Hello all,
This is a heads-up that tomorrow, we're planning to deploy the Article Feedback Tool, which is currently on 3,000 English Wikipedia articles, to a larger set of 100,000 articles. This initial expansion is intended to further assess both the value and the performance characteristics of the feature with an eye to a full deployment. As always, we may postpone the deployment if we run into unanticipated production issues.
Some examples of articles that currently have the tool (at the bottom of the article): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassroots_lobbying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_cuisine
The intent of the tool is two-fold: - to gain aggregate quality assessments of Wikimedia content by readers and editors; - to use it as an entry vector for other forms of engagement.
To assess its value in both categories, we've undertaken a significant amount of qualitative and quantitative research already. You can read an extensive summary of our work so far here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback
The headline summary is that based on the data we've seen so far, we do believe that user ratings can be a valuable way to predict high and low quality content in Wikimedia, and we're especially interested in engaging raters beyond the initial act of assessing an article. We've seen very good conversion rates on the calls-to-action that follow a rating which we've trialed so far, suggesting that this could be a very powerful engagement tool as well.
Beyond our own research and these engagement experiments, our goal is to make anonymized data from the tool available regularly, and to also give editors a dashboard tool that they can use to surface trends in the rating data.
Please use the talk page for comments, questions and suggestions. We'll also set up an IRC office hour soon to talk more about the tool.
All best,
Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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