Everyone,

I wanted to let everyone know that we recently began testing some new versions of the Article Feedback tool. As you may remember, the first version of the tool (launched earlier this year), focused on having readers provide feedback on the quality of articles [1]. The new versions try a different approach, based in part on feedback from the community. Rather than ask readers for feedback on quality, the new feedback forms prompt the user to help improve the encyclopedia. For example, one version we're testing asks the reader "Did you find what you're looking for?". If the reader answers "No", the tool prompts them to explain what is missing. The intent is to provide editors with some idea of feedback on what readers are actually hoping to see when they read a Wikipedia article, so that the editing community may incorporate that feedback when developing the article. Hopefully, some of these readers will also become editors.

Here is the blog post with more details:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/a-new-way-to-contribute-to-wikipedia/

Right now, there are three test versions running on approximately 10,000 randomly selected rticles.

Is this type of feedback actually going to be helpful? We don't know. So the next step is to evaluate the comment streams coming in from each test version to see which one offers the most number of constructive comments accompanied by the least amount of noise [2]. We'll be doing this with community members, so if you'd like to be involved, please drop either me or Oliver Keyes (okeyes at wikimedia dot org) a line. We're also tracking progress on the project page [3].

Howie

[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/07/15/%E2%80%9Crate-this-page%E2%80%9D-is-com... [2] The comment streams aren't going to be viewable by the public yet. One of the next phases of the project is to design a "Feedback Page" which displays the comment stream on a per article basis. We'll be collaborating closely with the editing community on the design of this page. [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5