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i'd like this extension to alllow users to rate a product review article but with 10 stars as an overallrating instead of 5points scale. 10 stars could have a custom size and AFT should have a setting to count ratings from all the time, not last 30 days - display overall rating changes in time (all time/year/month/week) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.134.163.135 ( talk) 22:08, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
Note: ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
I don't understand how the feed of comments is going to be: shouldn't those comments be merged to the talk page, so that there's a single point of discussion and feedback can be discussed easily (for instance, how to be acted upon)? Nemo 21:24, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
I was for a long time active in Russian Wikipedia, and there the feedback tool page exists for I believe two years, ru:Википедия:Сообщения об ошибках. (Before Russian Wikipedia, it was introduced in Polish Wikipedia, but there I had no experience with it.). The link to the feedback form is found in the Toolbox field. It is a long-standing pain-in-the-ass page, since it creates a considerable backlog and requires a constant attention of several dozens of dedicated editors. I do not have any quantitative statistics, but my impression is that all comments are at least meaningful (possibly the meaningless ones are blocked by a filter, I am not sure) in the sense it is clear what the user actually wants. About 50% (in my estimate) are about typos which are easy to fix; about 10% are bogus (when the user misread smth or wants to add smth which clearly does not belong to the article or is plain wrong) and do not require any reaction, but the remaining 40% or so is addition of some unsourced information which looks credible but may be not credible (especially what concerns the BLP, the press-secretaries usually go the feedback form for whatever reason). The users who leave messages never come back and it does not make any sense to ask them questions. In many cases the dedicated users who work on the page can not handle the feedback, and then eventually it gets archived and goes to the talk page (and dies there). So I would say such feedback requires a lot of coordination (which should be thought out in advance - for instance, my contribution over there was to suggest to close every single discussion once it does not require any action anymore, then it could be automatically archived by a bot) and actually has very little useful output - but if you want to try, just try. The page should be popularized between the active users from the very beginning, otherwise in two days it will have a thousand messages's backlog.-- Ymblanter ( talk) 08:42, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
I'm willing to be a lackey alpha tester, or help out in any other way you need. I've been following this issue more closely than I have most issues, and want to help make it a success.
Sven Manguard
Wha? 11:04, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
K, let me start. The reason I hate the current article feedback tool is it lets people who don't like the subject rate it 1 star for every category, when, say, it's extremely comprehensive, well-referenced, etc. That's the problem with the stars - no specific advice is really given. "Okay, I've added two hundred reliable sources from all these news agencies and Celtic F.C. is still rated 1.01 star for sources." That's basically the problem with the stars.
The current article feedback tool is also disadvantaged by the limited selection of the aspects - sourcing, bias, comprehensiveness, and quality of prose. I simply propose just to scrap using specific categories, as well, they don't help too much either, as I explained above. My proposal is outlined below:
HurricaneFan 25 21:53, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
When giving feedback, users should have the option to not have their ip shown (except to checkuser or admin). Feedback on controversial articles may elicit unwanted responses... Smallman12q ( talk) 21:59, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
Note: multiple ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
One worry I have about the current version is that it appears at the bottom of the article. I suspect that in most cases readers who have serious frustrations will never get far enough down to see the Feedback request -- and the longer the article, the more likely that is. Looie496 ( talk) 22:11, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
To ability to close it:
To another placement:
== History == [Feedback] [Edit]
What do you think about it? --18:47, 30 October 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk)
Regarding the proposals of placement of a feedback link, I want to revisit some things I brought up earlier regarding placement. Don't we prefer edits over feedback? If that is the case, then why does all of those suggested placements of the feedback links instead put an emphasis on feedback? Will the proposed links also have an "x" so readers can dismiss them? The proposal says "we expect to [...] implement the best of these solution in the final version." Best as determined by which parameters? Generating most comments? Generating best comments? Least intrusive the the 90% lurkers? (I feel comfortable suggesting the lurkers on Wikipedia are more than 99%) Again: our mission is to serve the world information, not solicit comments on it. Most readers are simply not interested in editing or commenting. And that is totally fine! Any of the suggested placements of the link will increase the volume of comments at the expense of the lurker-reader's experience and we risk losing those readers to other sites who prettier present our content. That would be a disaster! We need to look at the bigger picture: What's good for the Wikimedia projects as a whole, not just what's good for the AFT-projekt. -- Bensin ( talk) 00:51, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
Note: Ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
I think I prefer the clean and simple option 1, but that the question be rephrased as "Did this article contain the information you were looking for?" (or perhaps "the information you expected to find?") because that is what we want to know. My thoughts on option 2: "Suggestions" are what we want, "Questions" are better answered on the reference desk, "Problems" should be phrased as suggestions. "Praise" may be nice, but is not necessary. If you go for option two it would be better if the options were checkboxes. -- Bensin ( talk) 02:27, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
"Did you find what you were looking for?" ~ "Oh yes, I finally found this AFT window. What a long way…"
I'd like it to simply ask "Is there any content that you would like to see added to this article?" It's simple, to the point, does not prompt an emotional outburst, and has a high potential to improve article content esp. when a large piece of info is missing/requested :) ~User: Hestiazfire
Note: multiple ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers or are under discussion
The idea of having a written feedback form is probably an improvement on the current polling method in that clarifies the particular concerns and will probably expose any reviewer bias. However, there is a concern that the reviewer may later regret their comments and want to have them removed. In terms of data collection, the previous type of form may be more useful on heavily trafficked pages, where the number of reviewers will tend to wash out a small number of biased votes. It may also be useful to track individual votes and apply robust statistical methods.
I would like to request that the new output form have a link from each comment to the matching article history version that was being commented upon. It'd also be good to have a standard page watch option for editors, if it doesn't already. Thank you. Regards, RJH ( talk) 19:39, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
Comments:
These should be all my ideas for now. See you later. --19:28, 30 October 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk) So, in order:
Option 1 (also if rephrased "Did this article contain the information you were looking for?") would possibly restrict the feedback options too much. What if the information was there, but was given incorrectly? As a user I may think, well I have been looking for the correct information, and not for nonsense. If I like to report a mistake or incorrectness, shall I answer yes or no?
The feedback tool could be used to improve articles in scientific disciplines (my field is biology). The basic problem there is that WP contributors have cited sources that contained incorrect information - my experience is that these kinds of mistakes are extremely difficult to get corrected in WP (because the authors argue that the source was given and that for changing this passage, other sources showing the contrary must be provided - background is that those authors are often not experienced experts in the involved very special subdiscipline and do not have the skills to see that the source from which they took their information contained mistakes or unubstantiated arguments). I made bad experiences in the German and English WPs, a colleage of mine had the same problems in the French WP. It gets very difficult to remove mistakes when the authors are experienced WP authors. I have largely given up editing pages for these reasons, and I am not the only one. It's usually 2 or 3 bad experiences (experienced WP authors being successful in defending scientific nonsense because they know the tricks) and then you practically never contribute again.
I can imagine that a tool designed to report nonsense or incorrect information (in a button-like form without the WP author having the chance to answer) could possibly have the effect that the WP authors could somehow be encouraged to change their behaviour (especially if bad ratings could be accumulated for each responsible WP author). My suggestion would be to use the feedback form to rank the scientific skills of those WP authors who feel responsible for certain pages (meaning that they have these pages on their watchlists). The objective is not to force scientists to improve pages by getting involved in endless discussions with experienced WP authors, but more indirectly, by downvoting the scientific value of the content without even knowing which WP author would currently feel responsible for it.
The result again, could be shown at the corresponding page of content. "The WP users who have this page on their watchlists, have in average obtained the following rating score for all the pages they feel responsible for". This would eventually provide some help to judge the reliability of the scientific content. Experienced WP authors who survey hundreds of pages would not get voted down by someone who dislikes a certain football team and gives a bad score for one page. But WP authors who repeat the same mistakes over and over again in their pages would sooner or later obtain bad ratings.
The present tool had this checkbox "I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional)". Was this successful? I never used it. I do not know if the things I am raising here have already been known or discussed.
As a user I don't care much on the cited sources if I have the feeling I can rely on the given information. If I see that I cannot rely on the given information, my experience is that the fact that a source was cited, does not at all improve the content. Citing of sources and reliability of information are disconnected from each other. If sources are cited, this can at some occasions even mean "the content of page is under dispute, and this is why various conributors needed to cite sources, for their edits not getting immediately reverted". If no or few sources are cited, this can mean, "the information is reliable, nobody has disputed it and forced others to cite many sources". -- FranciscoWelterSchultes ( talk) 23:04, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
This is so different from the previous versions that it's hard to compare them. However, I expect that one set of complaints will go away ("He rated my great article as all ones just because he hates the actor") and be replaced by another set of complaints ("He complained about my great article just because he hates the actor").
Do we have a plan for dealing with libel in the comments? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 01:43, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
I'm new to the conversation on this page and I haven't taken the time to read all of the recent conversations about the subject, so I'm sure I'll be covering territory already discussed, but I've been asked to come and voice my opinions/concerns, so here I am. I've been in several heated discussions regarding the AFT and I've honestly gotten burned out on the subject, so I'll try and summarize my views succinctly.
I'm not a fan of the tool for several reasons. The first and most important being what's already been stated by others hundreds of times - From what I've seen, much of the time the ratings people leave are based on the subject of an article rather than on the merits of the article itself. I've found this to be a particular problem with "celebrity"/"pop-culture" pages, which includes actors, singers, politicians - basically, any well-known public figure's "biography" page, as well as pages for TV shows, movies, video games, etc, etc, the list goes on and on. I've seen "featured" articles rated very low because simply people don't like a politician and "stub" or "start" articles rated very high simply because 12-year-old girls think the new tween heart-throb-of-the-month's new haircut is "cute", so the ratings are often meaningless as far as I'm concerned. When I've pointed this out in the past, I was dismissed and told this tool was supposedly created to lure casual users into editing and not to provide any real indication of an article's quality but then I honestly just don't see the point of a ratings system if its results are intended to be ignored from the outset.
One of my other main problems with the tool (I have too many to recount them all again here) is the four criteria we're being asked to rate. In my opinion, even the well-intentioned "average reader/rater" (this includes myself when it comes to 99.999% of pages) is not qualified to judge 3 of the 4 criteria. If I come to an article with 40 or 50 or 100 or more sources, I'm not going to sit there and take 2 or 3 hours to read and verify every single source before rating the page. Unless it's a subject I'm very knowledgeable about, the one criteria I'm reasonably qualified to judge is "well-written". The rest of the criteria, "trustworthy", "objective" and "complete" are criteria that I would have to sit and check every single source before being qualified to rate (short of an obvious lack of sources, glaring bias, or obvious "stub" status.)
As I've stated before in previous conversations, I would personally vote to just scrap the tool - However, if we are to keep it, I would suggest adopting IMDb's system of making ratings "hidden" on the page until the article has received at least 10 votes. This way, a good article doesn't sit with one or two stars for months based on one or two 10-year-old girl's opinions. If the average reader sees a page is rated very low, it's human nature to suspect there must be something specious about the article as a whole since the average reader most likely will not realize that the ratings are simply being manipulated based on people's opinions of the subject rather than the quality of the article, again, unless they intend to sit and research/verify all the references/sources on a page (which sort of defeats the whole purpose of Wikipedia for the average reader.) My other suggestion would be to move the ratings off the article page altogether (perhaps to the "talk" page) - again, so as not to "taint" a well-written article with low ratings, or conversely, give a poorly-sourced "stub" article the air of legitimacy with disproportionately high ratings.
I could go on and on, but these are my basic problems/suggestions regarding the tool. I realize a whole new set of conversations and changes are already in the works, but I'm burned out on the subject, so I admit I haven't taken the time to read all of the most recent threads/pages discussing the tool, but I was asked to share my opinion about my experience with the tool, so I thought I should chime in. --- Crakkerjakk ( talk) 05:44, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
Earlier this year, I and others ran a trial. We put an invitation to edit at the top of 19 medical articles for a month. Readers who clicked the invitation were taken to a mini how-to-edit tutorial. The intention was to compare relevant editing stats for that month with those for the same month in previous years, and, finally, compare those results with the same results from a similar sample without the template. It had the support of many members of WikiProject Medicine and regular editors at each of the trial articles.
The trial was constantly harassed by editors objecting to its existence, the template was frequently removed from trial articles and, mid-trial, the template was proposed for deletion.
It was meant to be a practice run for a much bigger sample. But, after the experience of defending the templates on 19 articles, and arguing the merits of the trial with a seemingly endless stream of editors on that tiny trial, I couldn't face attempting to persuade the community to back a larger trial, and the nonsense, literally, that running and defending such a trial would entail. I was also profoundly dispirited by the mini-tutorial: in the end, I believe it had all the essentials for a first-time medical editor to do a reasonable job, but it was still far too long. That is, as was mentioned in your recent office hours discussion, no matter how slick the invitation is, the UI (for editing and especially creating citations) is a huge impediment to new editors. I'm ashamed to say I just walked away from the trial, and went back to editing. I have no idea whether those stats would reveal anything, the number is so low.
I just thought I'd point interested editors to this experience, in case any ideas canvassed during its development and trial stages ( WT:ITE) are of relevance to this wonderful enterprise. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk) 05:56, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
I think it would be good to have some easy way to get to all comments. Imagine you don't know what to do on WIkipedia (really hard to imagine :D ) and so you will go and get to comments that haven't been used yet. It could be either some central repository with all comments posted there or a special link. That central page was my first idea but now it seems to big, the link version would be better.
This link would work as "Random article with comments none worked up yet". This way both comments from well-know pages (where will be lots of them) to outer not-so-usually-visited articles (where is none to use them) could be worked up.
I am not sure where this link should be placed here on enwiki. Maybe to Help or in that template in Recent Changes. Or (which sounds better) to CleanUp project or something like that. --19:34, 31 October 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk)
Hey, everyone!
So, first off, thanks for all your great suggestions so far :). I should have responses from the devs by tomorrow morning. Second, although I've tried to notify everyone, just in case anyone got missed - Brandon Harris, Howie Fung, Dario Taraborelli, Fabrice Florin and I will be holding an Office Hours session on Thursday at 24:00 UTC. I'd love if you lot could come along and get some direct, realtime feedback from the devs - as with the last occasion, I'll stick around afterwards and chat :). It'd be great to see you there! Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 19:39, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
I note that the tool collects data as red stars and displays ratings as blue squares. I'd dearly like to see the log of whichever design discussion came up with that decision. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 03:11, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
Is there any way i can be kept up to date on discussions, office hours requests etc, involving the article feedback tool? I'd like to recieve messages like this in future. I looked over the relevant pages, but couldn't find a place to add my name to a notification list. The Cavalry ( Message me) 22:23, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
Oliver et al., I hope you don't mind: I asked User:Graham87 for his feedback about accessibility. Tony (talk) 13:29, 4 November 2011 (UTC)
Undone and done are minimum. Bensin proposed merged resolution. But why not to use more of them as in Trac system? ("~" tilde means a response)
Is something like that being prepared or have I found the gold vein? Or you don't like it and it's only pyrite? --13:17, 5 November 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk)
I was requested to comment and am happy to do so.
I think that the change to providing specific feedback is much needed and very good. I think that the "ratings" method of the previous versions does not provide good info. First, the obvious, it's just a rating rather than specific comments. But second, there is no framework/standard to interpret the meaning of any particular rating. Even if there was an attempt to develop it, I don't think it would work due to the wide variations in articles, the reader situations that they create, and the readers.
I must confess that I dislike distracting clutter on article pages, and due to it's size, position etc., I think that version 4 was certainly clutter. I found myself substantially irritated by it/ actively disliking it. Suggest (only) a brief but clear and obvious few words to click on on the article page, which would take the reader to a screen which shows the detail.
Sincerely, North8000 ( talk) 21:35, 5 November 2011 (UTC)
Note: ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
Hey guys! Okay, first off, thanks to everyone for their work so far. People have come up with a lot of useful suggestions, all of which have been happily ferried to the devs. If you look at the top of the page you'll see a new box with a load of ideas in - this is the "status box", showing what happened to community ideas the devs accepted. Each of the ideas are going to be looked at in more detail and hopefully built into the programming, either in phase 1 (normalspeak = between now and January) or phase 2 (January to March-ish). I have no doubt the box will expand as we go on - all the suggestions since I formatted it have been just as awesome :).
In the meantime, there's one open issue which (imo) is of paramount importance - that's this: what level of "authority" should be necessary to access and use the feedback page itself, particularly the up- and down-voting elements? Fabrice had a meeting last week, and they drew up some basic ideas. One of these (and I think, one of the most important bits of the entire system) is that only registered users should be allowed to up- and down-vote questions, to avoid the possibility of gaming the system. Personally, I think IP addresses should be allowed to vote - if we limit it to just registered users we're limiting it to (mostly) just editors, who may not be interested in the system, and excluding most readers. Any clearly gamed posts can just be hidden, and I don't think they're likely to be that big a problem. Fabrice has asked me to throw this out and gather editorial perspectives and opinions on this - what do you lot think? Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 14:27, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
Will feedback show as an edit when looking at someone's contribs? One reason for asking this is that it would be handy if, when looking at a feedback item, it were possible to click something that immediately took you to all other feedback provided from the same IP or by the same logged in user. For one thing it would be a fast way to see if someone is misusing their feedback rights in some way or, more positively, to follow a very helpful user who provides useful feedback and maybe edit articles based on their detailed and actionable concerns. -- bodnotbod ( talk) 15:32, 7 November 2011 (UTC)
Let me add a point that I don't think has been mentioned so far. In conjunction with the feedback system there ought to be a page that users can read explaining the purpose of the feedback system and giving hints about what sorts of feedback would be most useful. There probably should be a link to this explanatory page on the feedback form (labeled "Info" or "Help" or "About" or something). Looie496 ( talk) 15:47, 7 November 2011 (UTC)
Getting started
Be guided by these important principles
<ref>
and </ref>
. When you save your work, the footnote marker[14] will appear in the text where you typed your reference, and the full reference will appear at the bottom of the article in the list of references.Hey guys; we're holding another office hours session on Thursday at 19:00 UTC (you can check when that is for you here). I hope to see you all there :). If you can't make it, I will be posting the logs as usual. Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 23:02, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Have we checked this out to see how much it slows things down for people on dialup and other slow connections? One of the perennial problems of new developments is that they are run and tested on setups with fast connections and they neglect the large parts of the global south where connection speeds are way less than in San Francisco. I should elaborate that this is me whinging against programmers everywhere, and I've no reason to suspect that our devs are any more likely to make this mistake than any other group of first world programmers. Ϣere SpielChequers 17:09, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
My principal concern with this feature is the risk that it will compound our existing problem of a declining editorship by exacerbating the trend from improving the pedia to that of tagging articles in the hope that others will improve them. If like me you buy the theory that the rise of templating is a principal cause of the decline in the editing community then something that furthers that trend is inherently undesirable. So I'd like to suggest that we set some Key Performance Indicators that give us meaningful measurements of the impact of this software. The most logical ones to my mind are the number of new editors/amount of editing in mainspace, (the raw count of new editors includes templating and some people who never make it out of userspace). The difficult thing is knowing what the count would otherwise be as it is declining anyway, and if this software turns out to be neutral rather than harmful it would be unfair to criticise it because the number of new editors continued to decline at the same rate. For the previous version I suggested that we do some A/B testing - put the feature on a hundred thousand articles, pick another 100,000 as a control sample and see how many new editors each group attracted, that wasn't done for the first version but I'd appreciate it if we did it for the second version. Obviously we'd need a way to ignore edits that just added templates.
Ideally I'd like to see the testing done prior to implementation and with a commitment that we wouldn't roll out until we had a system that didn't just work technically, but from the testing was likely to be neutral or only marginally negative to the pedia. Ϣere SpielChequers 00:21, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
One thing we have to consider (and one thing the developers have asked me to bring up - how do we deal with comment spam? My personal thinking is "if it's technically feasible, we should just plumb in the existing edit filters, abuse filter, spam blacklist and reCAPTCHA" - do people have other suggestions? Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 15:09, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
I would like to maintain a distinction between the two. Feedback ought to be a very lightweight process for the reader, requiring zero knowledge of Wikipedia procedures. Editing, on the other hand, is not a lightweight process and cannot be made into one -- edits made without thought, preparation, and knowledge of procedures are likely to be reverted. I don't believe we do a service either to readers or to ourselves by giving the impression that editing is a trivial act: it is an important act that needs to be taken seriously, and we should try to convey that impression to readers. In short, I am opposed to including a call to edit as part of the feedback tool. Readers who give feedback that leads to a response will be much more encouraged to participate than readers who make an edit that is promptly reverted.
I would have much less objection to a link from the feedback tool to WP:Tutorial/Editing (although that page currently sucks -- clearly written by people with no teaching experience). Looie496 ( talk) 15:16, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
I've flicked through some of the discussion above. Exactly what are the objectives of the AFT? Has anyone produced a bulleted list? For example, is it the following?
Are there other objectives? Do these six need to be amended or reshaped, or some withdrawn? What should be their order of priority?
On the last bullet, I can't help feeling that the good start made by the Foundation's Summer Research program into looking at data on anon and newbie editing hasn't yet come to fruition. Do we yet have a way of identifying the editing patterns of newbies and anons that are associated with people who are worth the investment of allocating to a "mentor"? Real-person mentoring is clearly the most effective way to shepherd in more editors. Is the design of AFT5 relevant to such identification? Tony (talk) 11:36, 11 November 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys; another office hours session, coming right up! 22:00 UTC, #wikimedia-office, tomorrow. Hope to see you all there :). Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 20:14, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Just some ideas - I don't check here too often - Tesseract2 (talk) 00:14, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
I am glad that you are dispensing with the system of four ratings. Many readers clearly did not understand them - I have seen stubs with no references given ratings of 5 for trustworthiness. Also, the questions were slanted towards the sort of thing that editors think about and discuss anyway.
I like the idea of focussing on text suggestions. I had no idea what to do with the numerical ratings, but I would like to know what changes to content readers want. Therefore, I prefer Option 1 as modified by suggestions above: "How can we improve this article?" It needs to be as simple as possible - after all, this box is for people who haven't noticed the Discussion tab.
That leads me to my question: Is there going to be a comparative analysis of the contributions on the talk page and those on the feedback page? RockMagnetist ( talk) 18:08, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Hey, all! A quick update on how version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool is developing.
So, we're just wrapping up the first round of user contributions. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed ideas (a full list of which can be found at the top of the page); thanks almost entirely to contributions by editors, the tool looks totally different to how it did two months ago when we were starting out. Big ideas that have made it in include a comment voting system, courtesy of User:Bensin, an idea for a more available way of deploying the feedback box, suggested by User:Utar, and the eventual integration of both oversight and the existing spam filtering tools into the new version, courtesy of..well, everyone, really :).
For now, the devs are building the first prototypes, and all the features specifications have been finalised. That doesn't mean you can't help out, however; we'll have a big pile of shiny prototypes to play around with quite soon. If you're interested in testing those, we'll be unveiling it all at this week's office hours session, which will be held on Friday 2 December at 19:00 UTC. If you can't make it, just sign up here. After that, we have a glorious round of testing to undertake; we'll be finding out what form works the best, what wording works the best, and pretty much everything else under the sun. As part of that, we need editors - people who know just what to look for - to review some sample reader comments, and make calls on which ones are useful, which ones are spam, so on and so forth. If that's something you'd be interested in doing, drop an email to okeyeswikimedia.org.
Thanks to everyone for their contributions so far. We're making good headway, and moving forward pretty quickly :). Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 16:33, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Sign up for prototype testing
On mw:Article feedback/Version 5/Feature Requirements it is said that "Unlike with the AFT v4 form, users will not be able to edit previous feedback", but I think this may be problematic, since people may want to fix a typo in their comments. See e.g. bugzilla:18379. Helder 14:38, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
Do we know which articles will get the first deployments of the new feedback tool? Thanks, epicAdam( talk) 03:37, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
Apologies if this is information I should have been able to find, but where is the question-symbol icon on the upper right of the form going to take a user? Is that page ready to roll? I might be able to help with it if it needs work. Looie496 ( talk) 17:36, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
I ran through the Phase 1.0 tests, exercising every major code pathway I could identify. Here are the issues I spotted:
I know how to use Bugzilla and will be happy to file reports, but thought it would be a good idea to mention these issues here first so as to avoid cluttering the database with things that would turn out to be NOTABUGs. Looie496 ( talk) 16:42, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
I haven't read everything here, so there may be some overlap. Generally I think the focus should be on the reader who comes to the article for information, and not the knowledgeable reader/potential editor. Feedback responses have to be separated between those from experienced readers and editors (who are there to evaluate the content, style, organization etc.) and those from readers seeking information on a subject with which they are completely unfamiliar. In my view the purpose of an encyclopedia is not as a repository of information, it is as a communication means. When information at a suitable level for the information seeker can not be located easily, the tool fails. So here is what I think the feedback section should look like (I'm not going to take the time to think this through thoroughly because, given that most contributors are thinking along other lines, it is unlikely that it will be taken seriously.):
1) I know a lot about the subject and I'm here to judge how well the information is presented. 5) I know nothing about the subject and I'm here to learn the basics.
1) I know most of the material presented and am formally trained in the subject. 5) I know almost nothing about the subject.
1) The information is organized logically and I was able to find what I was looking for very quickly. 5) The information is illogically organized and I was not able to find what I had hoped to find.
1) The content was too difficult for me to understand and the links to more basic material were not helpful. 5) I was able to understand the content easily and do not feel the article should be expanded to include more difficult material.
1) The material is presented in a manner that I find so poor that it distracted me from concentrating on the article's content. 5) I found the material's presentation to be everything I could have hoped for.
1) I'm 13 years old, or younger. 2) I am between 14 years old and 17 years old. 3) I am between 18 years old and 22 years old. 4) I am between 23 years old and 30 years old. 5) I am 31 years old or older.
More could be added at the risk of becoming tiresome. Perhaps the better approach would be to allow the reader to zero in on perceived difficulties with the article using a comment box. 74.89.141.180 ( talk) 05:43, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm a sparodic visitor here. The idea of specific comments vs. ratings is very good.
One likely pitfall to be careful of. The comment listing will be in the "hot seat" on contentious articles. To whatever extent the comments can be modified (promoting certain comments to more prominent, finding wiki-lawyer excuses to suppress comments that oppose their view) by the combatants, they will. North8000 ( talk) 11:08, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm a bit confused. I got an email a couple of days ago that I thought indicated that Phase 1.0 had begun, and so I went through a series of tests as I described above, and filed bug reports. But now I see that Fabrice has just altered the schedule to state that Phase 1.0 will begin on Dec. 14. Could we please get some clarity on when we should be doing things? Regards, Looie496 ( talk) 16:45, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
I've made some comments about the accessibility of the new AFT prototype at bug 33081. I'll make a note of the current test period at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility. Apart from the accessibility issues, it sounds great to me! Graham 87 06:48, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm wondering if it's really useful to have the feedback tool put on articles marked as stubs. What feedback could possibly be given that we don't know already? (not enough references; article too short; article doesn't discuss this aspect; etc.) Sasata ( talk) 02:11, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
It would be very useful for editors to be able to find out when were the assessments made - which revision of the article was actually rated. -- Eleassar my talk 13:37, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
Will this appear on my watchlist? If anything can be added that might need the attention of an Administrator, it absolutely must appear on our watchlists (BLP issues alone make this vital). Dougweller ( talk) 07:05, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
" Experienced editors and administrators will have the option to feature posts more prominently, or hide offensive posts." What's the criteria for 'experienced editor'? Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 11:56, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
I am relatively concerned about the potential for mass vandalism using this tool. So I have several questions:
Thanks! Reaper Eternal ( talk) 14:00, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm gonna preface this by saying that I'm sorry if this has already been brought up; I didn't see it mentioned as I skimmed the above comments but I could have missed it!
So. There seems to be a lot of support for not asking logged-in users to rate the page. But what about asking non-autoconfirmed users on semi- or fully-protected pages, and asking non-admins on fully protected pages? I know I didn't discover the edit request feature for a long while after I started editing Wikipedia.
Maybe the AFT could include some code that checks the page's protection level and cross-references the user's rights (autoconfirmed/admin). If the user is looking at a page they are unable to edit due to its protection level, the top of the AFT could say something along the lines of "If there's a specific edit you want made to this page, click here to submit an edit request." The "click here" could have a link much like the one you get when trying to edit a protected page; the link opens up a new section on the talk page and already has a section header with the timestamp as well as the proper edit request template and four tildes for the user's signature.
TL;DR - there should be some exceptions to the "don't-ask-logged-in-users" thing.
If you reply here, please put the following thing on my talk page: {{Talkback|Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5|ts=~~~~~}} --~~~~~. Otherwise, I can guarantee you won't get clarification or a reply or anything. I'm incredibly spacey and I need that bright yellow "new messages" bar to remind me to check back here. The template's already filled out, just hit "new section" on my talk page and paste it. I even put the signature in for ya. Thanks! — Preceding signed comment added by Cymru.lass ( talk • contribs) 20:42, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
The design is very "large and obnoxious"; and although it is very nicely done it needs a UX expert looking into it. Take a look at how it dominates Pretzel Pezzullo for example... I suggest the following - hide the "Send Feedback" button and the textbox initially. Just present the Yes/No question and when either one is clicked then present the further options. Also I would shrink the size of the "Did you find..." font to match article text, and de-bold the header. You shouldn't shove the thing in peoples faces *just* to try and get them to notice it :) Ideally it should be the natural progression when completing reading the article?
On that note it might be worth coding a float-box style that appears to one side once you have scrolled some percentage through the article - just a small sidebox with the Yes/No question that then expands with the feedback form. This is both common/expected behaviour in the modern web, meets good UX standards & also will probably see a much better response ratio (because, UX 101, it "appears" and thus prompts the user, rather than gets shoved at the bottom :)) -- Errant ( chat!) 14:00, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
As I wrote earlier Hebrew Wikipedia has article feedback script which I implemented in July 2011. I have compared the Hebrew Wikipedia article feedback to this:
Article Feedback Tool | Hebrew Wikipedia's script |
---|---|
|
|
In conclusion, although this article feedback tool (V5) is really nice, it is currently unusable as there is NO WAY to read the comments (and if there is, it is hidden somewhere in a special page and isn't integrated to recent changes and to the article talk page) and reader can't write large comments (the box doesn't have scrollbars). Eran ( talk) 07:10, 6 January 2012 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
i'd like this extension to alllow users to rate a product review article but with 10 stars as an overallrating instead of 5points scale. 10 stars could have a custom size and AFT should have a setting to count ratings from all the time, not last 30 days - display overall rating changes in time (all time/year/month/week) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.134.163.135 ( talk) 22:08, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
Note: ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
I don't understand how the feed of comments is going to be: shouldn't those comments be merged to the talk page, so that there's a single point of discussion and feedback can be discussed easily (for instance, how to be acted upon)? Nemo 21:24, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
I was for a long time active in Russian Wikipedia, and there the feedback tool page exists for I believe two years, ru:Википедия:Сообщения об ошибках. (Before Russian Wikipedia, it was introduced in Polish Wikipedia, but there I had no experience with it.). The link to the feedback form is found in the Toolbox field. It is a long-standing pain-in-the-ass page, since it creates a considerable backlog and requires a constant attention of several dozens of dedicated editors. I do not have any quantitative statistics, but my impression is that all comments are at least meaningful (possibly the meaningless ones are blocked by a filter, I am not sure) in the sense it is clear what the user actually wants. About 50% (in my estimate) are about typos which are easy to fix; about 10% are bogus (when the user misread smth or wants to add smth which clearly does not belong to the article or is plain wrong) and do not require any reaction, but the remaining 40% or so is addition of some unsourced information which looks credible but may be not credible (especially what concerns the BLP, the press-secretaries usually go the feedback form for whatever reason). The users who leave messages never come back and it does not make any sense to ask them questions. In many cases the dedicated users who work on the page can not handle the feedback, and then eventually it gets archived and goes to the talk page (and dies there). So I would say such feedback requires a lot of coordination (which should be thought out in advance - for instance, my contribution over there was to suggest to close every single discussion once it does not require any action anymore, then it could be automatically archived by a bot) and actually has very little useful output - but if you want to try, just try. The page should be popularized between the active users from the very beginning, otherwise in two days it will have a thousand messages's backlog.-- Ymblanter ( talk) 08:42, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
I'm willing to be a lackey alpha tester, or help out in any other way you need. I've been following this issue more closely than I have most issues, and want to help make it a success.
Sven Manguard
Wha? 11:04, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
K, let me start. The reason I hate the current article feedback tool is it lets people who don't like the subject rate it 1 star for every category, when, say, it's extremely comprehensive, well-referenced, etc. That's the problem with the stars - no specific advice is really given. "Okay, I've added two hundred reliable sources from all these news agencies and Celtic F.C. is still rated 1.01 star for sources." That's basically the problem with the stars.
The current article feedback tool is also disadvantaged by the limited selection of the aspects - sourcing, bias, comprehensiveness, and quality of prose. I simply propose just to scrap using specific categories, as well, they don't help too much either, as I explained above. My proposal is outlined below:
HurricaneFan 25 21:53, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
When giving feedback, users should have the option to not have their ip shown (except to checkuser or admin). Feedback on controversial articles may elicit unwanted responses... Smallman12q ( talk) 21:59, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
Note: multiple ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
One worry I have about the current version is that it appears at the bottom of the article. I suspect that in most cases readers who have serious frustrations will never get far enough down to see the Feedback request -- and the longer the article, the more likely that is. Looie496 ( talk) 22:11, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
To ability to close it:
To another placement:
== History == [Feedback] [Edit]
What do you think about it? --18:47, 30 October 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk)
Regarding the proposals of placement of a feedback link, I want to revisit some things I brought up earlier regarding placement. Don't we prefer edits over feedback? If that is the case, then why does all of those suggested placements of the feedback links instead put an emphasis on feedback? Will the proposed links also have an "x" so readers can dismiss them? The proposal says "we expect to [...] implement the best of these solution in the final version." Best as determined by which parameters? Generating most comments? Generating best comments? Least intrusive the the 90% lurkers? (I feel comfortable suggesting the lurkers on Wikipedia are more than 99%) Again: our mission is to serve the world information, not solicit comments on it. Most readers are simply not interested in editing or commenting. And that is totally fine! Any of the suggested placements of the link will increase the volume of comments at the expense of the lurker-reader's experience and we risk losing those readers to other sites who prettier present our content. That would be a disaster! We need to look at the bigger picture: What's good for the Wikimedia projects as a whole, not just what's good for the AFT-projekt. -- Bensin ( talk) 00:51, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
Note: Ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
I think I prefer the clean and simple option 1, but that the question be rephrased as "Did this article contain the information you were looking for?" (or perhaps "the information you expected to find?") because that is what we want to know. My thoughts on option 2: "Suggestions" are what we want, "Questions" are better answered on the reference desk, "Problems" should be phrased as suggestions. "Praise" may be nice, but is not necessary. If you go for option two it would be better if the options were checkboxes. -- Bensin ( talk) 02:27, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
"Did you find what you were looking for?" ~ "Oh yes, I finally found this AFT window. What a long way…"
I'd like it to simply ask "Is there any content that you would like to see added to this article?" It's simple, to the point, does not prompt an emotional outburst, and has a high potential to improve article content esp. when a large piece of info is missing/requested :) ~User: Hestiazfire
Note: multiple ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers or are under discussion
The idea of having a written feedback form is probably an improvement on the current polling method in that clarifies the particular concerns and will probably expose any reviewer bias. However, there is a concern that the reviewer may later regret their comments and want to have them removed. In terms of data collection, the previous type of form may be more useful on heavily trafficked pages, where the number of reviewers will tend to wash out a small number of biased votes. It may also be useful to track individual votes and apply robust statistical methods.
I would like to request that the new output form have a link from each comment to the matching article history version that was being commented upon. It'd also be good to have a standard page watch option for editors, if it doesn't already. Thank you. Regards, RJH ( talk) 19:39, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
Comments:
These should be all my ideas for now. See you later. --19:28, 30 October 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk) So, in order:
Option 1 (also if rephrased "Did this article contain the information you were looking for?") would possibly restrict the feedback options too much. What if the information was there, but was given incorrectly? As a user I may think, well I have been looking for the correct information, and not for nonsense. If I like to report a mistake or incorrectness, shall I answer yes or no?
The feedback tool could be used to improve articles in scientific disciplines (my field is biology). The basic problem there is that WP contributors have cited sources that contained incorrect information - my experience is that these kinds of mistakes are extremely difficult to get corrected in WP (because the authors argue that the source was given and that for changing this passage, other sources showing the contrary must be provided - background is that those authors are often not experienced experts in the involved very special subdiscipline and do not have the skills to see that the source from which they took their information contained mistakes or unubstantiated arguments). I made bad experiences in the German and English WPs, a colleage of mine had the same problems in the French WP. It gets very difficult to remove mistakes when the authors are experienced WP authors. I have largely given up editing pages for these reasons, and I am not the only one. It's usually 2 or 3 bad experiences (experienced WP authors being successful in defending scientific nonsense because they know the tricks) and then you practically never contribute again.
I can imagine that a tool designed to report nonsense or incorrect information (in a button-like form without the WP author having the chance to answer) could possibly have the effect that the WP authors could somehow be encouraged to change their behaviour (especially if bad ratings could be accumulated for each responsible WP author). My suggestion would be to use the feedback form to rank the scientific skills of those WP authors who feel responsible for certain pages (meaning that they have these pages on their watchlists). The objective is not to force scientists to improve pages by getting involved in endless discussions with experienced WP authors, but more indirectly, by downvoting the scientific value of the content without even knowing which WP author would currently feel responsible for it.
The result again, could be shown at the corresponding page of content. "The WP users who have this page on their watchlists, have in average obtained the following rating score for all the pages they feel responsible for". This would eventually provide some help to judge the reliability of the scientific content. Experienced WP authors who survey hundreds of pages would not get voted down by someone who dislikes a certain football team and gives a bad score for one page. But WP authors who repeat the same mistakes over and over again in their pages would sooner or later obtain bad ratings.
The present tool had this checkbox "I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional)". Was this successful? I never used it. I do not know if the things I am raising here have already been known or discussed.
As a user I don't care much on the cited sources if I have the feeling I can rely on the given information. If I see that I cannot rely on the given information, my experience is that the fact that a source was cited, does not at all improve the content. Citing of sources and reliability of information are disconnected from each other. If sources are cited, this can at some occasions even mean "the content of page is under dispute, and this is why various conributors needed to cite sources, for their edits not getting immediately reverted". If no or few sources are cited, this can mean, "the information is reliable, nobody has disputed it and forced others to cite many sources". -- FranciscoWelterSchultes ( talk) 23:04, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
This is so different from the previous versions that it's hard to compare them. However, I expect that one set of complaints will go away ("He rated my great article as all ones just because he hates the actor") and be replaced by another set of complaints ("He complained about my great article just because he hates the actor").
Do we have a plan for dealing with libel in the comments? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 01:43, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
I'm new to the conversation on this page and I haven't taken the time to read all of the recent conversations about the subject, so I'm sure I'll be covering territory already discussed, but I've been asked to come and voice my opinions/concerns, so here I am. I've been in several heated discussions regarding the AFT and I've honestly gotten burned out on the subject, so I'll try and summarize my views succinctly.
I'm not a fan of the tool for several reasons. The first and most important being what's already been stated by others hundreds of times - From what I've seen, much of the time the ratings people leave are based on the subject of an article rather than on the merits of the article itself. I've found this to be a particular problem with "celebrity"/"pop-culture" pages, which includes actors, singers, politicians - basically, any well-known public figure's "biography" page, as well as pages for TV shows, movies, video games, etc, etc, the list goes on and on. I've seen "featured" articles rated very low because simply people don't like a politician and "stub" or "start" articles rated very high simply because 12-year-old girls think the new tween heart-throb-of-the-month's new haircut is "cute", so the ratings are often meaningless as far as I'm concerned. When I've pointed this out in the past, I was dismissed and told this tool was supposedly created to lure casual users into editing and not to provide any real indication of an article's quality but then I honestly just don't see the point of a ratings system if its results are intended to be ignored from the outset.
One of my other main problems with the tool (I have too many to recount them all again here) is the four criteria we're being asked to rate. In my opinion, even the well-intentioned "average reader/rater" (this includes myself when it comes to 99.999% of pages) is not qualified to judge 3 of the 4 criteria. If I come to an article with 40 or 50 or 100 or more sources, I'm not going to sit there and take 2 or 3 hours to read and verify every single source before rating the page. Unless it's a subject I'm very knowledgeable about, the one criteria I'm reasonably qualified to judge is "well-written". The rest of the criteria, "trustworthy", "objective" and "complete" are criteria that I would have to sit and check every single source before being qualified to rate (short of an obvious lack of sources, glaring bias, or obvious "stub" status.)
As I've stated before in previous conversations, I would personally vote to just scrap the tool - However, if we are to keep it, I would suggest adopting IMDb's system of making ratings "hidden" on the page until the article has received at least 10 votes. This way, a good article doesn't sit with one or two stars for months based on one or two 10-year-old girl's opinions. If the average reader sees a page is rated very low, it's human nature to suspect there must be something specious about the article as a whole since the average reader most likely will not realize that the ratings are simply being manipulated based on people's opinions of the subject rather than the quality of the article, again, unless they intend to sit and research/verify all the references/sources on a page (which sort of defeats the whole purpose of Wikipedia for the average reader.) My other suggestion would be to move the ratings off the article page altogether (perhaps to the "talk" page) - again, so as not to "taint" a well-written article with low ratings, or conversely, give a poorly-sourced "stub" article the air of legitimacy with disproportionately high ratings.
I could go on and on, but these are my basic problems/suggestions regarding the tool. I realize a whole new set of conversations and changes are already in the works, but I'm burned out on the subject, so I admit I haven't taken the time to read all of the most recent threads/pages discussing the tool, but I was asked to share my opinion about my experience with the tool, so I thought I should chime in. --- Crakkerjakk ( talk) 05:44, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
Earlier this year, I and others ran a trial. We put an invitation to edit at the top of 19 medical articles for a month. Readers who clicked the invitation were taken to a mini how-to-edit tutorial. The intention was to compare relevant editing stats for that month with those for the same month in previous years, and, finally, compare those results with the same results from a similar sample without the template. It had the support of many members of WikiProject Medicine and regular editors at each of the trial articles.
The trial was constantly harassed by editors objecting to its existence, the template was frequently removed from trial articles and, mid-trial, the template was proposed for deletion.
It was meant to be a practice run for a much bigger sample. But, after the experience of defending the templates on 19 articles, and arguing the merits of the trial with a seemingly endless stream of editors on that tiny trial, I couldn't face attempting to persuade the community to back a larger trial, and the nonsense, literally, that running and defending such a trial would entail. I was also profoundly dispirited by the mini-tutorial: in the end, I believe it had all the essentials for a first-time medical editor to do a reasonable job, but it was still far too long. That is, as was mentioned in your recent office hours discussion, no matter how slick the invitation is, the UI (for editing and especially creating citations) is a huge impediment to new editors. I'm ashamed to say I just walked away from the trial, and went back to editing. I have no idea whether those stats would reveal anything, the number is so low.
I just thought I'd point interested editors to this experience, in case any ideas canvassed during its development and trial stages ( WT:ITE) are of relevance to this wonderful enterprise. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk) 05:56, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
I think it would be good to have some easy way to get to all comments. Imagine you don't know what to do on WIkipedia (really hard to imagine :D ) and so you will go and get to comments that haven't been used yet. It could be either some central repository with all comments posted there or a special link. That central page was my first idea but now it seems to big, the link version would be better.
This link would work as "Random article with comments none worked up yet". This way both comments from well-know pages (where will be lots of them) to outer not-so-usually-visited articles (where is none to use them) could be worked up.
I am not sure where this link should be placed here on enwiki. Maybe to Help or in that template in Recent Changes. Or (which sounds better) to CleanUp project or something like that. --19:34, 31 October 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk)
Hey, everyone!
So, first off, thanks for all your great suggestions so far :). I should have responses from the devs by tomorrow morning. Second, although I've tried to notify everyone, just in case anyone got missed - Brandon Harris, Howie Fung, Dario Taraborelli, Fabrice Florin and I will be holding an Office Hours session on Thursday at 24:00 UTC. I'd love if you lot could come along and get some direct, realtime feedback from the devs - as with the last occasion, I'll stick around afterwards and chat :). It'd be great to see you there! Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 19:39, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
I note that the tool collects data as red stars and displays ratings as blue squares. I'd dearly like to see the log of whichever design discussion came up with that decision. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 03:11, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
Is there any way i can be kept up to date on discussions, office hours requests etc, involving the article feedback tool? I'd like to recieve messages like this in future. I looked over the relevant pages, but couldn't find a place to add my name to a notification list. The Cavalry ( Message me) 22:23, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
Oliver et al., I hope you don't mind: I asked User:Graham87 for his feedback about accessibility. Tony (talk) 13:29, 4 November 2011 (UTC)
Undone and done are minimum. Bensin proposed merged resolution. But why not to use more of them as in Trac system? ("~" tilde means a response)
Is something like that being prepared or have I found the gold vein? Or you don't like it and it's only pyrite? --13:17, 5 November 2011 (UTC), Utar ( talk)
I was requested to comment and am happy to do so.
I think that the change to providing specific feedback is much needed and very good. I think that the "ratings" method of the previous versions does not provide good info. First, the obvious, it's just a rating rather than specific comments. But second, there is no framework/standard to interpret the meaning of any particular rating. Even if there was an attempt to develop it, I don't think it would work due to the wide variations in articles, the reader situations that they create, and the readers.
