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_Stein_Matthias_Busse.pdf
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@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@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
On 26 September 2014 14:31, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers@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@gmail.com>
wrote: