Hoi,
It is a widely held belief that bots that create articles are bad. It is
believed that they prevent people from writing new articles. It is why
several projects prohibit the use of bots for the creation of new articles.
The German Wikipedia is a great example at that.
Yes there are the "social" bots. I am happy that I do no know about them at
all.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 27 September 2014 11:01, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think the belief that bots cause editor attrition
relates to the bots
that “slap the editor in the face” by reverting, writing something critical
on the user’s talk page, etc. In the Swedish example, I gather the bots
were creating new articles so they weren’t beating up other editors but
rather providing more articles for people to read and add to. I think it’s
the “beating up” that causes attrition. We have plenty of editors who are
happy to beat up others, but bots can do it so much more systematically L
While it’s not appropriate to characterise them as Good Bots and Bad Bots
(as the “Bad Bots” do some genuinely useful things and save a lot of work
for humans), it is perhaps reasonable to characterise them as “interacting”
and “non-interacting” and take special care with the interacting ones in
terms of “tone” and, in the spirit of WP:BITE, maybe what they do/say
should be different when dealing with newbies.
The paper
http://wikipedia-academy.de/2012/w/images/f/f0/13_Paper_Maik_Anderka_Benno_…
showed that article-wide tags like {{refimprove}} were less likely to be
effective than specific inline tags like {{citation needed}}. It’s more
work to do {{cn}} (you actually have to read the article) than to say
“doesn’t look like enough references for an articles of that size” (which
is the Wikipedia equivalent of assessing student’s work by word count) and
slap on a {{refimprove}}. It’s no different to being at school and being
told “it’s not good enough, do it again”, without saying how to do it
better. You don’t teach people that way (well, not effectively); you teach
people by giving detailed feedback. Article for Creation has the same
problem; the reviewers reject the article without detailed feedback. At
present, the article creator makes some random changes, crosses their
fingers and resubmits, and usually gets rejected again by a different
reviewer often for a different reason. Eventually the article creator gives
up and then we delete the draft some months later. We are the on-line
experts at chewing people up and spitting them out. Who decides how AfC
works? It’s established community members who don’t create articles through
AfC, and the new editors who do create articles via AfC only get their
“say” by the one method at their disposal, they give up and walk away.
Hmm, reminds me of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation
and look where that ended (given the international readership of this
list, I’ll reserve judgement on whether or not it was a good outcome J )
Personally I think we should look for the simple interventions and
experiment with them and see if they can turn around editor attrition
before we look to the complex interventions (like the fully collaborative
editing environment). It might be far simpler for watchlists to show a
couple of things (I’ll leave the specifics to the UX people) 1) that one of
the editors since your last visit is a newbie (maybe this could show in the
relevant entry in the edit history too) and 2) that the last edit was very
recent, suggesting the possibility that someone may be currently editing it
(and hence more likely to create edit conflicts if you go in). I don’t how
if it is a simple matter to show that the page is current open for edit (I
suspect not, but don’t know the internals of the code), but if it was easy,
that would be an even better thing to signal. We don’t need to change how
things work; it might be sufficient to just give clearer signals about
what’s going on.
I note that this process of signalling is the key to highly scalable
insect behaviour (e.g. ants, termites, bees etc), aka stigmergy. Maybe we
should try a little stigmergy in Wikipedia. Don’t change how things work,
just provide humans (and bots) with better information about the situation
and hope they respond more appropriately.
Kerry
------------------------------
*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Gerard
Meijssen
*Sent:* Saturday, 27 September 2014 5:48 AM
*To:* Research into Wikimedia content and communities
*Subject:* Re: [Wiki-research-l] FW: What works for increasing
editorengagement?
Hoi,
Did you read this [1] the notion that bots are good for increasing the
number of editors is contentious. However, numbers from the Swedish
Wikipedia experience confirim exactly that bots are good. They not only
increase the number of readers but also the number of editors.. <BIG GRIN>
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2014/09/wikipedia-to-bot-or-not-to-bot-i…
On 26 September 2014 14:31, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Scott,
That's why the rest of my email focussed on things that we could that
would improve editor retention and which would be uncontentious, but also
there is a third question, are people's assumptions re newbie behaviour
true? This is where research would be useful. Where the problem lies in
mutually contradictory assumptions about user behaviour then the best way
to break the logjam is with research, now I'm confident that the research
will support my assumptions, but if I am wrong then I'm prepared to back
solutions that I have previously opposed.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 26 Sep 2014, at 09:56, Scott Hale <computermacgyver(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 1:46 PM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Attn Luca and Scott
There are some things best avoided as going against community
expectations. I would be happy to see flagged revisions deployed on the
English Wikipedia but I'm well aware that there is a significant lobby
against that of people who believe that it is important that your edit goes
live immediately. And with the community somewhat burned by bad experiences
with recent software changes now would be a bad time to suggest such a
controversial change.
Yes. Completely agree, and that was the exact point of my first email:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Scott Hale <computermacgyver(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
And that is the fundamental flaw with this whole email thread. The
question needing to be answered isn't "what increases new user retention".
The real question is "what increases new user retention and is acceptable
to the most active/helpful existing users". The second question is much
harder than the first.
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