I am more active in categorisation on Commons than on Wikipedia, and there is a difference there as images in a very fine grained category may be the specific images that one sees if they click on the commons category link in a Wikipedia article.
But on both I see allocating more specific categories as part of the workflow of many of our editors. Checking through entries in a high level category, sifting out hoaxes and the like and moving the rest into more appropriate categories. I suspect what we really need is a better watchlisting system, one that doesn't just give you options to ignore bot and minor edits but also to ignore category edits and edits that are just reversions of IP and newbie edits. Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: Kerry Raymond <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2018 11:43 pm To: 'WereSpielChequers'; 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Readers of Wikipedia I’m not suggesting categories are bad. I certainly don’t want uncategorised articles. I also make use of hidden tracking categories to manage groups of articles associated with various projects. But we do have to recognise that it is editors that appear to make the most use of them. Eye-tracking studies on desktop and I believe some instrumentation in mobile viewing shows that readers don’t look at them (although I acknowledge that they may indirectly benefit the reader through improved search). I do outreach work (general talks about Wikipedia and edit training) and I know from those interactions that our readers have mostly never seen or used our categories, even many librarians (folks for whom categorisation is part of their fundamental way of working) appear not to have noticed our categories. What I am objecting to is what I see on my watchlist every day, many recategorisations into increasingly fine-grained categories. Also Categories for Discussion Speedy seems to be a way to constantly fiddle with the category tree (mostly just renaming) which then result in huge numbers of edits to rename the categories in all the affected articles. If you look at some of our top contributors, that’s what they do all day, yet goodness knows how much time is spent by the rest of us reviewing these very-low value edits on our watchlists. I would be very interested if anyone had any studies on the cost/benefit of various types of edit (maybe a job for ORES) against the benefit to the article (and hence the reader) and the consumed time (by all parties) of that edit. For example, vandalism would score strongly negative (damage to article content) but corresponding removal of that vandalism would not score as strongly positive, because it’s not a zero-sum game due to risk of exposure of the vandalism to the reader before the revert and due to the reviewer cost (I review many changed articles that have had an edit-revert sequence) and the window in which the vandalism may have been ex, so even though the impact on the content is net zero, the impact on everyone who reviews it needlessly is a net negative for the project). All edits (good or bad) have a reviewer cost. Do we know anything about reviewer costs of edits? A couple of people have asked me about my mention of studies showing people don’t look below the references. I was referring to a presentation at Wikimania this year (URL to slides below). While the slides do not explicitly mention categories, it shows readers rarely get to the bottom of an article, where the categories lurk. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Which_parts_of_a_%28Wikipedia%29_article_are_actually_being_read_%28Wikimania_2018%29.pdf I don’t know if there is more information available on the topic, but hopefully as it was WMF Research, someone on this list may be able to point us to more info. Kerry From: WereSpielChequers [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, 17 December 2018 1:26 AM To: Kerry Raymond <[email protected]>; Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Readers of Wikipedia I've long seen categorisation on wikipedia as a way to bring articles to the attention of those who follow certain categories. During the cleanup of unreferenced biographies a few year ago this was a useful adjunct, with several wikiprojects cleaning up all the articles legitimately categorised for them. Some of the other Wikiprojects did at least go through and prod or speedy the non-notables and hoaxes in their areas. I'm pretty sure it still operates that way, categorisation of an uncategorised article sometimes brings it to the attention of people who know the topic. And of course where the article doesn't contain the words in the category, categorisation then improves search. If like me you are a glass third full person categories make a useful contribution. On Sat, 15 Dec 2018 at 22:21, Kerry Raymond <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Pointy? I think you may misunderstand my use of the term “hostage”. I don’t use it with the meaning of abducting people for ransom, but in the sense of “subject to things beyond our control”. I agree entirely that Wikipedia should serve its readers and to that end “To do” lists are compiled with the intention of giving adequate coverage of topics perceived to be needed. Yet, many of those “To do” lists are full of redlinks years later because we have volunteer contributors whose interests / expertise may not align with the perceived needs. Whereas if Wikipedia employed its writers, it could direct them to write articles about required topics. It would be a wonderful thing if we could harness the volunteer energy that goes into largely unproductive activities like endless category reorganisation (given studies show readers rarely look below the reference section and don’t see or use the categories) into writing content that is actually needed. But alas it is not so. Kerry From: Ziko van Dijk [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Sunday, 16 December 2018 3:32 AM To: Kerry Raymond <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>; Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Readers of Wikipedia Hello, Thanks for the link and the comments, Leila! Am Fr., 14. Dez. 2018 um 00:44 Uhr schrieb Kerry Raymond <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> >: hostage to the interests of their contributors (unless they actively remove the material). That is, you get the topics that the contributors are willing and able to write, no matter what the intention might be. That's a very pointy expression: "Hostage to the interests of their contributors"! In fact, WP should serve recipients, but the reality is often different. We alreday saw that Article Feedback Tool as a means to find out what recipients think. I would be happy with a new, less ambitious approach, where we don't expect recipients to contribute to the improvement of content but just want to know their opinion. By the way, the distincion of large and short articles I have found in Collison's "Encyclopedias through the ages" (or similar) from 1966. It is not very prominent in there, but I have elaborated on the idea in 2015, with a distinction of definition articles, exposition articles, longer articles and dissertations. An encyclopedia with "short" articles - or a meaningful combination of the four types above - would fit well to the original concept of hypertext not being an actual set of texts (or nodes), but being an individual's specific learning strategy or reading path. Federico: remember, most of the oldest German texts (Old High German) deal with Biblical topics... :-) Kind regards Ziko _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
