Hi there analytics,
Wanted to get your input on something. Our grantee partner Jake Orlowitz
(cc'd) is planning out the pilot evaluation for The Wikipedia Adventure.
We haven't hammered out the details yet, but it looks like he will be
comparing editing behavior between at least 2 cohorts: editors who were
invited to play TWA and who completed at least the first mission, and a
control group of editors who met the same basic criteria (joined around the
same time, met a minimum edit threshold). The TWA pilot will last at least
a month, and new editors will be invited on a rolling basis throughout that
month. We'd like to examine the editing behavior of each editor AFTER the
date they were invited to TWA (or would have been, in the case of the
control group).
Currently, it looks like Wikimetrics only lets you specify a date range at
the level of the cohort; that won't work for this analysis, since we want
to exclude edits made before a given date, which will vary user-by-user.
Could WikiMetrics be updated to allow researchers to set user-level date
ranges? I'm thinking potentially this could be an optional field in the
upload CSV.
I think this feature would be useful beyond TWA. The current setup works
well for offline events, where everyone in a cohort is receiving the same
"treatment" at exactly the same time. But for many online initiatives--such
as volunteer-driven email and social media campaigns & editor engagement
experiments like TWA, Teahouse, Image and translation drives, etc.--the
cohorts won't necessarily fit neatly into single-date buckets.
We have a little time to talk this through: the TWA pilot hasn't started
yet, and we won't be analyzing data for *at least* a month and a half, but
I wanted to get the conversation started.
Cheers,
Jonathan
--
Jonathan T. Morgan
Learning Strategist
Wikimedia Foundation