On the question of whether "mediawiki enables users to behave like bullies" ...
Like many technologies, we can use them for good or bad. A car can carry a sick person to a hospital in time to save their life. A car can run down and kill a person. Etc. But we do know that we can design cars to make them safer, both for their occupants (roll cages, seat belts, etc) and for other road users (e.g. banning the use of bull bars), but if I really want to kill myself or others, I can still do so with a car, I just have to try a bit harder. In the same vein, MediaWiki can be used in different ways. A User Talk page can be used to leave a Barnstar or call the person a "cunt" (to pick a recent topical example). Thanks to the user contribution page, I can easily find and revert every change you make. Now, maybe they were all bad edits (e.g. unsourced allegations about a living person) that were justified. Or maybe I am just harassing you or taking retribution for something you did or said to me or about me. What if I could not see your user contribution page? Would that make it harder for me to harass you? At the moment, a couple of clicks reverts an edit. What if we substituted a long form, where you had to click a box to select a primary policy under which you were reverting the edit, and then select a drop-down for a specific aspect of that policy, and then fill in a text box with 100 words explaining your concerns? I think it's fair to say that there would be less reverting, but whether that is for better or worse is hard to say until you try it. What if we got rid of User Talk pages and only had article Talk pages? Would our interactions change? Interestingly, it's as easy to thank someone for an edit as to revert an edit (not using any tools), yet the number of thanks are incredibly low. How low ... take a look at the stats for January: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:F%C3%A6/sandbox&oldid=1 49050523 (and woo hoo I made the top-10 on something in Wikipedia!) Why are thanks so low on Wikipedia compared with Facebook LIKEs? Why don't we let the Wikipedia readers click on a Thank-you button if they like an article, which delivers some kind of warm fuzzy message to its top contributors or recent contributors or all contributors or adds to their "good karma" score or something? I note that Facebook took away their old "thumbs down" button (was that an example of redesigning an interface to make it harder to be nasty to someone?) But it would seem that, with A/B testing, we can measure how changing the interface of MediaWiki changes behaviour quantitatively (it may be harder to assess how it changes it qualitatively). But maybe we can even do some kind of qualitative assessment of the change. Aaron and others (apologies if I am not giving credit where it is due) have developed a tool to make reasonable machine assessments of article quality. Could we develop some kind of metric of "sentiment" in user interaction and see if that is changing under A/B testing? It may even be that letting user's see their own "sentiment" score may cause self-correcting behaviour. Maybe we don't realise we are becoming older and grumpier. Kerry, older and grumpier (some times) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
