Re: [RCom-l] Conducting Experiments on Effects of Messages in Wikipedia: Feedback needed

Hi Aaron, This is Haiyi Zhu from Carnegie Mellon University. I am working with Bob Kraut and Niki Kittur. I read your work about the effects of revert in Wikipedia. That is very interesting. Also congratulations on getting the summer intern job in Wikipedia. We have been planning on conducting an experiment to investigate the effects of messages on participation in Wikipedia. We are wondering if there is any appropriate place in Wikipedia website for us to post our plan of experiments and get feedback from Wikipedia foundations and experienced Wikipedians. It would be really helpful if you could point us to the right place. I also attach the details of our experiments. Thanks for your help! Haiyi 1. Purpose of the study Wikipedia is one of the most successful examples of social production online, and the key components to its continued success is maintaining a large number of contributions made by a large and diverse community of editors. The quality of Wikipedia articles is also maintained by its community of editors through shared leadership behaviors, which are leadership behaviors that come from all members at all levels (e.g. all Wikipedia users), not only members in a defined leadership position (e.g. Wikipedia administrators). Shared leadership behaviors in Wikipedia include, but are not limited to, giving positive comments to a contributor for creating a well-written new article (positive task-based message), criticisms or reprimands to a contributor for not complying to Wikipedia guidelines (negative task-based message), giving directions to correct an error (directive task-based message). All of these aforementioned messages could be written in a manner that is sociable and person-focused--friendly, supportive and caring, and seeks to retain relationships with others, or not sociable. Past research has shown that person-focused leadership was effective in motivating users to contribute more, while negative messages lead to decrease in motivation (Effectiveness of Shared Leadership, CSCW, 2012, under review, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~haiyiz/ttt/SharedLeadership_fifthpdf.pdf). Therefore, we are interested in learning how task-based messages (positive, negative, directive) with a sociable(person-focused) component would effect Wikipedia users' contributions. We will test how receiving the different types of messages (positive task-based, negative task-based, or directive message) with and without a sociable component, as well as the recipient's level of experience will influence a recipient's future contributions to Wikipedia. We will do so by having researchers post messages on the recipients' Wikipedia User Talk page, and then we will track the recipients' level of contribution over time. 2. Research procedures: The research procedure will not require any extra effort and activity by the participants, other than their usual participation on Wikipedia. The time period of this experiment will take place from July 1st to August. The location will take place online on the Wikipedia website. We will be posting experimentally altered messages to the participants' Wikipedia User Talk page, which is public and can be seen by anyone. The experiment researchers will identify a list of newly created articles that are two to ten days old. We will only post a response to a newly-created article that is at least two days old, in accordance to Wikipedia's policy of "don't bite the newcomers" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BITE). We will then categorize the new articles as containing errors or not containing errors according to a set of criteria determined by Wikipedia guidelines. The creator of the new article containing errors would randomly be assigned to receive a positive task-based message, negative task-based message, directive message, or non task-based message, and each type of message would also be randomly assigned to be sociable or not sociable. The same assignment procedure will be given to the creator of an article without errors, with the exclusion of negative task-based feedback. Also, all messages sent by the experimenter will be prepared beforehand in templates (see the section 4) , which are designed to mimic messages sent by other Wikipedia users, and therefore the risk associated with these messages are no greater than the risks experienced by a Wikipedia user during everyday interactions on Wikipedia. We will then extract the users' activity data after one to two weeks in order to examine the users level of contribution; we will also extract some user info, such as date of first edit, in order to assess the recipients' level of experience. However, no personal information that could be used to identify the identity of the recipient will be extracted, used, or recorded in this experiment. 3. We need your help! If you are interested in our research project and would like to participate in our experiment and send out messages, please sign here. 4. Appendix: example messages 4.1 Each message has some base, non-task focused/non-social content. I see you created the new article [[“{{{{contrib}}}}]]. New articles are typically reviewed by users on the [[Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol|‘New Article Patrol’]]. If your article has not been reviewed, it should happen soon. Thank you, ~~~~ I see that you recently created the new article [[“{{{{contrib}}}}]]. As you know, Wikipedia is always a [work in progress]. So thank you, ~~~~ I see that you recently created the new article [[contrib]]. It would probably fit into project [[Project]]. (although a good suggestion, this message is not yet compatible with the various categories, 4.2. The social messages have social content in the salutation before the base message and in the closing after the base message: Salutations: Happy Monday, {{SUBST:BASEPAGENAME}}! Greetings {{SUBST:BASEPAGENAME}}! Hi {{SUBST:BASEPAGENAME}}! Welcome {{SUBST:BASEPAGENAME}}! (new users only) Closing: Happy editing! Hope your day is going well and you are having fun. ~~~ It’s nice to see you editing! Hope you’ll stick around! ~~~~ Have a fun and productive day! Cheers, ~~~~ Let me know if there is any way I can help. Hope you sill stick around. Thanks, Amy ~~~~ Let me know if I can be of any help and I’ll do my best! ~~~~ 4.3. The positive feedback message includes some general positive comment and an article specific comment General: This article looks very well put together. [ Point to a specific praiseworthy element , based on article content.] Specific: The image greatly improves the article. The citations and references seem to abide to Wikipedia’s referencing guidelines. There is a good number of citations and references. The content seems pretty substantial for a new article. The content seems well-organized. The information is presented clearly and is easy to understand. The layout of the article makes it very clear. The headings and sections seem appropriate. 4.4. The negative feedback message includes some general negative comment and an article specific comment General: However, I noticed the article contains errors. [Point to a specific error, based on article content.] Specific: The article contains spelling/grammatical error’s (specifics) The article currently does not contain any [[WP:REF|references]]. The article’s image currently does not contain any captions. The references in the article do not follow Wikipedia guidelines. There is a tutorial on formatting citations at [[Wikipedia:Referencing]] The article does not contain any [[Help:Link|Wikilinks]], and so doesn’t follow [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (linking)|Wikipedia style guidelines]]. The article does not contain in-line citations, and so doesn’t follow [[WP:REF|Wikipedia style guidelines]]. The article is confusing. I do not understand what you are trying to say. The article’s footer sections are not in the [[WP:FOOTER|standard order]]. 4.5. The directive message asks the editor to do a specific comment on an article related to the one they created. Other sample tasks: It would be great if you could also improve the related article __. It would be great if you could also [[Help:Files|upload a picture]] for the related article__. It would be great if you could also [[WP:REF|add references]] to the related article __. It would be great if you could also create new articles for [the red links that do not lead to another article yet]. It would be great if you could also [[Talk:__|give feedback]] for the related article __. It would be great if you could also clean-up the related article __. It would be great if you could also [[WP:MOS|Wikify]] the related article __. It would be great if you could also help merge the related article __. It would be great if you could also participate in the [discussion] about deleting __.