On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
Hello everyone,
As many of you know, we have been testing an improved version of Article
Feedback v5 in two pilots on the English and French Wikipedias throughout
2013. The main purpose of this experiment was to increase participation
on Wikipedia by inviting readers to leave comments on article pages.
The French pilot just ended last month, providing informative results
about this experiment. In the final RfC we ran on the French
site<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro/25_janvier_2…
(1),
about 45% of respondents wanted AFT5 removed
everywhere<https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0…#gid=4>,
while 38% wanted to keep it an opt-in basis, and 10% on help pages only
(2); nearly everyone agreed it should not be on by default on all 40,000
pilot pages, let alone on the entire French Wikipedia. Their concerns are
is consistent to what we heard from editors on the English and German
pilots: overall, a majority of editors do not find reader comments useful
enough to warrant the extra moderation work.
Based on these pilot results, we recommend that Article Feedback be
removed from our two pilot sites at the end of the month, as outlined in
this
report<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Report&… (3)
— since the tool is not welcome by a majority of editors, despite its
benefits to readers.
Fabrice, I commend you for authoring this report. It is honest,
straightforward, and thoughtful -- and, I imagine, not easy to write. I
think it demonstrates a high standard of professionalism with respect to
feature development. It makes me proud to be a WMFer when I see us act with
such self-awareness. It's an example I'll try to emulate.