On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 2 February 2013 03:33, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@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.
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