I for one would certainly encourage further development of many different interfaces that support the collection of good edits from many editors across many different communities and I think "games" can be a part of that. While I understand the dangers of gamification done badly, done well, it can be a fantastic thing for rallying a community together. I would not advocate that wikidata call itself a game.. or even that it devote much if any resources to building game-like editing systems itself. I would however encourage the development of more applications like the wikidata game(s) that Magnus has created - but better. Luckily all of the things that I would suggest for improvements could be layered on top of the code he has provided.. For me 'better' would mean: (1) Require some level of task redundancy as quality control. As the number of people playing these games grows, the increase in precision by adding in something simple like - "only make edit if 2/3 people agree" is well worth the loss of recall. (2) make many games for many specific communities of interest and market them directly to them. You don't have to call them games either. You could just say "we need volunteers and here is a really easy way that you can help". (3) If you are going to call them games.. (and that is a key IF), then make them more fun. There are lots of angles to take this - not just high score lists. This the principal double edged sword here that Lydia raised concern about above. If you make the game-element very appealing you have to be very careful that the game incentives are exactly aligned with what you want to encourage the community to do. If the game isn't quite lined up, you can get into trouble with people over optimizing to win the game while hurting the system the game was built to help.
http://zooniverse.org is an example of a collection of volunteer-tasks (for "citizen science") that could be gamified, but they have made the explicit decision not to do so because they are worried about incentive alignment - but also because they already have a community with more than 1 million registered users! While wikidata is off to a great start, there is a long way to go before we have the community needed to really achieve its potential. I support exploring many ways to get there, including well thought out games.
-Ben
On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, There is no reason why we cannot have both. There are continuous activities where play may not be that relevant, there is also the occasional stuff. Where time for instance is of the essence.
I think the seriousness of Wiki* is vastly overrated and is often a self defeating proposition. Thanks, GerardM
On 7 February 2016 at 16:09, Sandra Fauconnier < sandra.fauconnier@gmail.com> wrote:
Wow, these are great links, Lydia, thanks.
I, for one, would warmly welcome more well-designed games, especially in the distributed game framework that Magnus has built. Not so much for the playfulness, but because it’s such an easy way to do many useful edits without needing deep concentration, and because I find it really interesting to see all the kind of content that we cover (the games allow me to get out of the ‘filter bubble’ in which I usually edit, which is the field of the visual arts).
Game-like tools that I would like to see, would include
- a sourcing game to add reference URLs from RKDartists to statements
related to artists (birth dates, death dates, places of birth and death, professions)
- a nice and pleasant interface that allows me to state what is depicted
in an artwork
- a better game to add Thesaurus of Geograpic Names IDs to geographic
entities. The TGN is now in the distributed and ‘normal’ Mix’n’Match version but is hard to match in these. It really needs a good interface with a large map for ‘our’ items next to the more detailed geographical info contained in the TGN (tree view; is it a city/river/mountain…)
A competition element, on the other hand, would really put me off. I don’t care at all, I’m not in it for that and it would chase me away very quickly.
Sandra
On 07 Feb 2016, at 10:00, Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de wrote:
On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 11:08 PM David Abián davidabian@wikimedia.es wrote:
Hi folks,
It's fantastic to see that we have such interesting tools to contribute to Wikidata like Magnus' games.
With Wikidata Game and The Distributed Game as a base, I think we could go further and get a tool that serve, not only as a game, but as a real competition. In particular, with the following additions and a few suggestions, I believe we could celebrate great /in situ/ Wikidata competitions over the world:
- A chronometer with a start and a scheduled end while contributions are
registered for the contest.
- Some quorum (e.g., three) so that edits in the contest are only
applied to Wikidata if that quorum of people agrees on an answer.
- A scoring system that only provide points (or much more points) to
those who get a quorum. This avoids people answering randomly while they destroy Wikidata and earn more and more points.
- A way to show the same questions to the quorum number of participants
during the competition.
- A real-time ranking in the competition scope.
- A way to manage the list of participants and to register an
administrator, or multiple ones, for every contest.
Would this be a good idea? Would anyone like to develop some of these features?
Please be aware that a large amount of gamification systems actually hurt the community they are trying to build. They (usually) only work in the short-term and make the situation worse in the longer-term. The way the current Wikidata Game is doing it is very good. Here are some articles to read up on this topic:
- https://www.feverbee.com/participation-for-intrinsic-reasons/
- https://www.feverbee.com/blunt-instruments/
- https://www.feverbee.com/reputationsystems/
- https://www.feverbee.com/bigparticipationimpact/
- https://www.feverbee.com/dont-use-recognition-shortcuts/
- https://www.feverbee.com/superfans/
I can recommend the blog above for all kinds of interesting research-backed information around communities.
Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Product Manager for Wikidata
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