Topic on Talk:Growth/2023

I would propose a few tools to support and give feedback to both newcomers and oldtimers. (Just me trying to write down some ideas, aka ranting… )

Random award

People tend to continue doing things where they get a slightly random award. People tend to keep trying to get such rewards, even if the likelihood are pretty small. Compare to casino-like games.

It is rather well-documented how and why this work, and some people use it as an argument for free contributions vs paid contributions. That is probably wrong, but the argument is made anyhow. Its origin could be hunter-gatherers, and a continued quest for food even if they often failed.

That makes me believe there should be a page where new contributions are highlighted. A kind of special page “in the work”. That page can pick pages with larger contributions after they are patrolled or some time after the contributions are uploaded. Because the list should be limited it would be slightly random which page (contributions on that page) reach the special page. It is a feature that only some reach that page, but it could be possible to include more on the page if the reader choose to do so. Imagine the page as a “recent changes” with a lead paragraph with a list of the last contributions, and notify the user when his/her contributions reach the special page.

A practical implementation would pick pages that are above a certain threshold in size, and likewise a threshold on contribution. Above that threshold it would be included with a probability that scale with the accumulated size of the contributions.

Activity feedback

Users at Wikipedia are very eager on measuring their impact and reach, which makes me wonder if it is possible to create some kind of simple indexes or badges. It could be a kind of “six degrees of wikiholicks” with some funny comment popping up in the notification centre when you reach a higher level. As activity changes, it could be measured over some timespan, with some feedback (badges) early on that is pretty simple to get. Later on it could be logarithmically harder to get badges. Now our only feedback to newcomers seems to be a notification that their edits are rolled back, which gives a negative feedback.

Comparable systems are Khan Academy, Duolingo, and several other.

Ongoing work

I've been wondering if it would be a good idea to have a note on user pages about what page the user is editing. It would be like an implicit Kanban queue. If a page is open for edit in a tab, we could use a ping to the server and keep track of it in the session, and the user has several recent changes to the page, then it gets posted as “current work” or “work in progress” on the user page. If the user hasn't any contributions to the page, or if the contributions are too old, then it will not be listed. Likewise if the edits are not patrolled. A similar note can be posted on the content page itself, thus giving a positive feedback to the editing user. By limiting the number of listed pages it will give the contributor a sense of what s/he should focus on, ie. finish the current work, yet it allows the user to do random edits on other pages.

Note that “current work” should follow the page, and when another user moves the page to another title the note should keep pointing to the correct page.

Hi @Jeblad -- thank you for thinking about our work and for writing out these ideas. I'm sorry that it has taken a little while to get back to you. I have some notes and questions about each of your points:

• Random award: our team has talked many times about how to use awards to help motivate newcomers. Some of our notes are here. There is definitely evidence that awards can work, such as this paper about an experiment in German Wikipedia. In that experiment, a random set of newcomers was given an award for completing their first edit. They were then listed in public as one of the recipients of the award. This increased their retention by 10%. It's notable that in the experiment, the award came from a group of people (a WikiProject), as opposed to from "the system". Our team wants to extend the impact module on the newcomer homepage to give users awards that make sense for them, and we know we'll have a lot of thinking to do with our communities to make sure the awards are appropriate and incentivize healthy behavior.
• Activity feedback: I see this as related to the "awards" concept, because it's all about recognizing people for the work they have done. If you take a look at the homepage's impact module (shown in these designs), how good of a job do you think we're doing here? What should be different?
• Ongoing work: this reminds me of conversations our team has around a concept we call "neighborhoods". We think that it would help newcomers for them to be able to clearly say that there is activity happening in the wiki, so that they can join in (we have some notes on that here). Right now, it's hard to see activity unless you go to Recent Changes. So we think newcomers could have some kind of "activity feed" on their homepage, that could be tailored to topics that they care about, e.g. "Music", "History", etc. But it sounds like you're also saying that recent edits could be clearly listed on a user page. That would fit in well with some of our ideas around a potential structured user profile (some notes on that here, and I've added your idea to the bottom).

How does this sound? What do you think?

Random award is a bit weird. You tend to be more enthusiastic over a random award when you expect none, compared to a situation where you expect the award and get none. Even if the overall level of awards are the same. If people are giving the award, and you are expecting an award, then it quickly turn into a grudge toward the users that did not give you the expected award. Either the award should be really unexpected, that is statistically random, or it should be deterministic. A deterministic award is an activity feedback. It should also be given by a non-human, so to avoid disgruntled users. In the mean two different users at the same level should be given the same amount of random award, even if they have been given different awards at any given moment.

Activity feedback is a deterministic awards. You should be able to expect an activity feedback, but a random award should be unexpected. All users doing the same amount of work should be given the same activity feedback. Call it “activity award” and “random award” if it is easier to understand.

Ongoing work is the users “own work”, and limited to the users present major work. It makes him focus on his own work, possibly triggering a higher completenessrate. You could create interest groups, by collecting over a group of users from the categories where the user are editing. Note the difference between the users own activity, users interests, and articles where there are activity. Some user editing a random article does not imply he has a profound interest in neither the article nor the category. Only after accumulating edits over some time you know the users actual interest. The users interest could be modelled as the categories from the articles where (s)he contributes, weighted by the amount of work invested in each article. The categories should probably be simplified somewhat. You can make a metric for group activity both from users contributions and from recent changes. It depends on the level of granularity you want.

I'm not sure about the present standing on paid editing (Gneezy U; Rustichini A; (2000) Pay enough or don’t pay at all. Quart.J. Econom. 115(3):791–810.) I tend to believe the communities have made up their mind on a fairly weak (or even non-factual) basis. That could have implications for what kind of awards that can be used, and it makes it virtually impossible to use the most effective means for content production – payment. It seems like Wikipedia has at the same standing on corporate contributions as Linux in in the late 90s.

Note that awards in a system like Wikipedia relates more to cultural capital than social capital. Facebook and Twitter are more about social capital. LinkedIn tend to be social capital, but with a twist on educational and commercial capital. This has impact on what kind of awards will be regarded as important, and what kind is simply fun.