Kerry,
Thanks so much for the comments. I will bring up the subjects of badges
and cobtributor KPIs with Luis and/or Lila when I have a minute to refine
my thinking.
Pine
On Oct 6, 2015 2:33 AM, "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges
that do seem to encourage
certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to
generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little
housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on
most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put
any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly
edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I
discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take
them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural"
attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs
that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)?
Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and
it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive"
behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis).
This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation
rather than some more purpose-built tool.
In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a
behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done.
For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For
example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to
an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that
weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable
behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously
whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be
determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline
sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which
case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that
grounds it is more likely to be verifiable).
But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect
and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we
don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't
actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that
KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive
impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces
a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces
a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or
encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would
we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics"
(which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor
gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be
closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how
"female" an article topic is.]
On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra
functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up
enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia
is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory).
I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is
implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours
to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have
(in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just
becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or
someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit
(presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I
think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which
an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set,
come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in
the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback
mechanism, it could improve over time.
A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit
count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year".
ATM we only have
"lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick
positive acknowledgements for their efforts.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West
Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley <
pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user
behavior
This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior:
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf
On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference
sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that
you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how
to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that
Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse,
and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in
applicable research as preparation both for the unconference
discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform and
inspire new
editors.
Thanks,
Pine
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