On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:48 AM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:Indeed! Here's some research data from Oliver Keyes about the canned
> The hard part is figuring
> out what edit summaries are so common that they should be canned. Since
> there are so many different kinds of edits, that's the difficult part.
summaries gadget that's on enwiki:
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So, the research question; what does the usage of the default edit
summaries gadget look like?
Using data for the last 60 days from enwiki, I investigated.
Results
371 distinct users who edited in that time period have the gadget
enabled. This is 0.1% of the editors who have edited in that time
period (224,946). 5,392 edits were made by these users that matched
the dropdown options, which is 0.05% of the total (9,145,360). One
counter to this is that most people are unaware of the tool's
existence, which is true, but edits were made in the last 60 days by
2,338 people who have it enabled. In other words, only 15% of the
people who even have it enabled find an excuse to use it in 2 months.
In terms of how this usage was distributed, I've attached two graphs.
One is the distribution of those edit summaries over users - in other
words, how many users were distinctly using each one. The other is the
distribution over edit frequency - how many times they were used, full
stop.
Conclusions
As a researcher, I cannot find any evidence that this gadget is being
widely used, however widely it might or might not be installed. It is
sourceable to 0.05% of recent edits, at most (see 'caveats'), from
0.1% of users. Accordingly, I recommend against treating it as a
feature for general release without a decent research plan for
following up on its usage and investigating how people react to it.
If such a release (and plan) is desired, I'm happy (as Mobile's
Secondary) to be involved. It looks like an interesting project, even
if there isn't quantitative support for the idea of its utility.
Caveats
This is only enwiki; retrieving substantive chunks of the revision
table is painful for global queries. If I had more time I could
probably have done it trivially. More importantly, the actual edit
summary strings are presumably localised on a per-language basis, and
so the query would have to be tweaked on a per-language basis - and
those strings live in a .JS file, which isn't easily accessible in an
automated fashion.
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