[Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment

Sat Dec 24 00:46:04 UTC 2011

I was afraid of that... That the real reason, the underlying reason, for keeping the AFTv4 running all this time is because of the vanishingly small number of readers who make a rating, see the 'call to action' and then stay around long enough to become valuable editors in their own right.
If it's the case then the AFTv4 is simply being used as a cover for an inefficient editor recruitment program, then asking readers to give ratings is simply disingenuous. It is misleading to the well-intentioned reader (who genuinely believes we want their 'star ratings' opinion) and is also misleading the existing community who have been told that this tool will provide useful article feedback (its the name of the tool after all).

I honestly look forward to the AFTv5 that will be genuinely useful in generating qualitative article feedback. And, my hope is that it will include a method for the community to contacting those readers who give quality suggestions to ask them to join the discussion of their comments on the article talkpage (similar to the privacy-compliant 'email this user' feature we already have perhaps?). I believe that a 'call to action' that is personalised like this - personally relevant because it is responding to the reader's qualitative feedback and is also individually written - will be effective in recruiting new users that are seen by the existing community as an asset rather than a burden. Certainly, that method would engage fewer readers in total but I suspect it would have a greater level of retention because the new user's first interaction would be with other human beings on the talkpage asking them about their own feedback. Surely this is much more positive for everyone as the newbie feels more welcome and is less likely to trip over one of our editorial policies in their first edits (resulting in reverts, bot-warnings etc.).

In the mean time, I would like to reiterate that the the Article Feedback Tool (version 4 or 5) has always had its *primary* goal of getting article feedback and a distant *secondary* goal of getting new users. If the only real reason that v4 is still running is because of the very marginal success of that secondary goal then that is not, in my opinion, sufficient justification for keeping it running on 99.7% of en.wp articles. This is especially the case if the justification to the community for the tool being put on 100% of en.wp in the first place was on the basis of the primary goal, not the secondary goal.

-Liam

Peace, love & metadata

On 23/12/2011, at 23:45, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> That's basically my rationale, yup; thanks for explaining so clearly, Tom
> :P. Sleep deprivation makes me a poor writer.
> 
> On 23 December 2011 10:58, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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
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