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, 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_consi...
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@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@gmail.com 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
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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@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_notificatio...
They include:
- Useful edit notification
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
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
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
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.
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
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
On 5 February 2013 18:01, Fabrice Florin fflorin@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
This will inevitably include enwiki. I also think we're going to run into
a substantial problem persuading people to *use* it: if we build things into the API and handle it that way, marking contributions as non-negative takes zero additional effort on the part of contributors. If we make it a distinct action, one that does not appear in anti-vandalism and evaluation workflows, uptake will be low and we're essentially introducing a 'new task'.
If we've deprioritised the API we need to un-deprioritise the API :). Until we have a good long-term way of easily porting extensions between wikis (a la Kaldari's schema idea) having a way to plug in the third-party tools editors have created to compensate for MediaWiki's areas of suckiness is essential.
* 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 behaviorhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement/2013_strategy_planning_(Features)#First_Edits, 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_consi...
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@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@gmail.com
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
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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@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_notificatio...
They include:
** Useful edit notificationhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Useful_edit_notification
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 Notificationshttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Huggle.2FCluebot_Notifications
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 edithttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Contributions_since_your_last_edit
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 usershttp://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 pagehttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements .
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
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
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On 2/5/13 10:01 AM, Fabrice Florin wrote:
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.
Generating Echo events for every edit on Wikipedia for every editor of every article (even if they are bundled or filtered to a certain group of users) would quickly explode the database. It would also likely crash the servers with massive numbers of expensive queries – for every edit, we would have to look at all previous edits, and determine if those editors (which could number in the thousands) should receive a notification. Considering that we average more than 3 edits per second and have limited processing power (saving edits already takes 30 seconds or longer on long articles), I'm not sure this would be feasible. It also overlaps with existing watchlist functionality. Of all the ideas proposed, I think the contribution notifications are the least feasible and the least useful. The 'mark edit as helpful' idea seems like the best one to me so far, but would probably make more sense for E3 to develop than E2 (so that they could experiment with different UX and A/B test them).
Ryan Kaldari
I'd not call per edit notifications infeasible, but without careful rollups they would be spammy. The issue I have with them is they would not be very useful or motivating as raw notifications from a naive implementation except to very new or casual editors.
Noticing that an article I improved got more popular or that a topic I've been interested enough in to contribute to has been mentioned in the media and suddenly spiked would be great notifications, but without a lot of developer work hints at those would get drowned out by background noise of "Already popular/controversial article you corrected a typo in once has had another 1000 edits".
Rate of change notifications would be exciting but very hard to provide. Counters would reasonably easy to provide but noise to most editors.
I like the "people from 5 continents have read the article you created/edited". It would come at a reasonable volume for most editor usage patterns, and could happily be processed offline once per day as it is purely intended as positive reinforcement. There is no response required so it need not have a realtime feel.
"People from 50 countries have read the article you created/edited" falls in the same bucket.
Luke
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 2/5/13 10:01 AM, Fabrice Florin wrote:
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.
Generating Echo events for every edit on Wikipedia for every editor of every article (even if they are bundled or filtered to a certain group of users) would quickly explode the database. It would also likely crash the servers with massive numbers of expensive queries – for every edit, we would have to look at all previous edits, and determine if those editors (which could number in the thousands) should receive a notification. Considering that we average more than 3 edits per second and have limited processing power (saving edits already takes 30 seconds or longer on long articles), I'm not sure this would be feasible. It also overlaps with existing watchlist functionality. Of all the ideas proposed, I think the contribution notifications are the least feasible and the least useful. The 'mark edit as helpful' idea seems like the best one to me so far, but would probably make more sense for E3 to develop than E2 (so that they could experiment with different UX and A/B test them).
Ryan Kaldari
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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 * a special feature for welcomers or member of help team, in order to create interactions : "I'm available if you need some help" * 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") * of course, this feature mustn't spam people
For the button on the watch list or the recent changes, we agreed on a simple "merci" link. Not a "like" button ! :-)
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.
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.
Benoît
2013/2/5 Fabrice Florin fflorin@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 behaviorhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement/2013_strategy_planning_(Features)#First_Edits, 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_consi...
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@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@gmail.com
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
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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@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_notificatio...
They include:
** Useful edit notificationhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Useful_edit_notification
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 Notificationshttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Huggle.2FCluebot_Notifications
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 edithttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Contributions_since_your_last_edit
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 usershttp://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 pagehttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements .
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
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Than...
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 mockup. We considered putting a thanks link and notification on the diff page as well (see other mockup), 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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Firs...
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):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Watc...
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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Than...
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@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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, 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:
- 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.'"
- 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."
- 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'
- 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'
- 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"
- 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"
- 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_consi...
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@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@gmail.com 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
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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@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_notificatio...
They include:
- Useful edit notification
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
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
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
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.
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
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
I like the feature; until we get things like an external API built out at least. Two concerns I have; first, do we have plans for measuring whether we get bang for our buck with this feature? Second, it is *highly*important that we have a way of enabling or disabling this on a per-wiki basis (which I've WP:BOLDly added to the features requirements). It's a potentially highly-disruptive feature that may or may not produce substantive results, and we don't want to have wikis reject or take issue with echo over something so negligible in software terms.
