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

[Tom Morris]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 18:22, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> To be honest I'm not particularly worried if people canvass their
> mates to give straight 5s to an obscure article that only a few
> hundred people will ever notice. I would anticipate that will happen
> whenever someone files an AFD on an article that is of interest to a
> particular fansite, and if anything it will be less disruptive to have
> a bunch of fans boost the articles ratings than it will be to deal
> with those same fans at the AFD. The positive ratings that really
> matter to editors on this site are things like FA and GA and I don't
> see this system replacing that.
>


I think the important think about the article feedback tool is that
hopefully it will allow WikiProjects to prioritise article
improvements. Let's say you are involved with WikiProject Philosophy:
it'd be really useful to get a list of all the philosophy articles
with article feedback statistics mixed in. If we have an article that
is getting very variable ratings, going up and down all over the
place, that's a useful measure for having passionate readers. If
there's an article with organically occurring high ratings from the
readers, that is something the WikiProject should collectively
consider pushing towards Good Article or Featured Article.

The problem is we get the 'Bieber problem': people voting on the basis
of their views of the article's subject rather than the article, so
people who love Justin Bieber upvote it and people who loathe him
downvote it, even though we are asking whether they think the article
is good. The negative side is worse here: people downvoting the
article as a kind of 'delete' vote - they think that saying the
article is poor quality because we are giving too much coverage to a
subject we shouldn't be giving coverage to.

There is a good side though: we can use the different categories quite
usefully. If we have an article that is highly rated in three of the
four criteria but not so well rated in another, that's potentially
something we could flag up to WikiProjects as an area for improvement.

The article feedback tool is just that... a tool we can use to feed
back into the project. It shouldn't ever be an end in itself.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>