Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Is this a positive or a negative?

My concerns about article rating systems are that like templating they risk diverting some editors and potential editors away from improving articles and towards critiquing them, As well as driving away some existing editors who don't like getting judged badly.

We have major problems in that our editing community is not recruiting as many new editors as it used to, nor are we persuading as many of them to stick around. One theory is that it is the templating & deletionist culture that has soured the community and made this a less attractive place to spend time editing. If so then another tool to divert people away from improving the Pedia and towards annoying other editors is a step in the wrong direction.

I may be wrong in this, and it could be something completely different that is making editing wikipedia a less attractive hobby. But if this trial goes ahead I would like to see two sets of statistics collected:


 * 1) Number of edits to the 100,000 articles in the trial compared to an equally random control sample of 100,000 articles not in the trial.
 * 2) Some sort of retention analysis of the authors of the articles in the trial.

The first of these is relatively straightforward, and I would hope that if the control sample gets more edits than the test sample then the trial will be ended and the Article feedback tool removed.

The second of these is more difficult to quantify, if this does have a negative affect on editors it is quite likely that some editors will be tolerant of a test on 3% of the articles they've contributed to, but would be lost if this was rolled out to all of them. I'm particularly concerned at the editors who are not quite fluent in English, I rather suspect that we have a number of editors who can partially justify their hobby of writing Wikipedia as a free way to get feedback on their written English; If such editors found that they were getting less constructive feedback from collaborative editing and more negative feedback from this tool then we risk losing them.

Of course it is possible that something completely different caused the decline in editor numbers, or that this might even recruit more editors than it loses us. But it is important that if we trial this we measure the right thing to tell us whether it is positive or negative for the project.