Lucie: well, that wasn't primarily a study at the time. It was an actual attempt to teach new users things. But point taken :)
More generally: I think we ('we' = people who run, or want to run, wikilabelling campaigns) should invest in improving the outreach and onboarding experience for WikiLabels. We probably need to make some updates to the WikiLabels portal on wiki, so that it's easier for people who have never participated in or organized a wikilabels campaign to get up to speed.
For example, Miriam put together a
basic information page and an (optional)
signup page for our last unsourced statements campaign. The page wasn't fancy, it just explained what the campaign was for, what to expect as a labeler, and how to participate. We had a hard time getting a sufficient number of people to label in our most recent campaign, and I think that's going to continue to be a problem as more people use the tool--how do we incentivize people to label, and make it as easy as possible for them?
My proposal is:
1. to have a landing page that we can link people who might participate in campaigns too (not taking anything away from the current portal, just creating an alternate entry point that's designed specifically for end-users)
2. create a mechanism for posting campaign-specific subpages in the 'wikilabels' namespace, so that we can track campaigns transparently, labelers can have a standard location of providing feedback (a la "instructions are not clear", or "interface is broken", AND so individual campaign organizers can have a canonical URL for their campaign documentation, a la Meta:Wiki_labels/My_great_campaign. Looks like Aaron et al.
tried to do this on Enwiki in the early days, but I think everyone should be responsible for their own documentation.
Does this sound reasonable? Anyone want to work on it with me? Scoring platform is unlikely to have the bandwidth to do this for us. And we're going to be relying on this infrastructure more and more.
- J