Thanks Sidd for responding actively in this thread.

The biggest problem here: the algorithm used in this research were bad.
They produced nonsense that wasn't remotely grammatical.  You should have
caught most of these problems.  (The early version of the bot (for just
plays) had a poor success rate as well, but it seemed plausible that a
template for tiny play articles could be effectively filled out with
automation.)

Two interesting results IMO:
 + A nonsensical article with a decent first sentence & sections, and refs
(however random), can serve as encouragement to write a real article.
Possibly more of an encouragement than just the first sentence alone.  I
believe there's some related research into how people respond to cold
emails that include mistakes & nonsense.  (Surely there's a more effective
\ non-offensive way to produce similar results)
 + We could use even a naive measure of the coverage & consistency of new
article review.  (If it drops below a certain threshhold, we could do
something like change the background color & search-engine metadata for
pages that haven't been properly reviewed yet)

For future researchers:
If we encourage people to spend more time making tools work – rather than
doing something simple (even counterproductive) and writing a paper about
it – everyone will benefit.  The main namespace is full of bots, both fully
automatic and requiring a human to run them. Anyone considering or
implementing wiki automation should look at them and talk to the community
of bot maintainers.

Sam

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 1:28 PM, siddhartha banerjee <sidd2...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Ziko,
>
> Thanks for your detailed email. Agree on all the comments.
>
> Some earlier comments might have been harsh, but I understand that there
> is a valid reason behind it and also the dedication of so many people
> involved to help reach Wikipedia where it is today.
>
> We should have been more diligent in finding out policies and rules
> (including IRB) before entering content on Wikipedia. We promise not to
> repeat anything of this sort in the future and also I am trying to
> summarize all that has been discussed here to prevent such unpleasant
> experiences from other researchers in this area.
>
> -- Sidd
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>


-- 
Samuel Klein          @metasj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266
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