Thanks for taking an interest, Luis. This is one resource intensive project
that I think may be worth the investment. WMF is getting a fair amount of
flak for growing its budget at rates far higher than its growth in content
contributors. (Just imagine what would happen if a chapter did this.) I
think that making Wikipedia content contribution be a more emotionally
rewarding experience, perhaps by using positive reinforcement in ways
suggested by Kerry, might be helpful in our editor engagement. Are there
any chances of starting early work on a project along these lines in Q3,
perhaps aligned with the work on Wikiproject X and on improving ENWP
mentorship?

Pine
On Oct 13, 2015 6:43 PM, "Luis Villa" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I think there's a lot to be done there (probably will blog soon about my
> weekend experimenting with Genius, which had pretty extensive systems for
> this).
>
> It is an interesting prioritization question: doing it
> thoroughly/systematically would require a lot of software investment,
> especially since we don't have structured conversation pages (which are the
> basis for a lot of similar contributor recognition systems).
>
> Luis
>
> On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 5:25 AM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Up for a little language game? -- http://www.unfun.me
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>
> --
> Luis Villa
> Sr. Director of Community Engagement
> Wikimedia Foundation
> *Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely
> share in the sum of all knowledge.*
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