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

[Phil Nash]

I found it mostly useless. Not only could I mark the feedback resolved, 
which should not be possible for a banned user (!), but the feedback was 
either gibberish/abuse or unhelpful in the sense of (1) the material 
requested was already in the article, or a linked article, or (2) the 
complaint was too unspecific to be actionable. Since I have about 4700 
articles watchlisted, I feel this is a representative sample, and the result 
is only to be expected from "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Does 
this feature justify its cost? No.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "phoebe ayers" <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 8:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] AFT5: what practical benefits has it had?


On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 4:33 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Thank you for enabling it again. I had read about the blind tests in <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Quality_assessment>
> before but I see some major changes in the graphs, which are a bit hard to
> understand.
>
>> 1) In "Daily moderation actions (percentage)" there's a huge spike of
>> helpful/unhelpful after C (July), did those flags even exist before? Or 
>> did
>> helpfulness increase after wider usage according to the finding «the
>> average page receives higher quality feedback than pages picked for their
>> popularity/controversial topic»? (There's no change between 5 and 10 %
>> though.)
>>
> *They did; the spike is most probably caused by a deployment from 0.6
> percent of articles to 5 percent of articles, with a resulting "ooh, 
> shiny!
> Lets take a look" reaction.

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 :)

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).

-- phoebe

-- 
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *

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