Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Is this a positive or a negative?/reply (6)

Hi Howie, I agree it would be great if rating an article made it easier for readers to interact with the pedia and as a result more of them edited. But we need to test for the possibility that this feature diverts potential editors away from improving the pedia. 100,000 is a very large sample, providing it was a genuinely random one it should be possible to create a control sample and compare the edit counts - perhaps omitting a few anomalous articles that have recently been newsworthy - Paul Revere springs to mind.

Comparing the 100,000 to the average for the pedia will almost certainly show that they are edited less, if only from the inevitable selection bias of omitting the new articles created during the trial. So to be fair the comparison needs to be with a control sample, or perhaps against the same articles in a previous period - though you'd need to weight the two according to total edits across the pedia in the two periods.

Of course there is the possibility that the effects will be longterm - either positively with readers spending months rating hundreds of articles and then starting editing, or negative with readers spending some time rating articles then giving up on wikipedia because rating an article badly doesn't necessarily result in someone coming along and improving it.

I'm pretty sure that the easy to use templating tools have diverted some potential editors from improving a few articles to critiquing larger numbers of them, and if this tool exacerbated that unhealthy trend I believe it would be very damaging for the community and the project. But I would emphasis the if, I would be delighted if the 100k control test showed that the assessment tool was simply getting more readers to interact wit the pedia without diverting any away from improving it.