Hello future Snuggle users. A design consideration for Snuggle has come under question recently that I would like to have a public discussion about. How public should activities in Snuggle be? Right now, there's really only two types of actions that can be taken in Snuggle:
The latter activities are already public since all edits in Wikipedia are public, but the former (user categorization) could potentially be hidden within Snuggle and only made visible to Snuggle users. In a recent update to my work log, I posted a screenshot of an activity monitor for Snuggle that would make the two activities (categorization and user actions) public.
My intention is let the transparency inherent in a public activity log encourage good behavior among Snuggle users through a sense of accountability. I find visibility to be a good strategy in general for Wiki activities. This is something I've incorporated into the development of Snuggle (see the work log) and my research activities (see my contribs on meta:Research). However, some of the alpha testers have brought up concerns about problems that could result from making this log public. I'm making this post to give everyone a chance to chime in.
What do you think? Should your Snuggle activities be made part of a public record or should visibility of the activity log be restricted in some way? -- EpochFail( talk • work) 20:22, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
Hi EpochFail,
I can see this is an area where it is difficult to make the correct design decision.
I think the reason that classifying users in Snuggle feels different to the vast majority of Wikipedia edits is that it involves making a judgement about other users. People tend to keep their thoughts about others to themselves. This is perhaps compounded on Wikipedia by maxims like assume good faith, no personal attacks and don't bite the new comers. Even {{ uw-v1}} uses quite neutral language and tries to assume good faith. In contrast, classifying a user as "bad-faith" is very personal.
I think we have two issues:
In most cases the practical implications a nil. However, I can imagine you might get a few exceptions. These would come in two categories:
A relevant guideline for point 1 is WP:BITE, a the relevant essay to point 2 is WP:DENY. These suggest that a degree of privacy would help the project.
On the other hand, I can see the point about accountability and all keeping an eye on each other.
I think possibly the happy medium is to restrict visibility Snuggle results to other Snuggle users, but this doesn't stop the saddos creating a an account to log in to Snuggle to see how their socks are doing. So you could restrict it to some subset such as those with reviewer rights, or those that have classified more than 100 newbies, but that invites accusations of a kabal... so whatever you do there is going to be an issue. It's just a question of picking the option which minimises the down side.
This isn't a massive issue at the moment because Snuggle is relatively little known. It would be good to make a decision before it does become an issue.
I think that whatever decision we come to, the biggest thing is to not advertise the existence of Snuggle to newbies. It's not like its a top-secret project, its just that occasionally someone will misclassify a newbie. That shouldn't be a biggie because it shouldn't negatively effect the experience of a good-faith newbie (relative to a situation of Snuggle not existing) but we don't want to bite anyone.
Yaris678 ( talk) 18:09, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for your work! I wanted to test but then I saw the login option and I wondered what does it give. But first of all it felt awkward to put my credentials in an external site. Thoughts?-- Qgil ( talk) 18:11, 17 June 2013 (UTC)
Hello future Snuggle users. A design consideration for Snuggle has come under question recently that I would like to have a public discussion about. How public should activities in Snuggle be? Right now, there's really only two types of actions that can be taken in Snuggle:
The latter activities are already public since all edits in Wikipedia are public, but the former (user categorization) could potentially be hidden within Snuggle and only made visible to Snuggle users. In a recent update to my work log, I posted a screenshot of an activity monitor for Snuggle that would make the two activities (categorization and user actions) public.
My intention is let the transparency inherent in a public activity log encourage good behavior among Snuggle users through a sense of accountability. I find visibility to be a good strategy in general for Wiki activities. This is something I've incorporated into the development of Snuggle (see the work log) and my research activities (see my contribs on meta:Research). However, some of the alpha testers have brought up concerns about problems that could result from making this log public. I'm making this post to give everyone a chance to chime in.
What do you think? Should your Snuggle activities be made part of a public record or should visibility of the activity log be restricted in some way? -- EpochFail( talk • work) 20:22, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
Hi EpochFail,
I can see this is an area where it is difficult to make the correct design decision.
I think the reason that classifying users in Snuggle feels different to the vast majority of Wikipedia edits is that it involves making a judgement about other users. People tend to keep their thoughts about others to themselves. This is perhaps compounded on Wikipedia by maxims like assume good faith, no personal attacks and don't bite the new comers. Even {{ uw-v1}} uses quite neutral language and tries to assume good faith. In contrast, classifying a user as "bad-faith" is very personal.
I think we have two issues:
In most cases the practical implications a nil. However, I can imagine you might get a few exceptions. These would come in two categories:
A relevant guideline for point 1 is WP:BITE, a the relevant essay to point 2 is WP:DENY. These suggest that a degree of privacy would help the project.
On the other hand, I can see the point about accountability and all keeping an eye on each other.
I think possibly the happy medium is to restrict visibility Snuggle results to other Snuggle users, but this doesn't stop the saddos creating a an account to log in to Snuggle to see how their socks are doing. So you could restrict it to some subset such as those with reviewer rights, or those that have classified more than 100 newbies, but that invites accusations of a kabal... so whatever you do there is going to be an issue. It's just a question of picking the option which minimises the down side.
This isn't a massive issue at the moment because Snuggle is relatively little known. It would be good to make a decision before it does become an issue.
I think that whatever decision we come to, the biggest thing is to not advertise the existence of Snuggle to newbies. It's not like its a top-secret project, its just that occasionally someone will misclassify a newbie. That shouldn't be a biggie because it shouldn't negatively effect the experience of a good-faith newbie (relative to a situation of Snuggle not existing) but we don't want to bite anyone.
Yaris678 ( talk) 18:09, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for your work! I wanted to test but then I saw the login option and I wondered what does it give. But first of all it felt awkward to put my credentials in an external site. Thoughts?-- Qgil ( talk) 18:11, 17 June 2013 (UTC)