On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 4:08 PM, svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote:
I'd like to see this for anonymous contributors --
for the post-edit it
should be easy, for the flyout version it needs some thinking on possible
implementation.
Ultimately whether we present recommendations to anonymous editors will
depend on how the recommendations are generated. Right now, both the
post-edit and flyout versions are based off your last edit, so they
theoretically could work for any editor. Like you hinted at, the flyout is
harder since you don't know if the person has actually edited before (or if
it was someone else from that IP).
Any kind of filtering that looks at something more sophisticated would
likely require have more persistent history about an editor, and thus might
not work for unregistered users easily. Right now, for example, we already
know that SuggestBot has a lot of success by combing through a user's
entire edit history.
Our strategy will be first to figure out what works well for making good
recommendations, then see if we can extend it to unregistered users if
possible. Prioritizing recommendations for registered users makes sense not
just because it's technologically easier, but because we know registered
editors make the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia. Providing personalized
functionality to only registered users is something that's a pretty common
pattern on wikis, whether it's notifications, watchlist, or other things.
Steven Walling wrote:
The next step for this project is to A/B test
this with newly-registered
users on Wikipedia.
Please (kicking and screaming ;-):
- Ask at a local village pump and get community approval for enabling this
extension.
- Also test this at other Wikimedia projects, not only Wikipedia.
We generally don't ask permission to enable extensions. Thats a technical
decision that gets made as part of the deployment cycle. Plus,
recommendations is not a new extension, but is an optional feature of an
extension that has been deployed to many Wikipedias for a long time
(GettingStarted). We'll simply turn it on for a short time as part of a
test, then turn it off while we analyze the results.
The primary purpose of the new functionality is to aid new editors, and it
won't be presented to any existing registered users (not even on an opt-in
basis). There's no point in polling existing community members about
functionality they will not see. Running a short A/B test, in concert with
usability testing, will provide us with an objective look at whether a
particular feature helps new people contribute to the encyclopedia more or
less.
As for enabling recommendations on other Wikimedia projects... we have no
idea whether the recommendations will work for *any* project. Testing on
Wikipedia is our first focus. From a practical standpoint, the size of
large Wikipedias let's us run a comparatively short test to tell us
statistically significant results. If it ends up being a success, then we
should talk about whether the recommendations will work for
non-encyclopedic projects as well. It would definitely be cool to have
recommendations for editor communities like Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and
Wiktionary too.
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/