Hoi,
This whole notion of reward is quite powerful. It works best when processes
have been designed with this in mind from the start. Again, Wikipedia is
just part of what is done within the WMF. One project that has been worked
on is a copy of the work done by Magnus Manske.. his effort is the game and
it has clear objective tasks that people can do on the train, while waiting.
It is the kind of process that easily aggregates edits and consequently
easily allows for badges, recognition etc. As far as I am aware this is not
done (yet).
With more Wikipedias using Wikidata for its content. It is well worth
expanding the attention to these efforts and see what more we can do to
objectively heap praise for time well spend.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 6 October 2015 at 08:33, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Certainly there are a lot of sites with badges that do seem to encourage
> certain behaviour. On Wikipedia, we have edit count and that seems to
> generate editcountitis which (when gamed) tends to favour lots of little
> housekeeping edits over content edits. But one of the things with badges on
> most sites is that the site assigns the badge. Here on Wikipedia, I can put
> any badge I want on my User Page (the pre-existing ones are mostly
> edit-count based but I can roll my own as some users do). Indeed as I
> discovered, other people can put badges on my user page and presumably take
> them away. As edit count is our primary KPI, it doesn't address "cultural"
> attributes. Should we be making more of an effort to promote other KPIs
> that emphasise positive behaviour like thanks (given and received)?
> Unfortunately our main interaction mechanism is writing on talk pages and
> it's hard to tell whether any contribution on a talk page is a "positive"
> behaviour or a negative one (short of some kind of sentiment analysis).
> This is an unfortunate consequence of using a wiki for a conversation
> rather than some more purpose-built tool.
>
> In principle one takes a KPI and then creates a badge to reward a
> behaviour that improves that KPI. But that's all easier said than done.
>
> For content improvements, there are probably some things we can do. For
> example, I presume looking at the edit deltas, we could tell if an edit to
> an article added a citation (a pair of ref tag in the new version that
> weren't there in the old version). Adding citations is a desirable
> behaviour that we could report on and give badges for (although obviously
> whether or not that citation in any way supports the claim cannot be
> determined, so the "gaming" of this is to add random citations to offline
> sources to lots of articles, which cannot be easily verified). In which
> case maybe we need to give a better score to an online citation on that
> grounds it is more likely to be verifiable).
>
> But positive "culture" or positive social behaviour is harder to detect
> and reward. For example, we'd like to close the gendergap but firstly we
> don't have KPI that measures it on an ongoing basis because we don't
> actually know which contributors are male/female. And even if we had that
> KPI, what users or their behaviours would we reward for having positive
> impact on that KPI? In real-life, we might reward a customer who introduces
> a new customer. Or we might have a "finders fee" for someone who introduces
> a "new hire". How could we reward introducing new women to Wikipedia or
> encouraging them (perhaps through mentoring) to contribute more? Or would
> we reward contributors who contribute to articles about "women's topics"
> (which is addressing the content gendergap rather than the contributor
> gendergap, which aren't the same thing although many believe them to be
> closely linked). [I won't disgress into the challenge of deciding how
> "female" an article topic is.]
>
> On some sites, you need certain badges to "unlock" certain extra
> functionalities. Are we happy for RfA to be a question of collecting up
> enough badges? AFAIK, the only auto-implemented badge we have on Wikipedia
> is the "auto-confirm" (4 days and 10 edits from memory).
>
> I think badges are a good idea but I think the way Wikipedia is
> implemented makes it challenging to machine-identify desirable behaviours
> to reward (particularly for social/culture metrics). I think badges have
> (in the most part) to be machine-calculated and awarded or else it just
> becomes a popularity content (who's mates with who). I know Aaron (or
> someone) was toying with the idea of putting a value on each edit
> (presumably based on some training set of edit data that humans rated). I
> think it's not impossible to come up with some set of dimensions on which
> an edit might be valued and, using some human evaluations on a test set,
> come up with some kind of values for each dimension. It might be rough in
> the first instance but I guess if it incorporated some ongoing feedback
> mechanism, it could improve over time.
>
> A cheap thing that we could do (and I don't think we do) is have edit
> count badges for "last week", "last month", "last year". ATM we only have
> "lifetime" counts, which makes it hard for the new user to get any quick
> positive acknowledgements for their efforts.
>
> Kerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On Behalf Of Robert West
> Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2015 1:05 PM
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
> wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: Marti Johnson <mjohn...@wikimedia.org>; Patrick Earley <
> pear...@wikimedia.org>; Jacob Orlowitz <oca...@wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Reinforcing or incentivizing desired user
> behavior
>
> This paper is on using badges to steer user behavior:
> https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www13-badges.pdf
>
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 7:42 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Some of us plan to have a conversation at the WCONUSA unconference
> > sessions about ENWP culture. Are there any recommended readings that
> > you could suggest as preparation, particularly on the subject of how
> > to reinforce or incentivize desirable user behavior? I think that
> > Jonathan may have done some research on this topic for the Teahouse,
> > and Ocassi may have for done research for TWA. I'm interested in
> > applicable research as preparation both for the unconference
> > discussion and for my planned video series that intends to inform and
> inspire new editors.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Pine
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
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