[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment

Fri Dec 23 21:06:17 UTC 2011

The theory that the Article Feedback Tool may be encouraging newbies to
edit is an interesting one, though not in my view born out by the
statistics. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm

Comparing the number of newbies in recent months with the same month last
year I can't help but notice that last year we were getting rather more
newbies. This current testing phase gives us the opportunity to test not
just against the earlier version but against no AFT at all. Of course its
possible that if we didn't have the AFT encouraging readers to rate rather
than edit articles we would be having an even steeper decline in the number
of newbies. But logic and the statistics make me think otherwise.

WereSpielChequers

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:58:42 +0000
> From: Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAAQB2S_BGKFabA1MLondrSxt7e+wXEpWz+qQfcY3PniL-BV6Sw at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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/>
>
>
>
>