I must confess that I dislike distracting clutter on article pages, and due to it's size, position etc., I think that version 4 was certainly clutter. I found myself substantially irritated by it/ actively disliking it. Suggest (only) a brief but clear and obvious few words to click on on the article page, which would take the reader to a screen which shows the detail.
Sincerely, North8000 ( talk) 21:35, 5 November 2011 (UTC)
Note: ideas from this section have been accepted by the developers
Hey guys! Okay, first off, thanks to everyone for their work so far. People have come up with a lot of useful suggestions, all of which have been happily ferried to the devs. If you look at the top of the page you'll see a new box with a load of ideas in - this is the "status box", showing what happened to community ideas the devs accepted. Each of the ideas are going to be looked at in more detail and hopefully built into the programming, either in phase 1 (normalspeak = between now and January) or phase 2 (January to March-ish). I have no doubt the box will expand as we go on - all the suggestions since I formatted it have been just as awesome :).
In the meantime, there's one open issue which (imo) is of paramount importance - that's this: what level of "authority" should be necessary to access and use the feedback page itself, particularly the up- and down-voting elements? Fabrice had a meeting last week, and they drew up some basic ideas. One of these (and I think, one of the most important bits of the entire system) is that only registered users should be allowed to up- and down-vote questions, to avoid the possibility of gaming the system. Personally, I think IP addresses should be allowed to vote - if we limit it to just registered users we're limiting it to (mostly) just editors, who may not be interested in the system, and excluding most readers. Any clearly gamed posts can just be hidden, and I don't think they're likely to be that big a problem. Fabrice has asked me to throw this out and gather editorial perspectives and opinions on this - what do you lot think? Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 14:27, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
Will feedback show as an edit when looking at someone's contribs? One reason for asking this is that it would be handy if, when looking at a feedback item, it were possible to click something that immediately took you to all other feedback provided from the same IP or by the same logged in user. For one thing it would be a fast way to see if someone is misusing their feedback rights in some way or, more positively, to follow a very helpful user who provides useful feedback and maybe edit articles based on their detailed and actionable concerns. -- bodnotbod ( talk) 15:32, 7 November 2011 (UTC)
Let me add a point that I don't think has been mentioned so far. In conjunction with the feedback system there ought to be a page that users can read explaining the purpose of the feedback system and giving hints about what sorts of feedback would be most useful. There probably should be a link to this explanatory page on the feedback form (labeled "Info" or "Help" or "About" or something). Looie496 ( talk) 15:47, 7 November 2011 (UTC)
Getting started
Be guided by these important principles
<ref>
and </ref>
. When you save your work, the footnote marker[14] will appear in the text where you typed your reference, and the full reference will appear at the bottom of the article in the list of references.Hey guys; we're holding another office hours session on Thursday at 19:00 UTC (you can check when that is for you here). I hope to see you all there :). If you can't make it, I will be posting the logs as usual. Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 23:02, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
Hi. Have we checked this out to see how much it slows things down for people on dialup and other slow connections? One of the perennial problems of new developments is that they are run and tested on setups with fast connections and they neglect the large parts of the global south where connection speeds are way less than in San Francisco. I should elaborate that this is me whinging against programmers everywhere, and I've no reason to suspect that our devs are any more likely to make this mistake than any other group of first world programmers. Ϣere SpielChequers 17:09, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
My principal concern with this feature is the risk that it will compound our existing problem of a declining editorship by exacerbating the trend from improving the pedia to that of tagging articles in the hope that others will improve them. If like me you buy the theory that the rise of templating is a principal cause of the decline in the editing community then something that furthers that trend is inherently undesirable. So I'd like to suggest that we set some Key Performance Indicators that give us meaningful measurements of the impact of this software. The most logical ones to my mind are the number of new editors/amount of editing in mainspace, (the raw count of new editors includes templating and some people who never make it out of userspace). The difficult thing is knowing what the count would otherwise be as it is declining anyway, and if this software turns out to be neutral rather than harmful it would be unfair to criticise it because the number of new editors continued to decline at the same rate. For the previous version I suggested that we do some A/B testing - put the feature on a hundred thousand articles, pick another 100,000 as a control sample and see how many new editors each group attracted, that wasn't done for the first version but I'd appreciate it if we did it for the second version. Obviously we'd need a way to ignore edits that just added templates.
Ideally I'd like to see the testing done prior to implementation and with a commitment that we wouldn't roll out until we had a system that didn't just work technically, but from the testing was likely to be neutral or only marginally negative to the pedia. Ϣere SpielChequers 00:21, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
One thing we have to consider (and one thing the developers have asked me to bring up - how do we deal with comment spam? My personal thinking is "if it's technically feasible, we should just plumb in the existing edit filters, abuse filter, spam blacklist and reCAPTCHA" - do people have other suggestions? Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 15:09, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
I would like to maintain a distinction between the two. Feedback ought to be a very lightweight process for the reader, requiring zero knowledge of Wikipedia procedures. Editing, on the other hand, is not a lightweight process and cannot be made into one -- edits made without thought, preparation, and knowledge of procedures are likely to be reverted. I don't believe we do a service either to readers or to ourselves by giving the impression that editing is a trivial act: it is an important act that needs to be taken seriously, and we should try to convey that impression to readers. In short, I am opposed to including a call to edit as part of the feedback tool. Readers who give feedback that leads to a response will be much more encouraged to participate than readers who make an edit that is promptly reverted.
I would have much less objection to a link from the feedback tool to WP:Tutorial/Editing (although that page currently sucks -- clearly written by people with no teaching experience). Looie496 ( talk) 15:16, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
I've flicked through some of the discussion above. Exactly what are the objectives of the AFT? Has anyone produced a bulleted list? For example, is it the following?
Are there other objectives? Do these six need to be amended or reshaped, or some withdrawn? What should be their order of priority?
On the last bullet, I can't help feeling that the good start made by the Foundation's Summer Research program into looking at data on anon and newbie editing hasn't yet come to fruition. Do we yet have a way of identifying the editing patterns of newbies and anons that are associated with people who are worth the investment of allocating to a "mentor"? Real-person mentoring is clearly the most effective way to shepherd in more editors. Is the design of AFT5 relevant to such identification? Tony (talk) 11:36, 11 November 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys; another office hours session, coming right up! 22:00 UTC, #wikimedia-office, tomorrow. Hope to see you all there :). Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 20:14, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Just some ideas - I don't check here too often - Tesseract2 (talk) 00:14, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
I am glad that you are dispensing with the system of four ratings. Many readers clearly did not understand them - I have seen stubs with no references given ratings of 5 for trustworthiness. Also, the questions were slanted towards the sort of thing that editors think about and discuss anyway.
I like the idea of focussing on text suggestions. I had no idea what to do with the numerical ratings, but I would like to know what changes to content readers want. Therefore, I prefer Option 1 as modified by suggestions above: "How can we improve this article?" It needs to be as simple as possible - after all, this box is for people who haven't noticed the Discussion tab.
That leads me to my question: Is there going to be a comparative analysis of the contributions on the talk page and those on the feedback page? RockMagnetist ( talk) 18:08, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Hey, all! A quick update on how version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool is developing.
So, we're just wrapping up the first round of user contributions. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed ideas (a full list of which can be found at the top of the page); thanks almost entirely to contributions by editors, the tool looks totally different to how it did two months ago when we were starting out. Big ideas that have made it in include a comment voting system, courtesy of User:Bensin, an idea for a more available way of deploying the feedback box, suggested by User:Utar, and the eventual integration of both oversight and the existing spam filtering tools into the new version, courtesy of..well, everyone, really :).
