Do we have stats yet that measure whether this is encouraging editing, or diverting even more people from improving the pedia to critiquing it?
Remember there is a risk that this could exacerbate the templating trend. Just as we need to value edits that fix problems and remove templates above edits that add to the hundreds of thousands of maintenance templates on the pedia; So we need to value a talkpage comment that explains why someone has a specific concern about an article over a bunch of "feedback" that says people like or dislike an article without indicating why. Better still we should be encouraging readers to improve articles that they see as flawed. So we need to measure this tool in terms of its success at getting readers to edit, not in terms of its success at getting readers to rate articles. I hope it is successful, and I'm happy to take the long view and measure a trial over months to see how effectively we convert article raters into article editors. But we do need to be prepared to remove this if it has a net effect of diverting potential editors into merely rating articles for others to fix. We also need to be careful how we compare this 374k to the other "90%", not least because with 3,682,158 articles on En wiki as I write, 374k is about 6k more than a random 10% sample would be.
We also need to learn from one of the lessons of the Strategy wiki where we had a similar rating system. Many of the proposals there had so few ratings that they were close to being individual views and few had sufficient responses to be genuinely collective to the point where one maverick couldn't skew them - even without sockpuppetry. On average our articles get one or two edits a month, many get far less. I would not be surprised if 100,000 of the 374k in the trial had less than ten ratings even if trialled for a couple of months.
Lastly we need to be prepared for sockpuppetry, especially as these are random unsigned votes with no rationale. Can we have assurances that something is being built into the scheme to combat this?
Regards
WereSpielChequers
On 14 July 2011 10:08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14 July 2011 00:40, Howie Fung hfung@wikimedia.org wrote:
Just wanted to pass along a note to let everyone know that earlier today, we ramped up the Article Feedback Tool to 10% of articles on the English Wikipedia. That brings the total to approximately 374K articles with the tool deployed.
Is there anywhere we can read articles' ratings?
- d.
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