Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Delete/reply (21)

I think that's a good way of looking at things. We want features that help us get the "right" kind of editor in the funnel, not just any editor. That's why I'm a little skeptical about the results of experiments like the section edit icon -- this project increased the number of edits by a significant amount, but it may be because the section edit link is nice and shiny and therefore attracted people who really shouldn't have been editors in the first place. We haven't done the follow-up analysis for this project, but my guess is that the cohort of users that come in through the section edit link icon are probably of lower "quality" -- their edits are probably reverted at a higher rate and they probably don't stick around for quite as long. This is the type of analysis that we need to do with AFT. The click-through rates give us some good indication that users respond to an invitation to edit, but the real question is whether these editors will end up becoming constructive Wikipedians.

The invitation to discussion is something we really need to dig into. I agree that we should focus on developing more user friendly tools for discussion (like LQT). One of the underlying problems is that there are disconnects at many levels between readers and the idea of discussion on Wikipedia. Some don't even know discussions take place. Some think they take place but aren't sure where to find them. And those that can't find them are confounded by the interface since it doesn't look like any discussion page they've seen before. Brandon's done a lot of thinking around the next generation of LQT. But this is a much longer-term project -- to get this right will take a significant amount of time to design, develop, iterate, etc.