Thread:Talk:MoodBar/No thanks/reply (8)

Sven, as you say, there are no easy answers, and addressing issues of editor retention and editor health will likely require many varied interventions, both on the technical and social side of things. We're engaged in both: While you're observing MoodBar, AFT and WikiLove (each of which has a story more complex than the one you're telling), work is also actively ongoing on developing a completely new editing interface for Wikimedia projects, for example, and members of the community department are studying the impact of different warning messages and measuring the scale and impact of WikiProject work.

We have indeed discussed, and are considering, for example feature interventions to increase effectiveness of WikiProjects, as well as exposure to those projects in the lifecycle of an editor. The Account Creation Improvement Project has resulted in a redesign of the sign-up process, which is still in active experimental production use, and which exposes new users more quickly to tasks they can engage in, and to ways they can collaborate with others.

We've engaged in countless deep conversations about these issues, where lots of experienced editors have weighed in. Some have stated similar problems to the ones you've mentioned, some have identified very different ones. You'll find an example of that on strategy:Talk:March 2011 Update or the summarized version.

We also have several experienced Wikipedians on the WMF staff (including yours truly, and while I've not been very active recently, you'll find me in the edit histories of many key policies and conventions on en.wp); we continually engage in conversations such as this one, and we generally have no shortage of people telling us that what we're doing is wrong. :-) Resistance and opposition to change comes with the territory; some of that is well-placed skepticism and conservatism, and we generally try to listen hard and make sense of comments as they come in. We also try to be bold and experiment with lots of different ideas.

We'll wait and see as to what feedback is or isn't reported through MoodBar. You may be right, that feedback is going to be largely redundant with what people already know -- if so, and it's useful feedback, it would still be helpful to know what the actual percentage of different types of problems is that people report at different stages in their editing experience. We could spend endless time debating what might happen, but rather than doing that, we'll just give it a try.