Thanks to everyone who has helped us brainstorm ideas
for positive
notifications for Echo!
We've discussed these ideas and their feasibility with many of you on the
editor development team.
Based on these discussions, we would like to develop this Thank you
notification for our first release:
Of all the features we considered, this seems to have the best potential
to provide a lot of positive feedback to new users, and we think it can be
realistically deployed for our first release of Echo at the end of March.
To keep it as simple as possible, we propose to only add a small 'thank'
link in the History page, next to 'Undo', as shown is this first
ng>.
We considered putting a thanks link and notification on the diff page as
well (see other
)g>),
but this seems beyond the scope of what we can do this quarter. However, if
this feature proves popular, we could add more bells and whistles in future
releases.
Please let us know what you think of this feature. Do you recommend any
improvements?
Also, here are some of the other new notifications we are considering for
the first release:
Lastly, we hope to implement a couple more features related to the
watchlist, in collaboration with the E3 team (Guided tour, Add pages to new
user watchlists):
Comments welcome on any of these proposed features. We only have a few
weeks left to develop them for the first release, but we hope to get many
of them done, as long as we keep them simple.
Regards as ever,
Fabrice
P.S. Benoît, thanks so much for your good suggestions below. Please thank
the members of the French community for their helpful ideas. We look
forward to working with you all to deploy more great editor engagement
features together on the French Wikipedia. See my comments inline below.
On Feb 8, 2013, at 9:54 AM, Benoît Evellin wrote:
Hello all
I've asked members of the French community about the positive feedbacks
displayed by Echo.
To sum up :
* we don't have a editor-in-chief, we don't have people who check what is
good or bad : we only have others contributors who give advice or thanks
That's a very good point, thanks for reminding us of this important
principle.
* a special feature for welcomers or member of help team, in order to
create interactions : "I'm available if you need some help"
Good idea. We have considered a one-time notification to let new users
know where and how to meet people who can help them (e.g. the Teahouse on
the English Wikipedia, or Aide and Acceuil page for the French Wikipedia).
This is definitely in the cards for our next release. We held it back from
the first release, because of the need to customize the link for every
Wikipedia project based on their unique requirements.
* distributing different messages, with an evolution, encourage to
continue. This idea was suggested by this wonderful sentence : Bien ! >
Trop bien ! > Wow ! > Cool ! > Super ! > Super cool ! > Bravo ! > Extra
! >
Grave ! > Génial ! > Super génial ! Trop mortel ! > Que ferait-on sans
toi ? > "Bravo ! Tu as gagné tes premiers lauriers !" (variations on
"Good", "Very good", "Awesome", "Terrific",
"What would be done without
you", "You win your first barnstar")
Could you explain a bit more about what would trigger this feature? How
often would it be sent, and how would we determine automatically if the
user is in fact progressing well enough to warrant some of these
superlatives.
* of course, this feature mustn't spam people
Yes, that is our cardinal rule: we want to inform people without spamming
them.
For the button on the watch list or the recent changes, we agreed on a
simple "merci" link. Not a "like" button ! :-)
Great minds think alike! This is the feature that we ended up selecting
for the first release:
Note that initially it would only be on the article history page. Once we
all have a chance to evaluate it there, we can look into adding it on other
pages in future releases.
People suggest to implement Echo to IP's pages, in order to thank them
when they make a good edit, and incitate them to create an account.
We cannot provide Echo for IPs at this time, because there is no guarantee
that the message will reach the intended user, since IPs are often shared
across different users.
So Echo is only for registered users at this time. As they say, membership
has its benefits :)
I hope to have other feedbacks soon.
Is it possible to display on Echo special announcements ? If we can
advertise people about major RFC or votes, the community will be more
involved.
We are considering adding this feature in future releases, but it would
require some work to make sure that it can't be abused to spam our users.
For now, the Central Notice can continue to be used for community-wide
announcements.
Thanks again for all your good ideas, which will help us develop a better
product over time!
Benoît
2013/2/5 Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>
Hi everyone,
Thank you for all your good suggestions and comments about positive
notifications for Echo, which mean a lot to us!
