Hey guys, Just keeping you in the loop; we're going to be testing another change to the Article Feedback Tool on starting tomorrow, January 10. So far, we've done a bit of small-scale experimentation with the actual design of the tool, as announced on the blog,[1] the village pump, and on various mailing lists. This has all been on a tiny fraction of articles (~22k total articles, about 0.6% of the English Wikipedia), and a lot of really useful data has been gathered without bothering the vast majority of editors or readers. Ideally, that's what we'd aim for with all tests :).
Even with Wikipedia readership reaching half a billion users per month, the feedback form its current position (at the end of the article) doesn’t see a whole lot of activity [2]. In this test, we’ll be experimenting with a more prominent way to access to tool. When a user loads the page with the test version of the Article Feedback Tool, they will see an “Improve this article” link docked on the bottom right hand corner of the page (please see [3] for a mockup). Since this link is docked, it will stay with the reader while they’re reading the article. The introduction of this link will undoubtedly increase the amount of feedback. We need to, however, understand how it affects the quality of the feedback. We genuinely don't know what the impact will be, which is why we're doing these tests :). As with the last tests, it'll be on a very small subset of articles and probably won't be noticed by most people. If you do encounter it, and it does bug you, you can turn it off just by going into Preferences > Appearance > Don't show me the article feedback widget on pages. If you've already ticked this option, the new link shouldn't appear at all; please do let me know if it does. We are working on a way to disable it "in-line" as well so you can simply dismiss the link without going to preferences. We’ll also be doing some preliminary analysis on whether such a prominent link cannibalizes editing behavior. The team is very aware that the new link may compete with the edit tab and section edit links. Since the test version of the tool is deployed on a limited number of articles, we will only get a rough read on how much, if any, cannibalization takes place. Per our research plan, we’ll continue to monitor the tradeoff between giving feedback and editing.[4] If any of you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or drop a note on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5 Thanks! [1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/a-new-way-to-contribute-to-wikipedia/ [2] Overall activity for current version (AFT4) : http://toolserver.org/~dartar/aft/; Activity for United States, one of the most frequently rated articles: http://toolserver.org/~dartar/aft2/?p=United_States [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AFT5-Feedback-Link-Option-D-12-28.png [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Data_and_metrics -- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l