2013/1/23 Vickram Crishna <vvcrishna(a)radiophony.com>
On Jan 23, 2013 11:58 AM, "Arjuna Rao
Chavala" <arjunaraoc(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Rather than just the views, we need to look at the value felt by the
viewers (may be by an annual survey) as a measure of the impact of
Wikipedia's mission.
--cut--
That is a very challenging thought, Arjuna. Online
surveys are potentially
quite weak, as evidenced by the Facebook voting process (for policy
changes, not the Facebook 'like' feature, whose purpose itself is full of
questions).
A possibility may be a continuous rating system, with radio buttons on
each page, visible to logged in users (?), or actionable only by logged in
users, rather than an optionable survey on some other page. I see
difficulties with this as well, mind you, but throw it out as a suggestion.
On the plus side, adding such user-involving features may be a way to
bring in more 'mature' community involvement in knowledge creation and
dissemination. I am often struck by the manner in which some relatively
half-baked 'improvement' gets to be quite popular while worthwhile
technology lies unused. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But
in ourselves, that we are underlings', said the poet, but I hope we are
part of the solution, not content to remain the problem.
Article feedback
tool<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/20/article-feedback-new-research-…
in beta could be the impact metric that may be suitable for this
purpose.
Somewhere in the future, I see some kind of
'sharing' as a possibility,
whereby individuals who have common interests can actively and dynamically
connect through wikipedia pages. That might throw up an interesting metric
as well.
I understand that part of the plans for Wikipedia is to make it more
social.
Cheers
Arjuna