On 13 February 2013 02:04, Fabrice Florin fflorin@wikimedia.org wrote:
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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Than...
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 mockuphttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/History-Thank-Link-Mockup1.png. We considered putting a thanks link and notification on the diff page as well (see other mockuphttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Diff-Page-Thank-Mockup3.png), 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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Firs...
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):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Watc...
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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Than...
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@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 behaviorhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement/2013_strategy_planning_(Features)#First_Edits, 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_consi...
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@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@gmail.com
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
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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@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_notificatio...
They include:
** Useful edit notificationhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Useful_edit_notification
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 Notificationshttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Huggle.2FCluebot_Notifications
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 edithttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Contributions_since_your_last_edit
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 usershttp://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 pagehttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements .
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
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
Hi all !
Quickly :
2013/2/13 Fabrice Florin fflorin@wikimedia.org
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 mockuphttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/History-Thank-Link-Mockup1.png. We considered putting a thanks link and notification on the diff page as well (see other mockuphttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Diff-Page-Thank-Mockup3.png), 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.
The who mockups are not really illustrating the most natural way to thank somebody. Usually, you see the diff on your watch list. Then you click on the diff button, see the changes, and, at this point you revert ou thank the guy. The thank button on watch page or the histroy page may not be useful.
On the second mockup, when user Alpha thanks user Zeta, does everyone see that on the diff ?
- a special feature for welcomers or member of help team, in order to
create interactions : "I'm available if you need some help"
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.
This feature must be choosen by the volunteers.
- 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.
Good question... We can increase it step by step : the 5 first ones may be just a "thank you", the 5 next a "very good job"... Or the progression may depend of the user who thanks : if somebody like a lot all your edits, you will have better messages from him, and then a possible interaction. I'll ask the French project.
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.
Okay. I was wondering for votes like a new sysop, or a edit-a-thon, who are not really known by new users. there is no spam risk if the asccess is restrected like the system messages.
When do we start the Echo test on fr.wiki ? :-)
-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Benoît Evellin <benoit.evellin@wikimedia.fr
wrote:
The who mockups are not really illustrating the most natural way to thank somebody. Usually, you see the diff on your watch list. Then you click on the diff button, see the changes, and, at this point you revert ou thank the guy. The thank button on watch page or the histroy page may not be useful.
On the second mockup, when user Alpha thanks user Zeta, does everyone see that on the diff ?
I don't think the 'thank' action will hurt on watchlist view etc, because it is good to have it there for consistency, but I agree with Benoît that the most natural flow will be thanking someone after actually viewing the content of their edit.
In any case, I am hugely supportive of this feature, and I'm excited to see it move forward as part of the first Echo release.
Hi Oliver, Benoît and Steven,
Thanks so much for your helpful feedback about this proposed Thank you notification!
It's very useful for us to hear from a variety of viewpoints, so we can improve new feature ideas together. Even if we can't implement all these good ideas, every constructive suggestion helps shape the overall direction of the feature and will be considered for future releases.
See my detailed responses online below.
Any more comments about this or other positive notifications for Echo?
We very much appreciate your views about this important editor engagement goal, even if we can't immediately use them.
Thanks again,
Fabrice
P.S.: Coincidentally, someone started a discussion about this idea on Quora as well. You are welcome to comment there too, if you like:
http://www.quora.com/Should-Wikipedia-add-a-Thank-button-for-article-revisio...
On Feb 13, 2013, at 10:29 AM, Steven Walling wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@wikimedia.fr wrote: The who mockups are not really illustrating the most natural way to thank somebody. Usually, you see the diff on your watch list. Then you click on the diff button, see the changes, and, at this point you revert ou thank the guy. The thank button on watch page or the histroy page may not be useful.
On the second mockup, when user Alpha thanks user Zeta, does everyone see that on the diff ?
I don't think the 'thank' action will hurt on watchlist view etc, because it is good to have it there for consistency, but I agree with Benoît that the most natural flow will be thanking someone after actually viewing the content of their edit.
Thank you both for this good observation!
I agree with you that it would make sense to include a thanks link on the diff page, for the reasons you cite. I initially proposed this idea in this mockup:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diff-Page-Thank-Mockup1.png
It should be possible to start with both the diff page and the history page, but note each additional page we have to support requires more of the limited time we have for our first release (we only have a week for this task). Thanks for your understanding of these very tight time constraints :)
In any case, I am hugely supportive of this feature, and I'm excited to see it move forward as part of the first Echo release.
Thanks, Steven! I'm really glad that you support this feature, which I am also very excited about.
I look forward to making it happen, with a little help from all our friends :)
-- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/
On Feb 12, 2013, at 9:08 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
I like the feature; until we get things like an external API built out at least.
Cool. I agree with you that once we get an external API, we should also implement a 'Mark as useful' feature in anti-vandalism tools like Huggle. But this could be months away, so I appreciate your support of this Thank feature for now, so we can offer positive feedback right away to our new users. Right now, they are simply getting ignored -- or reverted, which discourages them from participating more on Wikipedia.
