[WikiEN-l] Expanded Use of Article Feedback Tool

[Erik Moeller]

Hello all,

This is a heads-up that tomorrow, we're planning to deploy the Article
Feedback Tool, which is currently on 3,000 English Wikipedia articles,
to a larger set of 100,000 articles. This initial expansion is
intended to further assess both the value and the performance
characteristics of the feature with an eye to a full deployment. As
always, we may postpone the deployment if we run into unanticipated
production issues.

Some examples of articles that currently have the tool (at the bottom
of the article):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassroots_lobbying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_cuisine

The intent of the tool is two-fold:
- to gain aggregate quality assessments of Wikimedia content by
readers and editors;
- to use it as an entry vector for other forms of engagement.

To assess its value in both categories, we've undertaken a significant
amount of qualitative and quantitative research already. You can read
an extensive summary of our work so far here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback

The headline summary is that based on the data we've seen so far, we
do believe that user ratings can be a valuable way to predict high and
low quality content in Wikimedia, and we're especially interested in
engaging raters beyond the initial act of assessing an article. We've
seen very good conversion rates on the calls-to-action that follow a
rating which we've trialed so far, suggesting that this could be a
very powerful engagement tool as well.

Beyond our own research and these engagement experiments, our goal is
to make anonymized data from the tool available regularly, and to also
give editors a dashboard tool that they can use to surface trends in
the rating data.

Please use the talk page for comments, questions and suggestions.
We'll also set up an IRC office hour soon to talk more about the tool.

All best,

Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate