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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