[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment

Fri Dec 23 21:58:14 UTC 2011

Sure; we are doing those tests (I think this marks the fifth, or possibly
sixth time Dario and/or I have communicated this to you :p) and won't draw
any conclusions until we've gathered the data.

you say 'logic and the statistics make me think otherwise' - can you
explain what statistics? If you mean the below data, as I have already
explained to you, that logically doesn't fly. The data merely provides our
rate of decline - it does not provide any clues as to the reasons for that
rate, or possible factors retarding it.

On Friday, 23 December 2011, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 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/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation