I watched the video, in which Aaron did discuss social and motivational barriers as being more complex and difficult to solve than technical issues with VisualEditor.

I liked the questions that Aaron asked ("Did you make friends? Did you find the work rewarding? Did you identify with the community?") because my understanding is that in the wide world of volunteer associations, questions like those are strongly related to volunteer retention and activity levels.

I have a hunch that in-person workshops and editathons can do a lot to improve the onboarding and retention experience for new editors. My understanding from WMF Learning and Evaluation is that editathon series and writing contest series are particularly effective at retaining editors. I would guess that this effect happens because people in general may find it easier to make friends and identify with a community when they have face-to-face, positive interactions with other members of that community.

However, also note that most students who write Wikimedia content for their classroom assignments don't remain active contributors after the completion with their assignments, so I speculate that the third issue ("did you find the work rewarding?") may be significantly affected by the intrinsic motives and interests of potential contributors, as well as competition for the time of those potential contributors from other activities (like good grades, fulfilling jobs, or happy activities with family and friends) that also provide rewards.

There is ongoing work to improve the effectiveness of mentorships and wikiprojects on English Wikipedia, which may also help to address the "did you make friends" and "did you identity with the community" questions.

I'm thinking about how I can implicitly take these issues into account when designing the content of the video project that I linked earlier in this thread, and how the video content could help with lowering social-motivational barriers. Suggestions from other participants on Research-l would be most welcome.

Thanks,

Pine

Pine


On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 1:20 AM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com> wrote:

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to watch the YouTube version of the talk, but just taking the question at face value.

 

I don’t think the data is likely to be able to distinguish people doing their first edits at a training class or edit-a-thon because in general there is nothing to distinguish these folk from any other new contributors. It might be that some events use some system of categories for either the users or the articles (editathons often tag the articles with the event name) so you might be able to spot edits arising from a specific event but in general I don’t think you can tell them apart.

 

I teach a lot of edit training and, although I have yet to switch to the VE, I am looking forward to being able to do so as soon as possible. Markup is definitely a barrier to some people and I think the VE will be preferred by most users. However, while VE may make editing easier, it does not solve the problem of having newcomers’ good faith contributions being reverted by others. WP:NOBITE is the most ignored policy of Wikipedia.

 

Kerry

 

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Sunday, 2 August 2015 3:58 PM
To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] July 2015 Research showcase

 

I read the summary of the VE study, and I have a question. Anecdotally, I am hearing from multiple sources that new editors *who attend workshops or editathons in person* prefer VE over wikitext for ease of use. Do we have any data specifically about the productivity and longevity of this population of users when they are introduced to to Wikipedia editing on VE instead of wikitext?

Thanks!
Pine

On Jul 29, 2015 11:09 AM, "Leila Zia" <leila@wikimedia.org> wrote:

A friendly reminder that this is happening in 23 min. :-)

YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGyrVg_qKSM
IRC: #wikimedia-research

Best,

Leila

 

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 2:47 PM, Leila Zia <leila@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi everyone,

The next Research showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, July 29 at 11.30 PT. The streaming link will be posted on the lists a few minutes before the showcase starts (sorry, we haven't been able to solve this, yet. :-() and as usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research.

We look forward to seeing you!

Leila


This month:

VisualEditor's effect on newly registered users

By Aaron Halfaker
 
It's been nearly two years since we ran an initial study of VisualEditor's effect on newly registered editors. While most of the results of this study were positive (e.g. workload on Wikipedians did not increase), we still saw a significant decrease in the newcomer productivity. In the meantime, the Editing team has made substantial improvements to performance and functionality. In this presentation, I'll report on the results of a new experiment designed to test the effects of enabling this improved VisualEditor software for newly registered users by default. I'll show what we learned from the experiment and discuss some results have opened larger questions about what, exactly, is difficult about being a newcomer to English Wikipedia.

 

Wikipedia knowledge graph with DeepDive

By Juhana Kangaspunta and Thomas Palomares (10-week student project)
 
Despite the tremendous amount of information present on Wikipedia, only a very little amount is structured. Most of the information is embedded in text and extracting it is a non-trivial challenge. In this project, we try to populate Wikidata, a structured component of Wikipedia, using DeepDive tool to extract relations embedded in the text. We finally extracted more than 140,000 relations with more than 90% average precision. We will present DeepDive and the data that we use for this project, we explain the relations we focused on so far and explain the implementation and pipeline, including our model, features and extractors. Finally, we detail our results with a thorough precision and recall analysis.

 


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