To sum up our discussion so far, here some of the key points and ideas we
have heard in this email thread and in offline conversations.
*1. Positive notification ideas *
The positive notifications we have discussed so far fall in 7 main
categories, based on what triggers them.
Here's a short list of positive notification types (see full list below):
* Contributions ('100 edits to a page you edited.')
* Contributors ('20 people contributed to a page you edited.')
* Mark as useful ('someone marked your edit as useful.')
* Mark as non-problematic ('Cluebot did not find a problem with your
edit.')
* Pageviews ('a page you edited was viewed 1,000 times.')
* Visitors ('42 people read the page you edited.')
* Feedback ('10 positive comments were posted on a page you edited.')
While most of these notifications could provide positive reinforcement to
new users, some of them are easier to do and more likely to work on all
sites, as outlined below.
*2. Some ideas are hard to build*
Sadly, some of these ideas require a lot more development than we can
afford for our first release next month (we are looking for solutions that
can be implemented in no more than a week for this release).
For example:
* Mark as non-problematic:
This would require an API, so that tools like Huggle or Cluebot can
communicate with Echo. We have pushed back API development to future
releases, because it would take significantly more time than we can afford
right now -- not to mention the extensive coordination with third-party
developers.
* Pageviews/Visitors:
This would require us to create a special database that would make
pageview data available in a structured format, so that a program could
periodically extract that data on a per-article basis, to determine whether
or not a given threshold was exceeded. And visitor counts would be even
harder to collect. Sadly, these ideas appear to be out-of-scope for this
release.
*3. Some ideas may not work for all projects *
Here are examples of ideas that may not work on all projects, because
they would require features that may not exist on these projects:
* Mark as useful
While the 'mark as useful' idea would provide just the kind of positive
feedback we are looking for and could be developed in about a week, not all
projects may be willing to add this new feature in their article history or
diff pages.
* Feedback
While many positive notifications can easily be provided from the article
feedback extension, not all projects may be willing to add this feature on
their sites (e.g. the English Wikipedia is now leaning against it).
* Page reviews
Note that our current page review notification ('your page was reviewed')
requires Page Curation to be installed, which leaves out most other
projects right now. So for all intents and purposes, this notification will
only help English Wikipedia users at this time.
*4. Some ideas may not match primary user behavior *
We are primarily looking for positive notifications about article edits
made by a new user, because that primary behavior represents about 74% of
their first actions. While notifications about pages they created are nice
to have, this only corresponds to about 16% of current user
behavior<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement/2013_strategy_p…ts>,
which makes them less important.
So to sum up, we're looking for ideas that match these criteria:
* makes the new user feel good about participating
* responds to an article edit they made recently
* can be developed in no more than a week
* is likely to be adopted by a number of projects
Given these criteria, the most promising ideas so far appear to be
notifications about contributions (or contributors) to a page you edited.
We might also consider 'mark as useful' or 'feedback' notifications for
projects that seem likely to adopt these new features, but those would have
to be viewed as lower priority than the contribution notifications. Other
ideas may have to wait until future releases, sadly.
What do you think? Have we missed any ideas that could fit within our
criteria? Or do we have information that might shed new light on some of
the more challenging ideas we have discussed so far?
Thanks again for your great suggestions so far -- we're trying to solve a
difficult but important problem, which will require time and ingenuity from
all of us. We hope that with your help, we can develop practical methods
for showing appreciation and gratitude to new users in their first steps.
All the best,
Fabrice
_____________________
*POSITIVE NOTIFICATION IDEAS *
Here is a full list of positive notifications we have discussed so far.
They fall in 7 main categories, based on what triggers them, and are
listed below in rough order of feasibility:
*1. Contributions:*
*
*
* New edits to a page you edited:
"'100 edits have been made to this page since your last edit.'"
* New edits to a page you started:
"'100 edits have been made to a page you started.'"
*2. Contributors:*
* Contributors to a page you edited:
'20 people have contributed to this page since your last edit'
* Contributors to a page you started:
"5 other people have contributed to the page you created."
