Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

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Pine W

6 Oct 2015 6 Oct '15

2:42 a.m.

Hi all, Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse, and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in applicable research as preparation both for the unconference discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform and inspire new editors. Thanks, Pine

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Robert West

6 Oct 6 Oct

3:04 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

-- Up for a little language game? -- http://www.unfun.me

Kerry Raymond

6:33 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley <pearley(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Gerard Meijssen

7:25 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Hoi, This whole notion of reward is quite powerful. It works best when processes have been designed with this in mind from the start. Again, Wikipedia is just part of what is done within the WMF. One project that has been worked on is a copy of the work done by Magnus Manske.. his effort is the game and it has clear objective tasks that people can do on the train, while waiting. It is the kind of process that easily aggregates edits and consequently easily allows for badges, recognition etc. As far as I am aware this is not done (yet). With more Wikipedias using Wikidata for its content. It is well worth expanding the attention to these efforts and see what more we can do to objectively heap praise for time well spend. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2015 at 08:33, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

inspire new editors.

Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Up for a little language game? -- http://www.unfun.me _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

WereSpielChequers

7:25 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

I thought if we had a "primary" badge or KPI system it was the content focussed ones and especially those related to Featured articles. Editcountitis is seen by many as a bit of a joke. But there many others including articles created and length of service. I do like the idea of celebrating our most thanked editors but I don't think the necessary information is currently public. Regards Jonathan

...

On 6 Oct 2015, at 07:33, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote: Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley <pearley(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: Hi all, Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse, and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in applicable research as preparation both for the unconference discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform and inspire new editors. Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Jonathan Morgan

3:29 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Hi Pine, The book *Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence Based Social Design*[1] provides a great synthesis of concepts from economics, sociology, and cognitive psychology as they apply to the design of projects like Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the primary case studies used in the book. They have several chapters that focus on motivation techniques/tools. The book is easy to skim and apply! Hope that helps, Jonathan 1. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-successful-online-communities On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

Gerard Meijssen

6:42 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Hoi, There was a presentation about game theory at WIkimania in London... Quite interesting. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2015 at 17:29, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Ziko van Dijk

6:46 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Hello, that's this one: http://www.raphkoster.com/tag/wikimania/ 2015-10-06 20:42 GMT+02:00 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>:

...

Hoi, There was a presentation about game theory at WIkimania in London... Quite interesting. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2015 at 17:29, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Pine, The book Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence Based Social Design[1] provides a great synthesis of concepts from economics, sociology, and cognitive psychology as they apply to the design of projects like Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the primary case studies used in the book. They have several chapters that focus on motivation techniques/tools. The book is easy to skim and apply! Hope that helps, Jonathan 1. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-successful-online-communities On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Edward Saperia

7:20 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

shazam: http://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/wikipedia-is-a-game/ *Edward Saperia* Founder Newspeak House <http://www.nwspk.com> email <edsaperia(a)gmail.com> • facebook <http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia> • twitter <http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia> • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG On 6 October 2015 at 19:42, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hoi, There was a presentation about game theory at WIkimania in London... Quite interesting. Thanks, GerardM On 6 October 2015 at 17:29, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Nick Wilson (Quiddity)

7 Oct 7 Oct

12:56 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 12:25 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

I thought if we had a "primary" badge or KPI system it was the content focussed ones and especially those related to Featured articles.

+1 Though as discussed, almost anything automated can be 'gamed' (in the negative sense), and anything that requires human-discretion can too (either by someone placing an unwarranted award, or by someone placing an award that others might vociferously disagree with, e.g a diplomacy barnstar). Enwiki's existing profusion of barnstars and other award types are most easily found via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Barnstar_pages Editcountitis is seen by many as a bit of a joke. But there many others

...

including articles created and length of service.

I'd love to have the output from various of the offwiki tools, available as a "module/template" that I could optionally embed in my userpage at any wiki. E.g. the lists and barcharts, from places like: http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/pages/ http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-ec/ and numerical counts of (non-automatic) patrols and reviews that we've contributed, and other tweaked items from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:User_toolbox

...

I do like the idea of celebrating our most thanked editors but I don't think the necessary information is currently public.

The "Thank" itself is publicly logged, just not which edit it was sent for. Fae collects monthly top 10 "Thankers" and "Thanked" on various projects, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Faebot/thanks IIRC, projects must opt-in, and individuals can opt-out. (discussed in the thread starting here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-February/076731.html ) On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 11:33 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

[...] Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool.

