2013/1/23 Vickram Crishna <vvcrishna@radiophony.com>

On Jan 23, 2013 11:58 AM, "Arjuna Rao Chavala" <arjunaraoc@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 currently 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

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