[Wikimedia-l] AFT5: what practical benefits has it had?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 14 October 2012 20:19, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed; I remember some (internal) announcements around this, which
> caused me and no doubt others to while away an evening just after
> deployment clicking helpful/unhelpful :)

I didn't spend an entire evening on it, but I can certainly say those
announcements prompted me to go and moderate feedback which I then
didn't sustain. If lots of people did the same as us, that would
certainly give a spike in the graphs.

> Also, not to state the obvious, but 'helpful' feedback in and of
> itself doesn't mean the article changed for the better; I've marked
> plenty of feedback 'helpful' without doing anything further about it.
> Is there any data about rate of change of the articles since AFT was
> enabled? (probably pretty hard to measure since articles are
> individually fluid at much different rates, depending on topic, and
> you'd have to control for the baseline likeliness of random bursts of
> editing somehow).

That is a very important point. The goal of the AFT is not to collect
feedback, but to improve articles (either by people acting on the
feedback or, perhaps more interestingly, but people giving feedback
and then being prompted to edit themselves).

Collecting statistics on the feedback itself is a good first stage in
the experimentation process, but it does need to be followed up be
statistics on whether the ultimate goal is being achieved or not
(based on anecdotal evidence, I suspect it isn't at this point, but it
is early days).