*3. Mark as useful:*
* Support in history or diff pages: (manual clicks)
'Kaldari marked your edit as useful'
… or: (alternative wordings)
'Kaldari thanked you for your edit'
'Kaldari liked your edit'
*
*
*
*
*4. Mark as non-problematic:*
* Manual evaluations in tools like Huggle:
'Okeyes did not find a problem with your edit'
* Automated evaluations by bots like Cluebot:
'Cluebot did not find a problem with your edit'
*
*
*
*
*5. Pageviews*:
* Pageviews on a page you edited:
"A page you edited was viewed 1,000 times"
* Pageviews on a page you started:
"A page you started just reached its first 1,000 page views"
*6. Visitors*:
* Visitors to an article you edited:
"30 people have looked at your article since you made your edit."
* Visitors to a page you started:
"42 people have read the page you started.'"
* Visitors to your user page:
"20 people have visited your user page this week"
*7. Article feedback*
*
*
* Your useful feedback
"HowieF found your comment useful"
*
*
*
* Positive feedback for a page you edited:
"10 positive comments were posted on a page you edited."
*
* Useful feedback for a page you edited:
"10 useful comments were posted on a page you edited."
* Feedback satisfaction for a page you edited:
"85% of readers found what they were looking for on a page you edited."
The most promising ideas will soon be added to our feature requirements
page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Features_under_cons…
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin <benoit.evellin(a)wikimedia.fr
wrote:
Hi everybody
I have various observations for all of your ideas.
* Useful edit notification : this idea may be a good one, if the wording
illustrates a Jedi/padawan relation instead of an editor-in-chief/freelance
relation. We want equality between all editors. We all know that is not
true, so we mustn't dig the trench deeper.
* Contributions since the last edit : I completely agree with Chris
experience and Liam suggestions. Be careful again in the wording : articles
are the property of no one.
* positive notifications and bot notifications : how will it work on
Wikipedias without theses features ?
The idea is that instead of hooking it into specific services (ClueBot,
Huggle)
we'll have a "silent" notification - something that exists but is
not triggered by MediaWiki, and can instead be triggered through the API.
So, when ClueBot finds an edit does not meet its standards for reverting
it, it would poke the API to send $notification to $userwhomadeedit.
Because it's not service-specific, other wikis with their own automated or
semi-automated tools could also hook in using the same process.
The problem with tying the notification to something *in* MediaWiki is
that MediaWiki itself really doesn't have a way of recognising edits as
'good' or 'bad' - that's always been handled through bots and user
extensions.
(I'd actually argue that this is a good illustration of why a decade of
correcting for MediaWiki's flaws by way of the TS, bots, API calls, etc has
substantially harmed the efficacy of our product(s) - but this is an
essay-sized rant for another day :))
Benoît
2013/2/2 Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com
On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Oliver Keyes
<okeyes(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
> On 2 February 2013 03:33, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)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
_______________________________________________
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon <cmcmahon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hi guys,
We would be grateful for your advice on how to give more positive
notifications to new users after their first edits.
We're looking for notification ideas that could lead new editors
towards a "happy path" to encourage further contributions.
What about "20 people have visited your user page at User:Yourname this
week" or similar? I think it points up the interconnectedness of wiki
users.
In general, I think notifications about people and what people do will
be more welcome than notifications about pages and what is done to them.
This is true of the suggestions I've read, but I think it is worth noting
specifically.
_______________________________________________
On Feb 2, 2013, at 3:17 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 00:20, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes
<okeyes(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
So, I feel strongly that Huggle and ClueBot
integration is frankly all
the positive notification we need for edits alone. I can gather some data
on it, but I'm pretty sure they cover the vast majority of incoming edits.
I'm also wary of sticking another interface element in page histories or
diffs (already crammed), since it increases the footprint of Echo and the
chances people might grumble about it.
I think Oliver is probably correct that hooking in to these pre-existing
queues is the right approach. The one question I'd have is: what volume of
edits are actually being marked as helpful?
I can get some numbers on this - I'll poke the Huggle and Cluebot teams
today.
I think it's less 'mark as helpful' and more 'mark as
non-problematic' at the moment, but they're for all intents the same (An
edit that does not need reverting).
