[Wikimedia-l] Editor retention (was Re: "Big data" benefits and limitations (relevance: WMF editor engagement, fundraising, and HR practices))

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com>wrote:

> There is some neat tech that the E3 team has plans to use, which would
> also be a good framework for this kind of interactive training:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours
>

Yes, this is getting close to being ready for deployment, and is an idea
that has been floating around for a while.[1] There are quite a few good
open source libraries that do this kind of tooltip-based instructional
tour, so we worked off of one Terry Chay adapted for us.

In addition to tours packaged with the extension, it makes room for the
community to create tours, sort of like gadgets. Used sparingly (these are
popups, and can suffer from the Clippy effect if misused [2]) and with
careful attention to the workflow, we hope this will be a big help. When we
run remote user tests with average Web users, they quickly get confused and
overwhelmed by wiki page documentation with reams of instruction.

Steven

1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Feature_map
2.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1991915_1991909_1991755,00.html