From doing edit training myself, I would say that there
really are technical impediments particularly for older people (and I say that as a
retired person so I’m not that young either). I only get to do “one-shot” training
(typically half day, sometimes full day) and I think a one-shot workshop isn’t enough to
get some people to a level of technical competency. It would be nice to get an opportunity
to engage with people over a series of sessions but there are a whole host of reasons why
that’s a lot harder to set up (harder to lock in a venue over a number of sessions, harder
for people coming along to be free for multiple sessions, harder to find the volunteers to
do the training across multiple sessions). It’s hard enough to set up a one-shot at times.
I do genuinely believe the VE will help with this impediment. At the end of the day, if
people don’t click SAVE, there is no edit in our logs to analyse, so it’s not always easy
not to see the basic technical impediment that markup creates. But the VE does not solve
the “technical impediment” (cognitive impediment?) of understanding what a
citation/template/infobox is. Now in this mailing list, the idea of not knowing about
citations is unthinkable. But when I teach people older than me, typically local history
groups, I know they are statistically likely to have left school at age 14 having had 8
years of primary school education. They don’t know what a citation is. They type with 2
fingers hunt-and-peck; they don’t know how to copy-and-paste; they don’t know how to open
a second tab on their browser. They don’t know the difference between a
round/square/angle/curly bracket. They don’t understand why balancing their brackets
matters or why most of the article disappears from view because of unbalanced brackets.
They don’t know that slash and backslash are different or what a “tilde” is. Some of those
things the VE helps with, some not. There’s a lot of impediment out there that I never
realised until I saw it in edit training.
And the VE won’t solve the “community” problem. Given the hostility of the en.WP community
to the VE (probably it’s not widespread but a rather a very vocal minority), it is not
clear to me if tagging edits as being VE is actually a “red flag to a bull” to the
VE-haters. That is, might a VE-hater behave (even more) aggressively towards new users
using the VE?
Some months ago, we altered the banner for WikiProject Australia to include an email
help(a)wikimedia.org.au <mailto:help@wikimedia.org.au> as a way to reach out to new
editors of Australian content who need help and don’t know the Wikipedia ways of getting
help. It was successful in that we did receive emails, so there’s a tip – newbies find it
easier to email to get help. Aside: What was unexpected about it was that many of them
were a conflict-of-interest situation, where the editor was either the subject of the
article or an employee or otherwise affiliated. Now in most cases they hadn’t created the
article but they felt something was wrong and needed to be fixed or wanted to add
something. Generally the articles weren’t puffery and the edits desired weren’t
unreasonable (not white-washing) and generally we’ve helped them. None of them attempted
to hide their connection to the article; most went to some trouble to establish their bona
fides to make it clear that they were “authorised” to request this change. I don’t think
any of these people wanted to learn to edit themselves, they just wanted the article
fixed. Perhaps Wikipedia might be better off if we encouraged this kind of email request
rather than try to force everyone to become editors.
The other thing that pops up (sometimes CoI, sometimes not) is “I saw these messages about
needing more references. I’ve added loads of references but no matter how many I add,
those messages just don’t go away. What more can I do?”. Not understanding how Wikipedia
works is another “cognitive impediment” for the newbie that the VE won’t solve. Of course,
if we added in Aaron’s automated assessment tool, maybe we could provide a better way to
give some article quality feedback than persisting with the belief that WikiProjects are
alive and well and actively reassessing quality.
So, while I do disagree with Jane about the technical impediments, I do agree 100% about
the reverts as a big issue. It happens during edit training and it really upsets the
people, even though I am there to hold their hand. It’s really hard when I cannot
understand myself why the edit was reverted. And, as vast majority of attendees at edit
training are female, I see a very strong reaction from the women that reverting is “not
nice” and “very rude” (this is strong stuff, likely to lead to mentions of “little
hitlers”). I know the “Club House” paper didn’t detect any difference between male and
female reactions, but in terms of verbal reactions to being reverted, the women are quite
vocal and all agree on the “not nice”. I suspect the men are just as offended but don’t
mention it (the strong silent stereotype would prevent them telling me, a woman). When we
look at the gender gap, I have to wonder if we have something very basically wrong with
the Bold – Revert – Discuss approach. I don’t think it works for women, who tend to
Propose – Discuss – Discuss – Discuss – Eventually Implement. I think the whole “Bold –
Revert” is very libertarian ideology so I am unsurprised it doesn’t appeal to women. Women
tend to do things more slowly but I think get happier outcomes, probably because women are
socialised to keep people happy.
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell
Sent: Monday, 3 August 2015 10:36 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] July 2015 Research showcase
OK I am replying to this mail, as this one has the link to Youtube in it with the two
presentations. I am only responding to the first presentation by Aaron here.
In general I like the idea of focussing attention on the "New Editor Activation
Funnel". This area is of course the reason why we have a decline in new editors, and
it all has to do with an increase in "barriers to entry" (which btw I am not
convinced is the same thing as "technical impediments"). It is useful to split
these barriers up into Permission, Literacy (here wikimarkup is lumped together with
policies), and Social/Motivational (human interaction) issues, but I think the whole
presentation misses the point on the need for more dissection of the reverts problem
(shown a bit towards the end).
I personally think that demotivational behavior by experienced Wikipedians is the biggest
factor in the decline of new editor contributions, but unlike most people I don't
think this has to do with what the experienced Wikipedians do, but rather what they
don't do. They don't welcome people in person (because they don't see their
edits) and they don't give timely feedback on first edits to pages on their watchlist
(no way to see if those edits are first time edits). They don't show them the ropes in
that if one wants to make a BLP, or an article about a company or building or place, or an
article about an artwork, you should look at existing examples and start from there.
Having said this, I do think we spend an inordinate amount of time on things like
extending the page about WHAT WIKIPEDIA IS NOT (which btw I have yet to read). It seems
that our best way of dealing with newcomers is to throw CAPS at them, though we all hate
CAPS.
The point of this study was to prove these two: H1: VE will increase the amount of
desirable edits by newbies and H2: VE will increase the amount of undesirable edits by
newbies (aka VANDALISM). Guess what? Both H1 & H2 show no significance and if
anything, less vandalism came from VE editors. I could have told you that beforehand -
yawn. It angers me when people assume that others are not technical enough for Wikipedia.
Sorry, but it is not rocket science.
This type of thinking is not just on Wikipedia, I see this also in health occupations,
where doctors tell their patients not to go look things up on the Internet. Just trust the
doctors because they studied it! Yeah right, like I am going to trust all aspects of my
future health and well-being to someone who sees my future health and well-being as a
10-minute interlude in their 9-5 workday. No, I will nod politely (one must always remain
friendly) while googling my way to better health, thanks. And if I want to make an article
about something that I think needs an article on Wikipedia, I am going to try to do it on
my own as far as I can get, and I am probably not interested in talking about it until I
am done. The whole AfC queue thing is absolutely horrible because it puts these edits on
ice until the person totally forgets what the password was that they dreamed up for their
user account. As far as spelling corrections go, if I correct an error and see it deleted
(like from Kiev to Kyiv, which will be reverted by a bot probably), then I will probably
not come back.
I am very eager to hear more about the revision scoring though! I wish there was a better
way to do that than manually however.
Jane
On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 8:07 PM, Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto: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(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto: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 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Halfak_%28WMF%29> Aaron Halfaker
It's been nearly two years since we ran an initial study
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/June_2013_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
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/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.
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l