I found it mostly useless. Not only could I mark the feedback resolved, which should not be possible for a banned user (!), but the feedback was either gibberish/abuse or unhelpful in the sense of (1) the material requested was already in the article, or a linked article, or (2) the complaint was too unspecific to be actionable. Since I have about 4700 articles watchlisted, I feel this is a representative sample, and the result is only to be expected from "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Does this feature justify its cost? No.
----- Original Message ----- From: "phoebe ayers" phoebe.wiki@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 8:19 PM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] AFT5: what practical benefits has it had?
On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 4:33 AM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thank you for enabling it again. I had read about the blind tests in < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Quality_assessment... before but I see some major changes in the graphs, which are a bit hard to understand.
- In "Daily moderation actions (percentage)" there's a huge spike of
helpful/unhelpful after C (July), did those flags even exist before? Or did helpfulness increase after wider usage according to the finding «the average page receives higher quality feedback than pages picked for their popularity/controversial topic»? (There's no change between 5 and 10 % though.)
*They did; the spike is most probably caused by a deployment from 0.6 percent of articles to 5 percent of articles, with a resulting "ooh, shiny! Lets take a look" reaction.
Indeed; I remember some (internal) announcements around this, which caused me and no doubt others to while away an evening just after deployment clicking helpful/unhelpful :)
Also, not to state the obvious, but 'helpful' feedback in and of itself doesn't mean the article changed for the better; I've marked plenty of feedback 'helpful' without doing anything further about it. Is there any data about rate of change of the articles since AFT was enabled? (probably pretty hard to measure since articles are individually fluid at much different rates, depending on topic, and you'd have to control for the baseline likeliness of random bursts of editing somehow).
-- phoebe