Two concerns I have; first, do we have plans for measuring whether we get bang for our buck with this feature?
Yes, every notification on Echo will get measured, as outlined in our Echo metrics plan (see 'Quality' section, which we are now fleshing out as we speak):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Metr...
Second, it is highly important that we have a way of enabling or disabling this on a per-wiki basis (which I've WP:BOLDly added to the features requirements). It's a potentially highly-disruptive feature that may or may not produce substantive results, and we don't want to have wikis reject or take issue with echo over something so negligible in software terms.
I couldn't agree more.
Kaldari's plan is to implement this feature as a separate extension, which means that our communities would be able to enable or disable this feature on a per-wiki basis.
This is the way that Page Curation does this now, when people's articles are being reviewed, they get an Echo notification that is triggered by the separate Page Curation extension.
On Feb 13, 2013, at 9:07 AM, Benoît Evellin wrote:
Hi all !
Quickly :
2013/2/13 Fabrice Florin fflorin@wikimedia.org 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 mockup. We considered putting a thanks link and notification on the diff page as well (see other mockup), 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.
The who mockups are not really illustrating the most natural way to thank somebody. Usually, you see the diff on your watch list. Then you click on the diff button, see the changes, and, at this point you revert ou thank the guy. The thank button on watch page or the histroy page may not be useful.
Thanks for making this great point, much appreciated!
As I commented above, I agree with you that it would make sense to include a thanks link on the diff page, and initially proposed this idea in this mockup.
Based on your feedback, I will push for adding the 'thank' link on the diff page as well, if we can do this within our limited time-frame.
On the second mockup, when user Alpha thanks user Zeta, does everyone see that on the diff ?
This Thank you notification is intended to be a private feature in this first release. Which means that only Alpha and Zeta should be aware of this transaction for now.
For future releases, we could discuss the pros and the cons of making this more public. But please understand that our choice right now is to either implement a simple version of this feature now, or do nothing at all.
Our team is inclined to do something simple now, because we may not have an opportunity to do anything about this important issue for a long time, given all the other projects that are now on our plate, sadly.
Also note that for the first release, we will not be able to display the message I had proposed in this second diff page mockup ('Kaldari (talk | contribs) thanked you for your edit.'):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADiff-Page-Thank-Mockup3.png
The reason is that this message would require us to create a special data table to store this information, which would add a lot more development time than we can afford in this release. But it's quite possible that we may be able to add this message at a later date. Once a feature is live on production, it typically gets more attention and resources than if it is still only an idea. Hence the push to start with a first iteration now, to get the ball rolling.
- a special feature for welcomers or member of help team, in order to create interactions : "I'm available if you need some help"
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.
This feature must be choosen by the volunteers.
Yes, we agree that the volunteers can decide whether or not a feature can be implemented on their wikis.
However, I want to make sure everyone understands our limitations for our first release. We only have a couple weeks left for new notifications, and have already made a selection of which notifications to take on, from a very long list that has been under discussion for several months now.
In practical terms, we may not even be able to implement all the notifications we are now considering on this short list:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Firs...
So it's not likely that brand new ideas would be implemented in the first release. However, we will collect all ideas and revisit them again for future releases.
- 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.
Good question... We can increase it step by step : the 5 first ones may be just a "thank you", the 5 next a "very good job"... Or the progression may depend of the user who thanks : if somebody like a lot all your edits, you will have better messages from him, and then a possible interaction. I'll ask the French project.
Thanks. I still don't understand what would trigger this notification. Perhaps you guys could write up a clear proposal for this feature. For inspiration, here's how we write up feature specifications for notifications like these:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Talk...
Perhaps that format would be useful as a guideline for writing up your proposal?
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.
Okay. I was wondering for votes like a new sysop, or a edit-a-thon, who are not really known by new users. there is no spam risk if the asccess is restrected like the system messages.
Yes, I agree these would be good notifications to have, and I hope we can implement them in future releases.
When do we start the Echo test on fr.wiki ? :-)
We propose to deploy Echo on French Wikipedia about a month after our first deployment to English Wikipedia. So that would probably be in late April, early May.
The reason for not doing everything at once is that we will have so much feedback to process after that first deployment that we wouldn't be able to act on it all until we've fixed the most obvious bugs. So a staggered release makes more sense.
Thanks for your understanding :)
-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr _______________________________________________
On Feb 12, 2013, at 6:04 PM, Fabrice Florin wrote:
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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Than...
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 mockup. We considered putting a thanks link and notification on the diff page as well (see other mockup), 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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Firs...
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):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Watc...
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:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Than...
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@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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, 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:
- 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.'"
- 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."
- 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'
- 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'
- 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"
- 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"
- 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_consi...
On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:03 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
On 2 February 2013 12:43, Benoît Evellin benoit.evellin@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@gmail.com 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
On 2 February 2013 08:38, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@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@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@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@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_notificatio...
They include:
- Useful edit notification
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
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
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
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.
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
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
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-- Benoît Evellin Membre de Wikimédia France www.wikimedia.fr _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/