I used to be a much bigger fan of human effort vs automated features on
Wikia, back when I was just an admin on Muppet Wiki, and we had lots of
humans making the effort.
Now that I work for Wikia, and I look at thousands of wikis all the time, I
can see how much effort the human effort takes, and how relatively few
humans are making the effort.
Before we launched the welcome tool, I did a survey of the top 200 wikis to
see how many communities were consistently leaving messages for new
contributors. Turns out about 50 communities were. It's a great thing that
they were doing it -- but that's only 50 out of 13,000 wikis.
I think it'll be interesting to see if there are other routine tasks we can
automate and take out of people's way. If an automatic process can clean up
after vandalism, or follow up with people who have accidentally blanked
pages, or fix broken links, or whatever... then the humans can spend their
time doing interesting things, like writing content and learning things and
being nice to each other.
-- Danny
On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwa...@wikia-inc.com> wrote:
> I used to feel exactly the same way, but I think we both agree that it's
> an empirical question. "In my experience" you write - and I agree.
> However, I'm very impressed with the data: "The fact that such a message
> set for page blanking turned 56 of 78 page blanking actions into
> constructive wiki edits is very intriguing."
>
>
>
> Master Conjurer wrote:
> > I disagree. In my experience on Wikia, human effort has always been
> > superior to automated features. Whenever somebody blanks a page on one
> > of the wikis I use, it never takes more than an hour to undo it and
> > leave a pleasant message on their talk page (below the usual {{Welcome}}
> > ) along the lines of, "Hi there. I saw what you did. Any chance you'd
> > rather help us out?" It works just as often and has no chance of
> > stopping a genuinely helpful edit the way automated features often do.
> >
> > //masterConjurer (talk
> > <http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:Master_Conjurer>)
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwa...@wikia-inc.com
> > <mailto:jwa...@wikia-inc.com>> wrote:
> >
> > I really support this kind of thinking... I missed whatever follow-up
> > there was about this, but I love the concept of turning page blanking
> > actions into constructive edits, etc.
> >
> > I think most vandalism is just people testing to see if they can
> really
> > edit (even after all these years of wiki, people don't believe it),
> and
> > if the filter pops up and says "hey, how are you? maybe you'd like to
> > spend your time more usefully, you might be happier that way" then
> most
> > people will respond well to it.
> >
> > Daniel Friesen wrote:
> > > There was an interesting posting to wikitech earlier about Abuse
> > Filter.
> > > Any thoughts on getting the extension on Wikia?
> > >
> > > Rather than just serious filtering of bad behavior it looks like
> > there
> > > are interesting soft filters that can spit out a message to the
> > user and
> > > ask for confirmation.
> > > The fact that such a message set for page blanking turned 56 of
> > 78 page
> > > blanking actions into constructive wiki edits is very intriguing.
> > >
> > > I can definitely see a good use for that kind of feature,
> especially
> > > fitting in with Wikia's ideas for getting new contributors to a
> wiki.
> > > I can think of a good number of filters I could put on the
> > Narutopedia
> > > which would give a friendly message telling a newbie "You're
> > trying to
> > > do this? It's not normally considered polite here, maybe you
> > wanted to
> > > do this instead?" to help point out things which normally would
> > end up
> > > with someone from the community reverting, tagging for deletion,
> > or whatnot.
> > > Bleh, to bad it can't catch C&P page moves or copyvios from
> > LeafNinja.com.
> > >
> >
> >
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