[WikiEN-l] Article Feedback - Ramp up to 10% of Articles

[WereSpielChequers]

Do we have stats yet that measure whether this is encouraging editing,
or diverting even more people from improving the pedia to critiquing
it?

Remember there is a risk that this could exacerbate the templating
trend. Just as we need to value edits that fix problems and remove
templates above edits that add to the hundreds of thousands of
maintenance templates on the pedia; So we need to value a talkpage
comment that explains why someone has a specific concern about an
article over a bunch of "feedback" that says people like or dislike an
article without indicating why. Better still we should be encouraging
readers to improve articles that they see as flawed. So we need to
measure this tool in terms of its success at getting readers to edit,
not in terms of its success at getting readers to rate articles. I
hope it is successful, and I'm happy to take the long view and measure
a trial over months to see how effectively we convert article raters
into article editors. But we do need to be prepared to remove this if
it has a net effect of diverting potential editors into merely rating
articles for others to fix.
We also need to be careful how we compare this 374k to the other
"90%", not least because with 3,682,158 articles on En wiki as I
write, 374k is about 6k more than a random 10% sample would be.

We also need to learn from one of the lessons of the Strategy wiki
where we had a similar rating system. Many of the proposals there had
so few ratings that they were close to being individual views and few
had sufficient responses to be genuinely collective to the point where
one maverick couldn't skew them - even without sockpuppetry. On
average our articles get one or two edits a month, many get far less.
I would not be surprised if 100,000 of the 374k in the trial had less
than ten ratings even if trialled for a couple of months.

Lastly we need to be prepared for sockpuppetry, especially as these
are random unsigned votes with no rationale. Can we have assurances
that something is being built into the scheme to combat this?

Regards

WereSpielChequers

On 14 July 2011 10:08, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 July 2011 00:40, Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Just wanted to pass along a note to let everyone know that earlier today, we
>> ramped up the Article Feedback Tool to 10% of articles on the English
>> Wikipedia.  That brings the total to approximately 374K articles with the
>> tool deployed.
>
>
> Is there anywhere we can read articles' ratings?
>
>
> - d.
>
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