Hi Oliver,

Thanks for sharing your disappointment. I do not think you are alone in wanting to see wikigrok continue and grow. I would clarify that the 'success rates' you allude to were for reader engagement and accuracy, not in actually improving our projects by filling in important gaps in wikidata. A great deal of work would be required to build out in order for this project to have a scalable impact on wikidata.

I am not saying that casual contributions are going away, simply that we are going to recognize our resource limitations and evaluate opportunities for them based on highest return-on-investment. We currently have 5 developers working on readership for the entire web (due to some temporary leaves) and there might be smaller wins using casual contributions that work towards our end goal, but don't require the heavy upfront investment. This doesn't mean we don't take on big thorny problems, just that we take a step back and see if there are ways to subdivide them into smaller projects along the way.

Best,

Jon

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_permissions/Bot/WikiGrok

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I'm personally incredibly disappointed; this was the most successful
intervention I'd seen anyone try in a long while, if ever, and the
results blow me away. My question would be "what interventions with
similarly high success rates are going to be worked on instead?" - I
assume that we're not working on them because we can achieve the same
outcome through easier-to-implement interventions. I would be
interested to hear what those interventions are.

On 1 June 2015 at 14:57, Jon Katz <jkatz@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> TLDR: Wikigrok proved that readers are interested in and capable of making
> casual, mobile contributions to Wikipedia. We are putting continued
> development of the 'Wikigrok' casual contribution feature on hold until we
> have a plan for optimally harnessing this interest/capability.
>
> Background
> Given the growth of mobile traffic on wikipedia and the challenges inherent
> to traditional editing on a mobile device, Wikigrok was proposed as a way to
> test if regular wikipedia readers would be interested in making smaller,
> more casual contributions to wikimedia projects while reading Wikipedia on a
> mobile device.
>
> Results
> By early 2015, the results were in: readers were relatively interested in
> engaging with the feature[1]. Some oft-quoted comparisons include:
>
> 3x the number of unique responders as mobile editors during test period
> (4.5K editors, 12.3K WikiGrokkers), even with WG on sample of articles &
> users
> 1.5x better clickthrough than 2014 Fundraising full-screen mobile banner
>
> (I actually do not have references for these, as they are borrowed quotes)
> Furthermore, we found that the quality of responses was rather high [2,3].
>
> Future
> The original thought was to use these responses to fill in gaps in Wikidata
> and our initial test results (2 weeks worth) were successfully ported over
> in late April [4]. However, in order to production-ize the system, we would
> have to:
>
> scale and develop queries against the new wikidata query service
> create an article parser to identify potential multiple choice answers for
> each question
> create a system for attributing aggregated results to the specific
> contributors (per Wikidata bot request discussion[5])
>
> None of these are unsurpassable, but we have learned a great deal and, at
> this stage, we believe that further effort should be devoted to evaluating
> areas of need and fit before we commit additional efforts to specifically
> porting information into Wikidata.
>
> Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns about
> this decision.
> Best,
>
> Jon
>
> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiGrok/Test2
> [2] Quality of responses, version A:
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/File:All_Campagins,_Scatterplot,_version_(a).pdf
> [3] Quality of responses, version B:
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/File:All_Campaigns,_Scatterplot,_version_(b).pdf
> [4] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/WikiGrok?limit=500
> [5]
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_permissions/Bot/WikiGrok
>
>

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--
Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation