Hello All!

Greetings from Seoul,

We just finished our Seoul research sprint! For two weeks now, we have been jetting around Seoul, mostly by subway and bus, to meet participants. We’re now consummate experts on the cafes of Seoul (fun fact: hot coffees might be the default in the US, but in South Korea, when you ask for a latte, the barista will reply “iced or hot?”.)

Soohyun Pae, our Korean participant recruiter did an awesome job of finding and scheduling participants, as well as being super responsive as we iterated and pivoted the recruit to meet the needs of the research as it progressed.

Our two local researchers, Cathy Park and Hyun Ju Lee, did a great job of interviewing, translating language and Korean cultural perspectives throughout the sprint. They also functioned as fun teammates and guides to the city for things like getting around on the subway, and finding good food for us to eat.

Panthea and Lauren from Reboot brought frameworks, leadership and management of the team, and overall management and operations for the team.

We (Neil and Abbey) brought Wikimedia and WMF perspectives, as well as helping to guide the direction and inquiry of the research, ensuring what we come home with will be useful and actionable for teams.

Everyone on the team participated in interviewing participants and frequent analysis and synthesis sessions as the data came in. The team functioned well as a unit, and we all brought important perspectives and skills to the project, and had some fun doing it all.

Here is a quick update on what we have accomplished.

Thirty three interviews

• 20 new editors

• 16 non-surviving

• 4 surviving

• We did a lot of brainstorming and iterating communications to entice more survived new editors to talk with us, but we only were able to interview 4 people in that category.

• We are bringing what we have learned about the recruit in South Korea, forward into how we implement the recruit for Czech Republic.

• 9 experienced editors

• 4 expert interviews

• We also spoke with a teacher and a group of his students who are writing a "how to survive wikipedia guide" for Korean Wikipedia.

Three days of synthesis:

• Structured our observations fleshing out the patterns observed among the new and experienced editors.

• During synthesis we collected, organize and measured a set of opportunities that had been adding up all along the way. After categorizing them, Neil and I assessed them against a set of criteria we (Neil and I) built. It is just the beginning of defining opportunity areas, and, though we are mostly focused on gathering the data and observations from research, it’s interesting to see what kind of opportunities have sprung out of the research so far.

• We created two draft personas, and noted two more to create.

Researching editors, is a whole different experience and challenge than researching readers, and we are learning how to best navigate working with a smaller pool of potential participants. The main challenge we have faced is finding active new editors who respond to our invitations, and are willing to be interviewed. We are still trying to figure out why this gap exists, and how to address it. Hyun Ju will be in Seoul for a while longer, and willing to conduct more interviews if needed. So, Soohyun will schedule more survived new editors if any respond to our outreach in the next week or so.

Here are some (very early) early things we have observed:

• Across all types of users (new and experienced), laptops are used for more rigorous or complex activities, while mobile is used for routine short tasks like searching, navigation and communications.

Experienced editors, mentors and patrollers (one person might do several roles)

• Hardcore editors seem to have started contributing to Wikipedia young, before the demands of real life kick in.

• Successful editors are primed for contributing to Wikipedia because they have an established practice of self-study.

• It is easier, and natural, for experienced editors to focus on the harm caused by poor / problematic new editors, rather than the potential of promising new editors. It is less work, and feels productive.

New editors

• Many of the key problems for new editors we’re aware of on the largest Wikipedias are also problems on the Korean Wikipedia:

• finding and understanding help pages

• understanding policies (verifiability and notability are particularly tricky)

• knowing how to communicate with other users or even that there are other users to communicate with

• not seeing or knowing how to respond to messages from Wikipedians who do reach out, or provide reasons for deletion, etc.

• New editors often have difficulty logging in—particularly when they forget the usernames they chose—and aren’t aware they can edit without doing so.

• New editors expect Wikipedia’s talk pages to work like the other online forums they contribute to, and are confused and frustrated when it doesn’t.

• New editors are confused about the purpose of Wikipedia (both Korean and English). For example, we observed new editors attempting to use Wikipedia for self promotion or promotion of their business or other efforts, and being confused and frustrated when their edits are reverted and new articles deleted.

• Many new editors refrain from going beyond most obvious corrections because feel they have to be experts in a topic to contribute to Wikipedia (for one new editor, this even coexisted with the feeling that Wikipedia wasn’t a very reliable source!)

• The English Wikipedia is a constant presence: many new editors read it and translate from it, and a few even consult its help texts to help them understand how to contribute to the Korean Wikipedia. There is also a sense that the Korean Wikipedia has less value (in amount of and quality of content) than the English Wikipedia.

• Some surviving new editors “make it” because they’re driven by a social mission to “correct” a flaw they see, and therefore push through technical and process barriers that might deter other users.

Next steps:

• Working with Václav, our Czech recruiter, to get him up and running

• Bringing forward what we have learned about recruiting in South Korea

• Lauren will work some more on pulling our data, synthesis and findings together to inform the research framework and instruments as we move forward to the Czech sprint.

• Creating a few more personas and user journeys for each of them.

• New Editor Experiences steering committee meeting June 6th.

More coming soon! Lauren is working in New York, furthering the synthesis and iterating our framework and research instruments in preparation for Prague.

We will keep you updated. Feel free to respond here and ask questions. We are looking forward to seeing and talking with all of you in our check in meeting next week!

Abbey and Neil