Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikidemia/feedback to contributors
Central question: What is the effect of feedback?
Research outline:
- Describe existing feedback mechanisms.
- Develop ways of measuring characteristics (quantity, valence, detail, person-specific or work-specific) of feedback.
- Develop ways of measuring contributor motivation (number and length of edits per unit of time).
- Interventions to manipulate feedback:
- Pick a sample of contributors.
- Randomly divide into N groups.
- One group is the pure control.
(The following are example interventions...)
- In one group, we take one or more recently-edited articles by those contributors and place, on those articles' pages, notes of the form: "Jane Doe recently contributed feedback to this article. Please give her feedback on her talk page.
- In one group, we take one or more recently-edited articles by those contributors and place, on those articles' pages, notes of the form: "Jane Doe recently contributed feedback to this article. If you think she made a positive contribution, please give her feedback on her talk page.
- In one group, the researcher or confederates provide positive feedback (eg, "I liked your recent edits to the article on Bob Dylan.")
- In one group, the researcher or confederates provide negative feedback (eg, "I didn't like your recent edits to the article on the Rolling Stones.")
- These two treatments are problematic because 1) they can't be organically replicated after the conclusion of the study, 2) the confederates might be detected by the contributors in these groups.