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