Obligatory mention of Flow ;-) All sorts of things should be possible with a structured system like this. For example the number of topics that an editor "Marks as resolved" (and isn't subsequently reverted). Perhaps/especially on specific pages such as helpdesks. E.g. Frwiki has been experimenting with a mixture of their old template system (in the "Summary" area) and Flow's "Resolved" status, at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Forum_des_nouveaux/Flow - open the ToC to see the resolved topics in a lighter text color, and skim down the page looking at the blue/red templates (which denote: questions that need more information from the original poster, and questions that aren't appropriate for that page). There was also an editfilter tracking the usage of the WikiLove extension, but it appears that was disabled in February 2015 due to performance issues with too many concurrent editfilters (IIUC). old results: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&wpSearchFil… However, there is still a database table tracking these Wikilove actions, just without an onwiki UI, so those details could perhaps be utilized, too. -- Nick / Quiddity

Jonathan Morgan

2:20 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 5:56 PM, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) < nwilson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

There was also an editfilter tracking the usage of the WikiLove extension, but it appears that was disabled in February 2015 due to performance issues with too many concurrent editfilters (IIUC). old results: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AbuseLog&wpSearchFil… However, there is still a database table tracking these Wikilove actions, just without an onwiki UI, so those details could perhaps be utilized, too.

Indeed they could! Top Wiklove recipients in the past year: http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/364

...

-- Nick / Quiddity _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

Pine W

11 Oct 11 Oct

12:25 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

...

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

inspire new editors.

Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Luis Villa

14 Oct 14 Oct

1:42 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

I think there's a lot to be done there (probably will blog soon about my weekend experimenting with Genius, which had pretty extensive systems for this). It is an interesting prioritization question: doing it thoroughly/systematically would require a lot of software investment, especially since we don't have structured conversation pages (which are the basis for a lot of similar contributor recognition systems). Luis On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 5:25 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

inspire new editors.

Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Luis Villa Sr. Director of Community Engagement Wikimedia Foundation *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.*

Pine W

17 Oct 17 Oct

6:03 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Thanks for taking an interest, Luis. This is one resource intensive project that I think may be worth the investment. WMF is getting a fair amount of flak for growing its budget at rates far higher than its growth in content contributors. (Just imagine what would happen if a chapter did this.) I think that making Wikipedia content contribution be a more emotionally rewarding experience, perhaps by using positive reinforcement in ways suggested by Kerry, might be helpful in our editor engagement. Are there any chances of starting early work on a project along these lines in Q3, perhaps aligned with the work on Wikiproject X and on improving ENWP mentorship? Pine On Oct 13, 2015 6:43 PM, "Luis Villa" <lvilla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

inspire new editors.

Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

WereSpielChequers

9:52 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

...

On 14 Oct 2015, at 02:42, Luis Villa <lvilla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I think there's a lot to be done there (probably will blog soon about my weekend experimenting with Genius, which had pretty extensive systems for this). It is an interesting prioritization question: doing it thoroughly/systematically would require a lot of software investment, especially since we don't have structured conversation pages (which are the basis for a lot of similar contributor recognition systems). Luis

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 5:25 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: Kerry, Thanks so much for the comments. I will bring up the subjects of badges and cobtributor KPIs with Luis and/or Lila when I have a minute to refine my thinking. Pine

On Oct 6, 2015 2:33 AM, "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote: Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley <pearley(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Luis Villa Sr. Director of Community Engagement Wikimedia Foundation Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Pine W

19 Oct 19 Oct

5:24 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

As much as I like the barnstar system, it's highly subjective and inconsistent. I'd like to see a more systematic approach. Perhaps this could be combined with some of Aaron's work about edit quality. On Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 2:52 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

We have a complex set of "badges", some, as Kerry pointed out are available to everyone who qualifies for them, some are based on the statistics of your account - tenure, edit count, articles created. Others are based on things you've been awarded by others, the bronze stars for featured articles, but also userboxes for everything from userrights to number of DYKs. Barnstars are a key subset that can only be awarded by others. There are Barnstars available for a huge range of things, even civility and diplomacy. It would be interesting and probably salutary to do a study on which Barnstars are awarded, my suspicion is that the anti vandalism ones may well be the most frequent. I would also encourage everyone to lead by example and actually use the Barnstar system for people who have made extraordinary contributions. But be careful not to devalue the system by for example giving one to everyone who reports a bug in visual editor - in the past when we had lots of adolescents and teenagers in the community there was a craze for creating secret pages with a Barnstar award for finding them; so if you give out Barnstars too freely you risk being thought of as the sort of immature adolescent that usually makes that sort of mistake. Regards Jonathan On 14 Oct 2015, at 02:42, Luis Villa <lvilla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I think there's a lot to be done there (probably will blog soon about my weekend experimenting with Genius, which had pretty extensive systems for this). It is an interesting prioritization question: doing it thoroughly/systematically would require a lot of software investment, especially since we don't have structured conversation pages (which are the basis for a lot of similar contributor recognition systems). Luis On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 5:25 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

inspire new editors.