I would say focusing on one method where we know
users are getting
positive feedback, and then iterating on that, is a good approach. Also: am
I correct in assuming that we have the "marked as patrolled" notification
for page creators?
I would say that adding the "mark as helpful" button is a larger change
than you think, and likely to cause a stir. I would proceed with caution
there, because in addition to the noise you'll generate from putting
_anything_ new on histories and diffs, we need to build a positive feedback
mechanism that is going to work in the long term, and which we think
experienced users will actually use in a large scale way. This is not a
trivial ux problem, as you can see from the tale of the MoodBar/Feedback
Dashboard story: we can always get newbies to generate a new queue of
activity. But changing the habits of experienced editors with lots to do is
hard.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
On Feb 1, 2013, at 12:15 PM, Luke Welling
WMF wrote:
Article Feedback integration, ie "A page you edited 'List of Ancient
Jedi' was rated 4* for trustworthiness"
"5 other people have contributed to the page you created 'The
Wombles'"
I think the best positive vanity metric would be "42 million people have
read the page you created 'Dr Who'" but getting the data would be
difficult.
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:02 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
> Hi guys,
> We would be grateful for your advice
on how to give more positive
> notifications to new users after their first edits.
> We're looking for notification
ideas that could lead new editors towards
> a "happy path" to encourage further contributions. Many studies have shown
> that positive reinforcement plays an important role in increasing a user's
> productivity, and we would like to provide at least one or two good
> solutions to support that goal in the first release of Echo at the end of
> March.
> Here are some of the ideas which we
have brainstormed to date, on our
> Echo feature requirements page:
>
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Positive_notificati…
> They include:
> ** Useful edit
notification<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Use…
> *
> This feature would add a 'Mark as useful' button in article history
> and/or diff pages, to invite experienced editors to mark edits they
> find useful, so they can send positive feedback to new editors. This could
> be done through a simple text link next to each edit (e.g. next to 'Undo'):
> 'Mark as useful' (or 'Useful' for short). When an editor clicks on
that
> link, this notification would be sent to the new editor: 'Kaldari marked
> your edit as useful on Golden-crowned Sparrow. <View your edit>'
> ** Huggle/Cluebot
Notifications<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Hu…
> *
> This feature would hook into third-party anti-vandalism tools like
> Huggle or ClueBot. Some of these tools could be adapted to provide
> an "approve of edit" button (Huggle already has such a feature), which
> could send a notification to the user who made the 'good' edit saying
> something like "this was good! Keep it up".
> ** Contributions since your last
edit<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Contributio…
> *
> Another feature we discussed is giving new users a bundled notification
> that '20 people have contributed to this page since your last edit'.
> While this type of activity is currently handled by the watchlist, this
> type of 'contributions' notification could have a positive impact in
> getting the new user to go back to a page they edited earlier (particularly
> if they don't yet feel motivated to use the watchlist).
> ** Positive notifications for active
new
users<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Positive
> *
> We have already identified a number of positive notification ideas for
> active new users, which include: WikiLove, Page Link, or Page added
> to WikiProject. While these positive notifications are likely to motivate
> active new users, a challenge we face is how to give positive reinforcement
> to new editors immediately after their first few edits, before they become
> active enough to start new pages or be noticed for a WikiLove message.
> What do you think of these first ideas? None of them may be perfect in
> their current formulation, but with your help, we could be improve them to
> provide a practical solution that helps engage new users to participate
> more productively. With everyone's guidance, we can do better than only
> send them negative notifications when their edits are reverted (which is
> like a slap in the face) -- or sending them no notifications whatsoever
> after their first edits (which is what we are doing now).
> Do you have other ideas for positive
notifications we could be sending
> to new users?
> You are welcome to respond in this
email thread, or add your comments or
> suggestions on this Echo talk
page<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_req…
> .
> Thanks for any tips or ideas you can
provide to help us with this
> important editor engagement goal!
> All the best,
> Fabrice
> _______________________________
> Fabrice Florin
> Product Manager, Editor Engagement
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free:
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_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
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