With the mood bar, the communication back to the editor was through their user page and email (when known). Do you have any data to show where they saw it (or from where they responded to it)? I've long suspected that new users don't know about User Talk and this frustrates our efforts to communicate with them. so I would be interested to know if there was any difference in reaction from those communicated with via user talk alone and those who also got email and what that might say about user talk as a means to communicate with new users. I note that on the mobile interface running on my ipad, I cannot find a way to get to my User Talk page (as far as I can see), short of entering the URL manually or switching to the desktop interface, which makes user talk pretty useless way of communicating with mobile users.

Sent from my iPad

On 16 Sep 2014, at 6:02 am, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia <gciampag@indiana.edu> wrote:

Hi Pine,

to answer your question on results about improving editor retention, there is a new paper authored by me and Dario coming out soon about MoodBar, an early EE experiment whose aim was to elicit feedback from newly registered editors, that shows that lightweight socialization (e.g. reporting feedback about editing experience and receiving help from more experienced users) improves long-term editor retention.

The pre-print of the paper is up on the arxiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1496 
I also gave a talk about it at the Mediawiki metrics meeting earlier this summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn4-cBYxttA

Cheers,

Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

✎ 919 E 10th ∙ Bloomington 47408 IN ∙ USA
☞ http://www.glciampaglia.com/
✆ +1 812 855-7261
✉ gciampag@indiana.edu

2014-09-11 2:00 GMT-04:00 Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com>:
Hello research colleagues,

When I look at the WMF Report Card, it appears to me that the global active editor stats and the number of new accounts being registered per month has been relatively flat since at least 2011.

Those of you who work in EE research and analytics, I would like to ask if there is a summary of techniques that you have found that do produce statistically significant results in improving editor retention. I know that some of you write tools, design projects, or pull and analyze data about editors. It looks to me like WMF is investing significant effort in research and tool creation, but we're not moving the needle to create the results that we had hoped to achieve. So I'd like to ask what have we learned from all of our time working on editor engagement about techniques and programs that do improve the EE stats significant ways, so that we can hopefully accelerate the implementation of programs and techniques that have demonstrated success.

I'd also like to ask what barriers you think prevent us from becoming more effective at improving the number of users who register and the number of active editors. For example, are users who go through GettingStarted often being deterred by quickly being confronted by experienced editors in ways that make the newbies want to leave? If that is a significant problem, how do you suggest addressing this?

One of my concerns about investing further in developing Flow, analytics tools like like WIkimetrics, and further complex editor engagement research projects, is that the most important challenges related to editor engagement may be problems that can only be solved through primarily interpersonal and social means rather than the use of software tools and mass communications. I like Wikimetrics and I use it, and I think there's an important place for analytics and tool development in EE work, but I wonder if WMF should scale up the emphasis on grassroots social and interpersonal efforts, particularly in the context of the 2015+ Strategic Plan and Jimmy's speech at the 2014 Wikimania. What do you think,and if your answer is yes, how do you think WMF can do this while respecting the autonomy and social processes of the volunteer projects?

Thanks,

Pine

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