For now, the devs are building the first prototypes, and all the features specifications have been finalised. That doesn't mean you can't help out, however; we'll have a big pile of shiny prototypes to play around with quite soon. If you're interested in testing those, we'll be unveiling it all at this week's office hours session, which will be held on Friday 2 December at 19:00 UTC. If you can't make it, just sign up here. After that, we have a glorious round of testing to undertake; we'll be finding out what form works the best, what wording works the best, and pretty much everything else under the sun. As part of that, we need editors - people who know just what to look for - to review some sample reader comments, and make calls on which ones are useful, which ones are spam, so on and so forth. If that's something you'd be interested in doing, drop an email to okeyeswikimedia.org.
Thanks to everyone for their contributions so far. We're making good headway, and moving forward pretty quickly :). Okeyes (WMF) ( talk) 16:33, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
Sign up for prototype testing
On mw:Article feedback/Version 5/Feature Requirements it is said that "Unlike with the AFT v4 form, users will not be able to edit previous feedback", but I think this may be problematic, since people may want to fix a typo in their comments. See e.g. bugzilla:18379. Helder 14:38, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
Do we know which articles will get the first deployments of the new feedback tool? Thanks, epicAdam( talk) 03:37, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
Apologies if this is information I should have been able to find, but where is the question-symbol icon on the upper right of the form going to take a user? Is that page ready to roll? I might be able to help with it if it needs work. Looie496 ( talk) 17:36, 9 December 2011 (UTC)
I ran through the Phase 1.0 tests, exercising every major code pathway I could identify. Here are the issues I spotted:
I know how to use Bugzilla and will be happy to file reports, but thought it would be a good idea to mention these issues here first so as to avoid cluttering the database with things that would turn out to be NOTABUGs. Looie496 ( talk) 16:42, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
I haven't read everything here, so there may be some overlap. Generally I think the focus should be on the reader who comes to the article for information, and not the knowledgeable reader/potential editor. Feedback responses have to be separated between those from experienced readers and editors (who are there to evaluate the content, style, organization etc.) and those from readers seeking information on a subject with which they are completely unfamiliar. In my view the purpose of an encyclopedia is not as a repository of information, it is as a communication means. When information at a suitable level for the information seeker can not be located easily, the tool fails. So here is what I think the feedback section should look like (I'm not going to take the time to think this through thoroughly because, given that most contributors are thinking along other lines, it is unlikely that it will be taken seriously.):
1) I know a lot about the subject and I'm here to judge how well the information is presented. 5) I know nothing about the subject and I'm here to learn the basics.
1) I know most of the material presented and am formally trained in the subject. 5) I know almost nothing about the subject.
1) The information is organized logically and I was able to find what I was looking for very quickly. 5) The information is illogically organized and I was not able to find what I had hoped to find.
1) The content was too difficult for me to understand and the links to more basic material were not helpful. 5) I was able to understand the content easily and do not feel the article should be expanded to include more difficult material.
1) The material is presented in a manner that I find so poor that it distracted me from concentrating on the article's content. 5) I found the material's presentation to be everything I could have hoped for.
1) I'm 13 years old, or younger. 2) I am between 14 years old and 17 years old. 3) I am between 18 years old and 22 years old. 4) I am between 23 years old and 30 years old. 5) I am 31 years old or older.
More could be added at the risk of becoming tiresome. Perhaps the better approach would be to allow the reader to zero in on perceived difficulties with the article using a comment box. 74.89.141.180 ( talk) 05:43, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm a sparodic visitor here. The idea of specific comments vs. ratings is very good.
One likely pitfall to be careful of. The comment listing will be in the "hot seat" on contentious articles. To whatever extent the comments can be modified (promoting certain comments to more prominent, finding wiki-lawyer excuses to suppress comments that oppose their view) by the combatants, they will. North8000 ( talk) 11:08, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm a bit confused. I got an email a couple of days ago that I thought indicated that Phase 1.0 had begun, and so I went through a series of tests as I described above, and filed bug reports. But now I see that Fabrice has just altered the schedule to state that Phase 1.0 will begin on Dec. 14. Could we please get some clarity on when we should be doing things? Regards, Looie496 ( talk) 16:45, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
I've made some comments about the accessibility of the new AFT prototype at bug 33081. I'll make a note of the current test period at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility. Apart from the accessibility issues, it sounds great to me! Graham 87 06:48, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm wondering if it's really useful to have the feedback tool put on articles marked as stubs. What feedback could possibly be given that we don't know already? (not enough references; article too short; article doesn't discuss this aspect; etc.) Sasata ( talk) 02:11, 15 December 2011 (UTC)
It would be very useful for editors to be able to find out when were the assessments made - which revision of the article was actually rated. -- Eleassar my talk 13:37, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
Will this appear on my watchlist? If anything can be added that might need the attention of an Administrator, it absolutely must appear on our watchlists (BLP issues alone make this vital). Dougweller ( talk) 07:05, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
" Experienced editors and administrators will have the option to feature posts more prominently, or hide offensive posts." What's the criteria for 'experienced editor'? Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 11:56, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
I am relatively concerned about the potential for mass vandalism using this tool. So I have several questions:
Thanks! Reaper Eternal ( talk) 14:00, 20 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm gonna preface this by saying that I'm sorry if this has already been brought up; I didn't see it mentioned as I skimmed the above comments but I could have missed it!
So. There seems to be a lot of support for not asking logged-in users to rate the page. But what about asking non-autoconfirmed users on semi- or fully-protected pages, and asking non-admins on fully protected pages? I know I didn't discover the edit request feature for a long while after I started editing Wikipedia.
Maybe the AFT could include some code that checks the page's protection level and cross-references the user's rights (autoconfirmed/admin). If the user is looking at a page they are unable to edit due to its protection level, the top of the AFT could say something along the lines of "If there's a specific edit you want made to this page, click here to submit an edit request." The "click here" could have a link much like the one you get when trying to edit a protected page; the link opens up a new section on the talk page and already has a section header with the timestamp as well as the proper edit request template and four tildes for the user's signature.
TL;DR - there should be some exceptions to the "don't-ask-logged-in-users" thing.
If you reply here, please put the following thing on my talk page: {{Talkback|Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5|ts=~~~~~}} --~~~~~. Otherwise, I can guarantee you won't get clarification or a reply or anything. I'm incredibly spacey and I need that bright yellow "new messages" bar to remind me to check back here. The template's already filled out, just hit "new section" on my talk page and paste it. I even put the signature in for ya. Thanks! — Preceding signed comment added by Cymru.lass ( talk • contribs) 20:42, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
The design is very "large and obnoxious"; and although it is very nicely done it needs a UX expert looking into it. Take a look at how it dominates Pretzel Pezzullo for example... I suggest the following - hide the "Send Feedback" button and the textbox initially. Just present the Yes/No question and when either one is clicked then present the further options. Also I would shrink the size of the "Did you find..." font to match article text, and de-bold the header. You shouldn't shove the thing in peoples faces *just* to try and get them to notice it :) Ideally it should be the natural progression when completing reading the article?
On that note it might be worth coding a float-box style that appears to one side once you have scrolled some percentage through the article - just a small sidebox with the Yes/No question that then expands with the feedback form. This is both common/expected behaviour in the modern web, meets good UX standards & also will probably see a much better response ratio (because, UX 101, it "appears" and thus prompts the user, rather than gets shoved at the bottom :)) -- Errant ( chat!) 14:00, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
As I wrote earlier Hebrew Wikipedia has article feedback script which I implemented in July 2011. I have compared the Hebrew Wikipedia article feedback to this:
Article Feedback Tool | Hebrew Wikipedia's script |
---|---|
|
|
In conclusion, although this article feedback tool (V5) is really nice, it is currently unusable as there is NO WAY to read the comments (and if there is, it is hidden somewhere in a special page and isn't integrated to recent changes and to the article talk page) and reader can't write large comments (the box doesn't have scrollbars). Eran ( talk) 07:10, 6 January 2012 (UTC)