Thread:Talk:Article feedback/Is this a positive or a negative?/reply (2)

The issue of cannibalization of edits for ratings is something we need to watch very closely. We are hoping this feature will actually increase participation by serving as an on-ramp for editing. The idea is that it will take readers from "doing nothing" (reading) to "doing something," and that once a user has done something, they will be more likely to participate in other means, namely edit.

The other possibility, as WereSpielChequers mentions, is that users who would have otherwise edited will now rate since it's an easier thing to do. I think it's a good idea to track the edit patterns of the 100k group of test articles, though I think comparing them against a control group of 100k randomly selected articles could be a little problematic. The main thing is that the 100k control group may have different editing characteristics than the the test group (even though they theoretically shouldn't). We could look at the before/after behavior of the 100k test group to see if there are any meaningful differences in editing volume. We could also look at the before/after for both the test and control group.

I'm not sure how we would measure the effect low ratings could have on editors of a particular article. Maybe we can identify a sample of articles that receive poor ratings and look at their edit histories?