It’s always been possible to read or edit
from a mobile phone or tablet using the desktop interface, but I agree that the
development of more mobile friendly tools alters things, but still I would
argue having some “measurements” (if KPI is too biased a term) is useful to
judge whether the effort put into those tools is worth it for the return. Does
adding features alter the way Wikipedia is edited and is it for better or
worse? For example when the new mobile tool was released a little while ago, I
saw a lot of edits tagged “Mobile Edits” that were vandalising Wikipedia. Fortunately
it died down, but obviously if most of the edits coming from mobile tools were
vandalism, we might well ask if it is worth having.
I often check my watchlist on my iPad and “knock
off” the easy ones “ok, ok, ugh vandalism revert, ok, ok, leave that one until
I’m on my laptop, ok, ok, ok” so it may be that people just reorganise their
editing around the device they are using in which case it might change what
they do from hour to hour but not over (say) a week.
I think we have a range of metrics to pick
from in terms of quantity of activity (how many, how large, etc). What we
probably need to complement are some kinds of quality metrics. We could go with
some easy ones (how often an edit summary is left, how long is the edit
summary), how often is the activity a revert or a reverted edit, are the edits
to mainspace, talk, user, user talk, etc. But I think we do want to consider
things like the macroscopic “quality assessment” issues.
Kerry
From:
wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
Sent: Sunday, 14 September 2014
3:23 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia
content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l]
What works for increasing editor engagement?
Hoi,
The problem with this approach is that as it is, the functionality for
editing on tablets and phones is not well developed at all. As a consequence
the results will not be that meaningful.
It is only recently that it became possible to edit. So realistically
there are several important factors... The development of enabling technology,
the numbers of readers from a tablet / mobile.
The personal argument of current editors that they prefer their
computer for complex stuff essentially makes the newbies on that other platform
second class citizens. The realisation that currently our technology favours
computer usage is not. The first is an argument that sounds like "do not
bother, it does not matter", the other leaves room for "we need to
work on improving the mobile/tablet experience".
Arguably, calling things a KPI may mean a bias from the start.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 13 September 2014 14:41, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>
wrote:
It would be very interesting to know the size of edits done on mobile
vs desktop (it would be even better if we could distinguish between phones and
tablets because of the different form factors. I appreciate that we have the
problem of definition as a person on a phone can use the desktop interface and
vice versa, so there's a matrix of device and interface potentially.
when I say "size of edit", I would really prefer to know the
size of the delta, not the difference in the size of the article as reported in
the history. My personal hypothesis is that the smaller the form factor the
smaller the edits. As much as I love my ipad, it is no substitute for my laptop
for serious editing, most edits are harder and slower on the ipad than my
laptop, and it's a pain to,do citations on a mobile device. If my hypothesis is
correct, I am not personally convinced that the loss of a desktop edit is
compensated by the gain of a mobile edit, even it results in the same total
number of edits, I think the extent to which an article is improved will be
lower on mobile (on average). Not sure how we measure that but KPIs like size
of delta and addition of citations would be something that might be
interesting. Or, with enough data, we could use the automatic assessment tool to
look for articles that change assessment (as measured by the tool) and look at
the mobile vs desktop edit counts and ratios etc.
Sent from my iPad
On 11 Sep 2014, at 8:20 pm, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
wrote: