[Foundation-l] Feedback tab on the English Wikipedia

[Howie Fung]

A couple quick comments:

For folks that are interested in this topic, please consider attending
Oliver's Office Hours on the topic.  Oliver hosts an IRC Office Hours
approximately every week to discuss the project.  Some are about specific
topics (e.g.., today's is about oversight of comments and is thus limited
to oversighters), but most are general purpose discussion where we discuss
stuff like design direction, general workflows, and DATA.  Here's a link to
the WMF office hours schedule (Oliver's Office Hours are always listed
here): http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours

One of the goals of this project is, as David states, increasing reader
engagement.  Ultimately, we hope that a percentage of the readers that
leave constructive comments will become editors.  We need to add feedback
loops where if someone leaves a great comment that's acted on by the
editors, that reader gets notified.  Hopefully that loop will work to draw
in readers by piquing their curiosity (and also providing some positive
feedback of "Hey look!  They took my suggestion -- and by the way, what are
they doing on this talk page thing. . ."  We need to get through a few more
baseline features before we start thinking more closely about the feedback
loop, but I at least wanted to put it out there.

Also, there will be some readers that simply will not become editors, and I
think that's okay.  Having them provide constructive feedback about what
their information needs are as readers, I think, is better than having them
not involved at all.  There is, of course, the signal to noise ratio, which
is one of the things that Oliver, Aaron Halfaker, and Dario have spent
quite a bit of time researching.  Having said that, we do need to be
careful about creating a "someone else's problem" dynamic.  One way to do
this is to keep making sure these readers know that they can make the
change themselves.

Howie

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> That's the plan. Neil, this is a concern we've taken into account; we'll be
> testing whether (for example) the presence of the feedback page adds 2,000
> comments, but kills half of our anonymous edits, or whatever. If the harm
> outweighs the benefits, we'll go back to the drawing board.
>
> On 9 February 2012 10:38, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 9 February 2012 09:04,  <neil at thebabbages.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I guess my concern is that it may encourage readers to type in
> > suggestions and take it no further rather than take the next step and
> begin
> > editing themselves.
> >
> >
> > At present, the average reader doesn't even fix typos.
> >
> >
> > > Definitely important to watch for any changes in the rate of new
> editors
> > contributing. It also implicitly makes it "someone else's problem" to fix
> > things compared to our current stock response of "if you see things that
> > could be better, fix it yourself. " I'm not saying this is intended but
> it
> > runs the risk of making projects look they have people exercising
> editorial
> > control.
> >
> >
> > If it's getting any increased reader participation in any way at all,
> > that's a big improvement over the present. Let's see how it works out.
> > (With numbers.)
> >
> >
> > - d.
> >
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>
>
>
> --
> Oliver Keyes
> Community Liaison, Product Development
> Wikimedia Foundation
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