Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-08-01/Research interview
The Huggle Experiment: interview with the research team
As part of the
The Signpost interviewed researchers
How did the Summer of Research project come about, and what questions will it investigate? According to Steven, the experiment aims to test "warning templates that are explicitly more personalized and set out to teach new editors more directly, rather than simply pointing them to policy and asking them not to do something". Steven says he personally got involved because, as a
Aaron said they decided to experiment with Huggle's standardised warning system because the project goal is to understand the decline in new editors, so it seemed logical to focus on new editors' experience in the community. "Team-member Dr. Melanie Kill suspected that welcome messages might have an effect on how new editors perceive the community. So because Hugglers send out the most messages to new editors, we wanted to see if we could improve conversion (from damage) and other retention rates by just changing the wording of the message."
We wondered how the Foundation's sometimes lofty strategic goals, like "Support the recruitment and acculturation of newer contributors", are translated into practical initiatives such as this. Steven points to the Board resolution on Openness and the Foundation's Annual Plan for 2011–12. "Recruiting and retaining editors for Wikipedia is now one of our top priorities, and Zack Exley, our Chief Community Officer, designed the summer to really dig deeper into the exact areas of English Wikipedia and other projects that have the largest effect on new editors, and whether those editors stick around. The Editor trends study gave us a high-level understanding of the trends in participation, but it didn't tell us with certainty what internal community factors most have an impact. We need to have more data we're confident in if we're going to make good decisions, thus the Huggle experiment, which is clarifying that automated editing tools have a huge impact on new editors. The project was in the sweet spot of being able to gather a statistically significant sample quickly and with minimal impact on the normal functioning of the community."
Stuart's background seems ideally matched to an experiment that seeks to understand social phenomena using technical methodologies. "I'm an adherent of the
How were the parameters of the experiment decided on – for example, the number of warnings delivered, the proportion of changed warnings? Aaron says they settled on three variables for testing in the experiment: personalized, teaching-oriented, and image. "Dr. Kill, a professor of rhetoric, produced personalized and teaching-oriented versions of the default warning template for Huggle; Stuart and Aaron then expanded these templates with image/no-image versions and prepared a random template generator. Our requirement for the number of experimental welcomes/warnings is based on a bit of statistical algebra that allows us predict how many observations we'll need to find statistically significant differences between the variables."
The Huggle experiment is not the first to investigate the interactions of patrollers and new page creators. In the 2009 community-led
Aaron points out that Huggle users come across hundreds of potential editors every day, and a surprising proportion of these editors are testing whether they can, in fact, edit Wikipedia by damaging an article. "We suspect that the reaction these potential editors receive affects whether they'll register an account and try contributing productively. We hypothesized that the tone of the welcome/warning message could be an important factor in this decision. We have Hugglers testing a few variations of the 1st-level warning message to find out if we're right."
So can we expect more experiments like this in the future? Steven says he could probably do an entire Signpost report just on this topic. "But let me give it a quick shot by saying that the recently released Annual Plan (see link above) will give you a very good idea of what direction we're focusing on, as well as activity on mediawiki.org, the tech portion of blog.wikimedia.org, and the impending software deployments page. We try to make sure to push a message locally here when new experiments with features or anything else is happening, but those three places are where to look if you're interested in these topics in the future."
Discuss this story
"Fewer than half of the newbies investigated received a response from a real person during their first 30 days". I think we really dropped the ball here. Interaction is a major way to recruit newbies and hopefully turn them into "regulars". OhanaUnitedTalk page 05:18, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps two critical concerns will govern the efficiency with which the problem can be addressed: (i) how long into a newbie's edit-history the patterns become clear, and (ii) the extent to which they can be identified by a bot (including whether a bot could do the initial "easy" filtering and pass a minority on to human eyes for higher-level sorting to identify the promising newbie-pluses for human interaction – a three-tiered filtering, as it were). Of particular interest might be the grey area of newbies – not those who will clearly stay and those who clearly won't (or who we clearly do or don't want to stay), but those where final stage, human interaction, has a reasonable likelihood of making the difference, of bringing them over the line. Finding the best bot/human mechanism for rationing the supply of "newbie mentors" to this prioritised editorial demographic, IMO, is the challenge. After that, a future project could work on developing guidelines for the best ways in which to interact with newbie-pluses. Tony (talk) 02:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]