Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage

Sunpriat (talkcontribs)

@MMiller (WMF)@Quiddity@Trizek (WMF) As the new user reports , in MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-tour-welcome-description-d, he did not understand what phrase "see your impact" at the end was about when he saw the message in the interface. He asked to make this phrase more understandable for someone who sees it for the first time. Perhaps it is worth making the original en-text a little more descriptive, otherwise mentioning only the name of the module weakly represents its real function.

KStoller-WMF (talkcontribs)

Thank you, @Sunpriat for passing along this feedback! We are working on some improvements to the Impact Module soon, as part of the Positive Reinforcement project, so this is well-timed feedback.

Just so I'm clear: this feedback is about the "Your impact" language on the newcomer homepage, correct? Do you think it's definitely the English copy that makes this confusing, or is "impact" a term that doesn't have a great equivalent translation in Russian? Please let me know if you have a specific suggestion for improved language.

We just ran several user tests with newcomers that included the Impact Module, so I'll also follow up with our lead researcher to see if this also came up in user testing. Thanks again for the feedback!

Sunpriat (talkcontribs)

@KStoller-WMF As for the feedback, it refers to the text MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-tour-welcome-description-d in the pop-up message. When you open the home page for the first time, this pop-up message appears. When a participant (who does not know anything about the module yet and has not seen it) reads this message for the first time, he does not understand what is being said here. If you look at the home page, there is an explanation "Views since you edited" under the module header and this allows you to correctly understand the meaning of the word. But the message seems to cut off the phrase. For example, if it were written "and you can see your power", then the question arises what type of power it says here. The participant read this message as "your actions", probably as a shorter but beautiful representation of the "Special:Contributions" (there is even a link to it at the bottom of the module). It would be clearer if the phrase were continued and concretized. For example, "and see your impact on pageviews", "your impact on the popularity of articles", "your impact on the frequency of article reads".


As for your question about translation - yes, it's also not very good here. In translation, we have two variants "wiktionary:влияние" and "wiktionary:воздействие". They are understandable in the context of a phrase or paragraph. But in a short phrase or seeing one word, the situation is such that this word is associated with a more common meaning - as if there is "influence", for example, "your influence in a group of people". (If you look at the translation in the opposite direction , then the main (first value) is also shown "influence". And auto-translators will translate it in the first place that way.) The module shows an improvement in metrics. This word does not represent the reference to metrics and pageviews improvements very well. I have no idea which module name would be better. (Maybe using the forward and then the reverse direction of translation in auto-translators will give you a fairly good idea of what meaning for words people understand first when they read some title.)


By the way, it would be useful to have a link to the help on the mediawiki page mw:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage#Modules, which describes the functionality of all modules. Your understanding of the homepage when you read the descriptions on the help page (or forgot, but you can easily find this page again and read it again) and understand the purpose of the modules is quite different from the understanding of the participant who saw only the final interface without those descriptions.

KStoller-WMF (talkcontribs)

@Sunpriat thank you for the detailed explanation! Yes, I can see how a newcomer might be confused by that language. I'll chat with our designer to consider if alternate copy is needed.

Even if the English copy doesn't change, would it be possible to just add slightly more context to the translation? So rather than a direct translation of "see your impact", the translation could be for "see the impact of your edits" or something along those lines?

And I'll also chat with our team about your suggestion about linking to the help page from the homepage. I think ideally the homepage is clear enough that linked documentation isn't needed, but that's an interesting idea.

Thanks again for passing along info, and for being a great advocate for new editors!

Sunpriat (talkcontribs)

There is an article w:Impact factor - this title (which already has translations into other languages) could be taken as a basis and called the metric "wiki impact factor".

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