Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-08-01/Research interview
The Huggle Experiment: an interview with the research team
As part of the 2011 Summer of Research, the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department has announced an experiment to investigate potential improvements to first-contact between new editors and patrollers using the Huggle anti-vandalism tool. The experiment aims to test "warning templates that are explicitly more personalized and set out to teach new editors more directly, rather than simply pointing them to policy and asking them not to do something", according to research fellow Steven Walling. To gain an insight into how such initiatives come about and what goes into planning them, the Signpost interviewed researcher Steven Walling.
Can you tell us a little about the Summer of Research project, how it came about, how you got involved and what sorts of questions you hope to investigate this year?
- Steven:
How did the idea to experiment with Huggle's standardised warning system originate?
- WSOR's goal is to understand the decline in new editors, so one of the areas we focused on is new editors' experience in the community.
- Doctor Kill suspected that Welcome messages might have an effect on how new editors perceive the community.
- Hugglers send out the most messages to new editors.
- We wanted to see if we could improve conversion (from damage) and other retention rates by just changing the working of the message.
How do lofty strategic goals like "Support the recruitment and acculturation of newer contributors" get translated into practical initiatives such as this?
An experiment of this kind seeks to understand social phenomena using technical methodologies. Does this involve coordination between, for instance, the Community Department and the Huggle developers, or is the experiment conducted by researchers proficient in social statistics or the digital humanities? Can you talk a little about the backgrounds of those involved?
Aaron is a computer science graduate student from the University of Minnesota. He's been an editor since Feb. 2008 (EpochFail) and publishing academic research of Wikipedia since WikiSym 2009. He specializes in statistical data mining and he designs user-scripts for Wikipedia intended to understand/improve editor interactions.
R. Stuart Geiger is a ... (socio-technical)
How were the parameters of the experiment – number of warnings delivered, proportion of changed warnings – decided upon?
We settled on three variables for testing in our experiment: personalized, teaching-oriented and image. Dr. Kill, a professor of rhetoric, produced personalized and teaching-oriented versions of the default warning template for Huggle; Stuart and Aaron then expanded these templates with image/no-image versions and prepared a random template generator. Our requirement for the number of experimental welcome/warnings is based on a little bit of statistical algebra that lets us predict at how many observations we'll need to find statistically significant differences between the variables.
The Huggle experiment is not the first attempt to investigate the interactions of patrollers and new page creators. A notable community-lead effort was the Newbie treatment at Criteria for speedy deletion experiment in 2009, where experienced editors (this interviewer included) posed as inexperienced article creators in order to gain an insight into how new contributors were treated in the patrolling process. The experiment attracted significant controversy, due to ethical concerns surrounding informed consent of the subjects. To what extent did the research team consider or engage with the relevant subjects from the editing community (i.e. Huggle patrollers, new contributors) prior to this experiment?
- Public notice posted Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Huggle_experiment
What do the researchers hope to learn from the experiment and what are the preliminary expectations or hypotheses to be tested?
Huggle users come across hundred of potential editors every day. Quite a lot of these editors are testing whether they can, in fact, edit Wikipedia by damaging an article. We suspect that the reaction these potential editors receive affects their decision try contributing productively. We hypothesized that the tone of the welcome/warning message could be an important factor in this decision so we have Hugglers testing a few variations of the 1st level warning message to find out if we are right.
What sorts of approaches we might expect from the Foundation in testing and improving usability, reader engagement and editor retention in the months to come?
Discuss this story
"Fewer than half of the newbies investigated received a response from a real person during their first 30 days". I think we really dropped the ball here. Interaction is a major way to recruit newbies and hopefully turn them into "regulars". OhanaUnitedTalk page 05:18, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps two critical concerns will govern the efficiency with which the problem can be addressed: (i) how long into a newbie's edit-history the patterns become clear, and (ii) the extent to which they can be identified by a bot (including whether a bot could do the initial "easy" filtering and pass a minority on to human eyes for higher-level sorting to identify the promising newbie-pluses for human interaction – a three-tiered filtering, as it were). Of particular interest might be the grey area of newbies – not those who will clearly stay and those who clearly won't (or who we clearly do or don't want to stay), but those where final stage, human interaction, has a reasonable likelihood of making the difference, of bringing them over the line. Finding the best bot/human mechanism for rationing the supply of "newbie mentors" to this prioritised editorial demographic, IMO, is the challenge. After that, a future project could work on developing guidelines for the best ways in which to interact with newbie-pluses. Tony (talk) 02:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]