Thanks, Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Luis Villa Sr. Director of Community Engagement Wikimedia Foundation *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.* _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Gerard Meijssen

9:07 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

Hoi, Ask yourself, what is it that you get with a more "scientific" approach. Is it commitment and involvement and who gets involved when science decides who to select as a special case? My point is very much that arguments like this forget what it is we want to achieve. A barnstar is from me (my involvement) to someone else (my appreciation). I do not care for scientific when it follows that my involvement is not welcome. Thanks, GerardM On 19 October 2015 at 07:24, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how "female" an article topic is.] On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback mechanism, it could improve over time. A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick positive acknowledgements for their efforts. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference > sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that > you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how > to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that > Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse, > and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in > applicable research as preparation both for the unconference > discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform and inspire new editors. > > Thanks, > Pine > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > -- Up for a little language game? -- http://www.unfun.me _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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WereSpielChequers

10:24 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

As Gerard points out a highly subjective and inconsistent rewards system is an inevitable consequence of a volunteer based community. I'd add that a one side of the inconsistency, people being overlooked, is something we can work on by finding better tools. For example before the loss of toolserver and the labs problems we used had a list of overlooked Autopatroller prospects <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Database_reports/Editors_eligible_for_Autopatrol_privilege&oldid=613695217> that HJ Mitchell and I used to work through. Other aspects of inconsistency are a great opportunity for researchers to investigate - and if research identifies a group of overlooked editors then the community will likely respond. Another side of the inconsistency, people cheapening the system by self awarding barnstars or handing them out too freely, is something the community has various mechanisms to handle; and those who would try and change this area need to be aware of that. Of course you can have elements of the reward system that are less subjective and inconsistent, for example service level awards, FA stars and so forth. I rather suspect that the barnstar system is the subjective and inconsistent residue left after many aspects of the reward system were codified and separated from the original barnstar system, but I'll let someone else earn a PhD by proving or disproving that one! On 19 October 2015 at 10:07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Kerry, Thanks so much for the comments. I will bring up the subjects of badges and cobtributor KPIs with Luis and/or Lila when I have a minute to refine my thinking. Pine On Oct 6, 2015 2:33 AM, "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to > encourage certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that > seems to generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of > little housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with > badges on most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, > I can put any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are > mostly edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as > I discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably > take them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address > "cultural" attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote > other KPIs that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and > received)? Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk > pages and it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a > "positive" behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment > analysis). This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a > conversation rather than some more purpose-built tool. > > In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a > behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done. > > For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. > For example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit > to an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that > weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable > behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously > whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be > determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline > sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which > case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that > grounds it is more likely to be verifiable). > > But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to > detect and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but > firstly we don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we > don't actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had > that KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having > positive impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who > introduces a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who > introduces a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to > Wikipedia or encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute > more? Or would we reward contributors who contribute to articles about > "women's topics" (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the > contributor gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe > them to be closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of > deciding how "female" an article topic is.] > > On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra > functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up > enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia > is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory). > > I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is > implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours > to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have > (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just > becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or > someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit > (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I > think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which > an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set, > come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in > the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback > mechanism, it could improve over time. > > A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit > count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have > "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick > positive acknowledgements for their efforts. > > Kerry > > -----Original Message----- > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto: > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Robert West > Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> > Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohnson(a)wikimedia.org>rg>; Patrick Earley < > pearley(a)wikimedia.org>gt;; Jacob Orlowitz <ocaasi(a)wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired > user behavior > > This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior: > https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf > > On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference > > sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that > > you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how > > to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that > > Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse, > > and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in > > applicable research as preparation both for the unconference > > discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform > and inspire new editors. > > > > Thanks, > > Pine > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wiki-research-l mailing list > > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > > > > > > -- > Up for a little language game? -- http://www.unfun.me > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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Pine W

22 Nov 22 Nov

12:25 a.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

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-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

Jonathan Morgan

23 Nov 23 Nov

5:58 p.m.

New subject: Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user behavior

It really is a good book :) And I'm glad to hear that Wes is looking into next steps re: supporting contributor growth. This kind of fell by the wayside within the organization, and I think it's a great time to revisit it as an organizational priority. Thanks Pine! Jonathan On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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I've started to read BSOC and I'm thoroughly appreciating it. I think that Wes is looking into notes from the former Growth Team and considering how to add contributor growth as a measure of succeess for current Product teams. I'd like to suggest that anyone in Product who is interested in the subject of contributor growth make at least a brief pass through this book. Thanks so much for the recommendation, J-mo. Pine On Oct 6, 2015 08:29, "Jonathan Morgan" <jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi Pine, > > The book *Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence Based Social > Design*[1] provides a great synthesis of concepts from economics, > sociology, and cognitive psychology as they apply to the design of projects > like Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the primary case studies used > in the book. They have several chapters that focus on motivation > techniques/tools. The book is easy to skim and apply! > > Hope that helps, > Jonathan > > 1. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/building-successful-online-communities > > On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference >> sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that you >> could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how to >> reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that Jonathan may >> have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse, and Ocassi may have >> for done research for TWA. I'm interested in applicable research as >> preparation both for the unconference discussion and for my planned video >> series that intends to inform and inspire new editors. >> >> Thanks, >> Pine >> > > > > -- > Jonathan T. Morgan > Senior Design Researcher > Wikimedia Foundation > User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> > >

-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

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Edward Saperia
Gerard Meijssen
Jonathan Morgan
Kerry Raymond
Luis Villa
Nick Wilson (Quiddity)
Pine W
Robert West
WereSpielChequers
Ziko van Dijk