[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 02:41, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm NOT making the argument that the AFT is inherently bad (in fact I'm really looking forward to the v5 of the tool to see how much good-quality reader feedback we get, which will hopefully enliven a lot of very quiet talkpages). I'm also NOT making the argument that the WMF needs to seek some kind of mythical consensus for every single software change or new feature test. What I AM saying is that now that v4 has been depreciated it is both disingenuous to our readers and annoying to our community to have a big box appear in such valuable real-estate simply because it will eventually be replaced by a different, more useful, box. As you say, this replacement is "still quite some time away" so it's a long time to leave a placeholder on the world's 5th most visited website.
>

>From what I understood, part of the point of the article feedback tool
was that it increased the number of readers who edit - because they
click through the star ratings and then were invited to edit
(apparently, despite the phrase "the encyclopedia you can edit" and a
big link at the top of the article saying "Edit" and little links next
to each section that say "edit", and ten years of people in the news
media, academia and so on excoriating Wikipedia for being unreliable
precisely because anyone can edit it, there is some group who do not
know that you can edit Wikipedia).

Even if we are no longer using the data collected from the previous
incarnation of the AFT (I've looked at a few articles I've written to
see what the AFTers think of it, and it is a minor curiosity), the
fact that it may be encouraging newbs to edit seems like a fairly good
reason for us to not jump the gun and switch it off prematurely.

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