Yusuke Matsubara and I ran a Mechanical Turk study to classify WikiLove messages a year or two ago.
Not what your colleague is asking for, but might give a couple pointers for how someone could perform that study... I think the dataset is still around somewhere too.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Classifying_wikilove_messages
Moral of the story: - about a quarter of WikiLove messages aren't "Hey, great job!". They're help requests, responses to help requests, offers of condolences, welcomes to new users, even some warnings. - the context and content of a message matter, so if you want to track the influence of WikiLove (on # edits? length of participation?) these messages are likely to be "noise" that confounds your analysis. So, if you're interested in the effect of *praise* or *thanks* specifically, you'll want to filter out messages like these.
There's also a real-time Wikilove edit filter on enwiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&wpSearchFilte...
- J
On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.ukwrote:
Wikilove the tool in particular, or barnstars/appreciation in general?
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034358 found productive people, gave half of them barnstars, and looked to see what happened. - "receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60% and makes contributors six times more likely to receive additional barnstars from other community members"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Survey_2011/Wikipedia_Community had a general question about appreciation through barnstars etc, but "do you like people saying nice things" is not the most rigorous study ;-)
Andrew.
On 25 July 2013 22:32, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
A colleague asks for a pointer to measurements of the influence of WikiLove. Thanks. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
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- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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