Thanks for your thoughts, Kerry and Jonathan!
Here is some response for your comments.
1. Regarding the targeted projects. Yes, we will definitely focus on content projects only for the reasons you mentioned. "Women in Red" is kind of special, and I don't think we will include it for now. Sorry for not being clear about this.
2. Regarding the invitation tactics. We do think there is a spectrum here, by either providing templates or giving total freedom to the recruiters. Also, not sure if some projects have their own templates of recruiting new members, but for now, we will provide general guidance for constructing recruiting the message. For instance, as mentioned in the meta-page, we will encourage project organizers to write personalized welcome messages, make specific task requests, or provide resource to start. Hope this should do the job - getting the right tone while still having it under control.
3. Yeh, for evaluation like if the invitation is taken, thanks for providing all those reasonable possibilities. Listing themselves on the project page might be one approach, but as Kerry mentioned, it might not work sometime. Rather, we can just see if they make any edit on the project (talk) pages as a sign of getting involved, or more loosely, if they keep editing project related articles. We will also provide short survey questions for each recommended editor to let organizers/project leaders evaluate the recommendation quality. We are expecting the project leaders to self-identify themselves when we post a recruiting message on the targeted projects to look for volunteer participants for our study (we will explicitly mention looking for "project leaders" or using similar descriptions).
On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 4:11 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
There are pros and cons.
Having a standard invitation makes for better research as the project outcomes are more comparable but perhaps worse for recruitment.
Perhaps the WikiProjects involved could write the invitation for the person to participate, hopefully they can get the tone right. They might want to particularly encourage (or discourage) people with specific skills or interests, e.g. "We are particularly interested in expanding our articles on Pacific Island 17th century wrestling. We are in desperate need of people who can develop templates. Our project prides itself on fully cited articles." But then differences in the invitation may lead to differences in the uptake. Better recruitment, but worse research.
And of course what are the variables being measured for the outcome:
- number of people invited to each WikiProject (presumably easy enough)
- number of people who take up the invitation - how do we determine this?
listing themselves on the Project page under Participants (yikes, I am active in many projects where I haven't done that), increasing their level of editing on articles associated with that project, increased activity on the project Talk page? Opinion of project leaders (do we have project leaders)? Self-identifying as such when asked by researchers?
- level of activity wrt to the project at various periods after the
invitation is accepted (when is it accepted? See above)
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Cardy Sent: Tuesday, 20 June 2017 8:02 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research about WikiProject Recommendation
Hi Bowen,
If you are going to promote wikiprojects by recommendation then you need to test different styles of recommendation. Taking what may still be the two biggest wikiprojects, MILHIST and professional wrestling, what worked as an invitation for either might be quite different than what would work for Opera or chemistry. Tone of voice is important when you are seeking to entice volunteers.
You also need to allow for the effect of different existing recruitment programs. These tend to be subtle, but they will vary, and that variation could mask your project. The most obvious recruitment is via wikiproject tagging of articles, and that isn't necessarily done by people who are active in the project concerned.
Regards
Jonathan
On 20 Jun 2017, at 07:35, Bowen Yu yuxxx856@umn.edu wrote:
Hi all,
We are preparing to conduct a study about WikiProject recommendations. The goals of our study are (1) to understand the effectiveness of different recommendation algorithms on recruiting new members to WikiProjects, and (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention on engaging and retaining Wikipedia newcomers.
In this study, we will recommend related editors to the organizers of WikiProjects, and request them to approach and recruit the editors. We will measure the actions and reactions of the organizers and editors for evaluation. More details about our study can be found here on this meta-page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiProject_
Recommendation>.
While planning the experimental design, we thought to gather more thoughts and suggestions from the community since this study would involve the efforts of some Wikipedians, so we wanted to open it up. Also, if you know of existing work or study in this area, please let us
know. Thanks!
Sincerely, Bowen _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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