Hi all,
I'd love to get some feedback on a new Growth team project: task
recommendations for Wikipedia editors. The design specification and
background for this is at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Task_recommendations. I also gave a brief
introduction to this at the last Foundation Metrics & Activities meeting,
viewable at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JbZ1uWoKEg#t=3483
The two prototype recommendation systems are live now on Beta Labs (
en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org). If you edit copies of real articles (like
Dog, Cat, or Cheese) you'll get some good results. However, this replica of
English Wikipedia is a bit slow, so be patient with us.
The next step for this project is to A/B test this with newly-registered
users on Wikipedia. Since translations of the interface have been pretty
quick (thank you translators!), we'll likely A/B test in at least English,
German, and French, if not other languages too. We've done some usability
testing, including at Wikimania, but we need to run a randomized experiment
to give us a first look at whether these recommendations can have a
positive impact on new editor productivity and retention.
Right now, the main goal of the recommendations we've built is to get
someone who's made their first few edits to keep going. That's why it only
looks at the last article you edited, and makes recommendations off of
that. In the future, we might consider doing something more sophisticated,
such as combing through your entire edit history to recommend articles. We
hope that we can build something which can be continually useful for a
content contributor as they get more experienced.
Thanks,
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/