "6 other > editors have changed this article and 500 people have read it since you

last

> helped edit it". Perhaps you could even give some more complex

breakdowns

with pageviews by continent?

The problem with this (or potential problem) is twofold: first, with a

large

number of pages it could get spammy. Second, to my knowledge the

toolserver

and stats.grok.se sites are not run off any kind of live data; they're reliant on database dumps. We'd either be plugging into third-party

services

of unknown viability or need to make a request to analytics for them to

make

this kind of data more internally available and transparent, which could

a pile of work.

-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr

Oliver Keyes

1:03 p.m.

On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin <benoit.evellin(a)wikimedia.fr>wrote;wrote:

...

Hi everybody I have various observations for all of your ideas. * Useful edit notification : this idea may be a good one, if the wording illustrates a Jedi/padawan relation instead of an editor-in-chief/freelance relation. We want equality between all editors. We all know that is not true, so we mustn't dig the trench deeper. * Contributions since the last edit : I completely agree with Chris experience and Liam suggestions. Be careful again in the wording : articles are the property of no one. * positive notifications and bot notifications : how will it work on Wikipedias without theses features ? The idea is that instead of hooking it into specific services (ClueBot,

Huggle) we'll have a "silent" notification - something that exists but is not triggered by MediaWiki, and can instead be triggered through the API. So, when ClueBot finds an edit does not meet its standards for reverting it, it would poke the API to send $notification to $userwhomadeedit. Because it's not service-specific, other wikis with their own automated or semi-automated tools could also hook in using the same process. The problem with tying the notification to something *in* MediaWiki is that MediaWiki itself really doesn't have a way of recognising edits as 'good' or 'bad' - that's always been handled through bots and user extensions. (I'd actually argue that this is a good illustration of why a decade of correcting for MediaWiki's flaws by way of the TS, bots, API calls, etc has substantially harmed the efficacy of our product(s) - but this is an essay-sized rant for another day :))

...

Benoît 2013/2/2 Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com>

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

motivator. It's

> logical really, we know this from the Education outreach projects and

also

> from all the GLAM content donations: people REALLY are motivated by

the fact

more to

you last

> helped edit it". Perhaps you could even give some more complex

breakdowns

with pageviews by continent?

The problem with this (or potential problem) is twofold: first, with a

large

number of pages it could get spammy. Second, to my knowledge the

toolserver

and stats.grok.se sites are not run off any kind of live data; they're reliant on database dumps. We'd either be plugging into third-party

services

of unknown viability or need to make a request to analytics for them to

make

this kind of data more internally available and transparent, which

could be

a pile of work.

-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

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participants (8)

Benoît Evellin
Chris McMahon
Fabrice Florin
Liam Wyatt
Luke Welling WMF
Oliver Keyes
Sage Ross
Steven Walling