[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool, version 5 - additional testing deployments

[Oliver Keyes]

Hey guys,

Just keeping you in the loop; we're going to be testing another change to
the Article Feedback Tool on starting tomorrow, January 10.  So far, we've
done a bit of small-scale experimentation with the actual design of the
tool, as announced on the blog,[1]  the village pump, and on various
mailing lists. This has all been on a tiny fraction of articles (~22k total
articles, about 0.6% of the English Wikipedia), and a lot of really useful
data has been gathered without bothering the vast majority of editors or
readers. Ideally, that's what we'd aim for with all tests :).

Even with Wikipedia readership reaching half a billion users per month, the
feedback form its current position (at the end of the article) doesn’t see
a whole lot of activity [2].  In this test, we’ll be experimenting with a
more prominent way to access to tool.  When a user loads the page with the
test version of the Article Feedback Tool, they will see an “Improve this
article” link docked on the bottom right hand corner of the page (please
see [3] for a mockup).  Since this link is docked, it will stay with the
reader while they’re reading the article.  The introduction of this link
will undoubtedly increase the amount of feedback.  We need to, however,
understand how it affects the quality of the feedback.  We genuinely don't
know what the impact will be, which is why we're doing these tests :). As
with the last tests, it'll be on a very small subset of articles and
probably won't be noticed by most people.

If you do encounter it, and it does bug you, you can turn it off just by
going into Preferences > Appearance > Don't show me the article feedback
widget on pages. If you've already ticked this option, the new link
shouldn't appear at all; please do let me know if it does. We are working
on a way to disable it "in-line" as well so you can simply dismiss the link
without going to preferences.

We’ll also be doing some preliminary analysis on whether such a prominent
link cannibalizes editing behavior.  The team is very aware that the new
link may compete with the edit tab and section edit links.  Since the test
version of the tool is deployed on a limited number of articles, we will
only get a rough read on how much, if any, cannibalization takes place.
Per our research plan, we’ll continue to monitor the tradeoff between
giving feedback and editing.[4]

If any of you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or
drop a note on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5

Thanks!

[1]
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/a-new-way-to-contribute-to-wikipedia/
[2] Overall activity for current version (AFT4) :
http://toolserver.org/~dartar/aft/; Activity for United States, one of the
most frequently rated articles:
http://toolserver.org/~dartar/aft2/?p=United_States
[3]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AFT5-Feedback-Link-Option-D-12-28.png
[4]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Data_and_metrics

--
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation