The theory that the Article Feedback Tool may be encouraging newbies to
edit is an interesting one, though not in my view born out by the
statistics.
Comparing the number of newbies in recent months with the same month last
year I can't help but notice that last year we were getting rather more
newbies. This current testing phase gives us the opportunity to test not
just against the earlier version but against no AFT at all. Of course its
possible that if we didn't have the AFT encouraging readers to rate rather
than edit articles we would be having an even steeper decline in the number
of newbies. But logic and the statistics make me think otherwise.
WereSpielChequers
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:58:42 +0000
From: Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
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On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 02:41, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm NOT making the argument that the AFT is
inherently bad (in fact I'm
really looking forward to the v5 of the tool to see
how much good-quality
reader feedback we get, which will hopefully enliven a lot of very quiet
talkpages). I'm also NOT making the argument that the WMF needs to seek
some kind of mythical consensus for every single software change or new
feature test. What I AM saying is that now that v4 has been depreciated it
is both disingenuous to our readers and annoying to our community to have a
big box appear in such valuable real-estate simply because it will
eventually be replaced by a different, more useful, box. As you say, this
replacement is "still quite some time away" so it's a long time to leave a
placeholder on the world's 5th most visited website.
From what I understood, part of the point of the
article feedback tool
was that it increased the number of readers who edit -
because they
click through the star ratings and then were invited to edit
(apparently, despite the phrase "the encyclopedia you can edit" and a
big link at the top of the article saying "Edit" and little links next
to each section that say "edit", and ten years of people in the news
media, academia and so on excoriating Wikipedia for being unreliable
precisely because anyone can edit it, there is some group who do not
know that you can edit Wikipedia).
Even if we are no longer using the data collected from the previous
incarnation of the AFT (I've looked at a few articles I've written to
see what the AFTers think of it, and it is a minor curiosity), the
fact that it may be encouraging newbs to edit seems like a fairly good
reason for us to not jump the gun and switch it off prematurely.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>