Re: [Wikitech-l] [WikimediaMobile] Wikigrok code no longer being worked on - Wikitech-l

1 Jun 2015

Hi Oliver,
Thanks for sharing your disappointment.  I do not think you are alone in
wanting to see wikigrok continue and grow.  I would clarify that the
'success rates' you allude to were for  reader engagement and accuracy, not
in actually improving our projects by filling in important gaps in
wikidata.  A great deal of work would be required to build out in order for
this project to have a scalable impact on wikidata.

I am not saying that casual contributions are going away, simply that we
are going to recognize our resource limitations and evaluate opportunities
for them based on highest return-on-investment. We currently have 5
developers working on readership for the entire web (due to some temporary
leaves) and there might be smaller wins using casual contributions that
work towards our end goal, but don't require the heavy upfront investment.
This doesn't mean we don't take on big thorny problems, just that we take a
step back and see if there are ways to subdivide them into smaller projects
along the way.

Best,

Jon

[1]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_permissions/Bot/WikiGrok

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Oliver Keyes &lt;okeyes(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

...
  I'm personally incredibly disappointed; this was
the most successful
 intervention I'd seen anyone try in a long while, if ever, and the
 results blow me away. My question would be "what interventions with
 similarly high success rates are going to be worked on instead?" - I
 assume that we're not working on them because we can achieve the same
 outcome through easier-to-implement interventions. I would be
 interested to hear what those interventions are.

 On 1 June 2015 at 14:57, Jon Katz &lt;jkatz(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:
  Hi,

 TLDR: Wikigrok proved that readers are interested in and capable of  making
  casual, mobile contributions to Wikipedia. We are
putting continued
 development of the 'Wikigrok' casual contribution feature on hold until 
we
  have a plan for optimally harnessing this
interest/capability.

 Background
 Given the growth of mobile traffic on wikipedia and the challenges  inherent
  to traditional editing on a mobile device,
Wikigrok was proposed as a  way to
  test if regular wikipedia readers would be
interested in making smaller,
 more casual contributions to wikimedia projects while reading Wikipedia  on a
  mobile device.

 Results
 By early 2015, the results were in: readers were relatively interested in
 engaging with the feature[1].  Some oft-quoted comparisons include:

 3x the number of unique responders as mobile editors during test period
 (4.5K editors, 12.3K WikiGrokkers), even with WG on sample of articles &
 users
 1.5x better clickthrough than 2014 Fundraising full-screen mobile banner

 (I actually do not have references for these, as they are borrowed  quotes)
  Furthermore, we found that the quality of
responses was rather high  [2,3].

 Future
 The original thought was to use these responses to fill in gaps in  Wikidata
  and our initial test results (2 weeks worth) were
successfully ported  over
  in late April [4]. However, in order to
production-ize the system, we  would
  have to:

 scale and develop queries against the new wikidata query service
 create an article parser to identify potential multiple choice answers  for
  each question
 create a system for attributing aggregated results to the specific
 contributors (per Wikidata bot request discussion[5])

 None of these are unsurpassable, but we have learned a great deal and, at
 this stage, we believe that further effort should be devoted to  evaluating
  areas of need and fit before we commit additional
efforts to specifically
 porting information into Wikidata.

 Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns about
 this decision.
 Best,

 Jon

 [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiGrok/Test2
 [2] Quality of responses, version A:

 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/File:All_Campagins,_Scatterplot,_version_(a).…
  [3] Quality of responses, version B:

 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/File:All_Campaigns,_Scatterplot,_version_(b).…
  [4] 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/WikiGrok?limit=500
  [5]

 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_permissions/Bot/WikiGrok

 _______________________________________________
 Mobile-l mailing list
 Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

 --
 Oliver Keyes
 Research Analyst
 Wikimedia Foundation