Kerry,

Thanks so much for the comments. I will bring up the subjects of badges and
cobtributor KPIs with Luis and/or Lila when I have a minute to refine my
thinking.

Pine
On Oct 6, 2015 2:33 AM, "Kerry Raymond" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage
> certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to
> generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little
> housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on
> most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put
> any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly
> edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I
> discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take
> them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural"
> attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs
> that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)?
> Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and
> it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive"
> behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis).
> This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation
> rather than some more purpose-built tool.
>
> In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a
> behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done.
>
> For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For
> example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to
> an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that
> weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable
> behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously
> whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be
> determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline
> sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which
> case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that
> grounds it is more likely to be verifiable).
>
> But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect
> and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we
> don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't
> actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that
> KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive
> impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces
> a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces
> a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or
> encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would
> we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics"
> (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor
> gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be
> closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how
> "female" an article topic is.]
>
> On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra
> functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up
> enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia
> is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory).
>
> I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is
> implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours
> to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have
> (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just
> becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or
> someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit
> (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I
> think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which
> an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set,
> come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in
> the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback
> mechanism, it could improve over time.
>
> A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit
> count badges for  "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have
> "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick
> positive acknowledgements for their efforts.
>
> Kerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:[email protected]]
> On Behalf Of Robert West
> Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
> [email protected]>
> Cc: Marti Johnson <[email protected]>; Patrick Earley <
> [email protected]>; Jacob Orlowitz <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user
> behavior
>
> This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior:
> https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf
>
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference
> > sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that
> > you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how
> > to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that
> > Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse,
> > and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in
> > applicable research as preparation both for the unconference
> > discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform and
> inspire new editors.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Pine
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
>
>
>
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