Part of the reason we have a problem with dealing with good faith new users is
because we assume they understand things like we do. They don't.
Try and imagine you are a genuine good-faith new user (hard for us, but I get
to see them face-to-face so I get some insight into their experience). Imagine
that you have just spent quite a number of minutes making your first ever
change to a Wikipedia article. You found it quite difficult, strange jargon,
incomprehensible tool bars etc. Lots of things didn't work, so you explore more
menu options, blah blah blah. But you finally prevailed! You saved your edit
and you could see your change on the screen in the article. Hurray! Do a little
dance to celebrate! Sacrifice a goat! I must show Mum!
Then the edit gets reverted.
The first question to ask is how does the user know it got reverted.
* The article does not show their edit when they look at it later; they do not
know it was reverted
This is the likely scenario if they are not still logged in to their user
account (or at a different IP address if they did an IP edit) They find out
next time they look at the article. Remember how proud they are of that edit.
They may show the article to someone "look how I changed Wikipedia, hey, why
can't I see the change I made?".
Now how do they react to this? They may be thinking "maybe it's awaiting a
review" (remember newbies don't know how things work) so they wait and wait ..
Maybe, perhaps after some waiting, they decide they must have not got it right.
Remember they struggled to do that edit; they found it difficult; they can
imagine that they did something wrong. So they might just give up thinking "I
am not tech savvy enough to change Wikipedia". Or they might think "I have to
give it another go and see if I can get it right this time. So they repeat the
edit (possibly not being logged in) and presumably it gets reverted again.
* they may see a an alert or notification so they know it was reverted
If they are still logged in or at the same IP address, they may see an alert or
notification. I say "may" because not being a new user I am not sure how they
are shown a reverted edit. Someone else who knows will have to answer this. But
I do know from face-to-face observation that new users often do not notice
things in the user interface like alerts, notifications, message etc even when
they remain logged-in. Their eye focus is entirely on the article content. Lots
of studies of eye tracking and their heat maps show us that this is normal
behaviour on most web pages, people are focussed on where they think is
relevant to them. Since this user's experience of Wikipedia is 99.99% as a
reader, they are 99.99% pre-programmed to look straight to the article content.
As regular contributors, we are probably far more aware of things like alerts,
notifications, etc (but equally would you notice a change in the elements of,
say, the left hand tool bar as quickly).
Assuming they see that there is an alert or notification, do they know to
click the alert or notification to find out that their edit was reverted?
Again, stuff we take for granted, but it's their first time. So they may still
not know their edit has been reverted.
Assuming they managed to navigate the GUI to get to the revert notification,
they might be seeing the edit summary on the reversion and/or a talk page entry
(probably a Twinkle-or-other-tool template).
Edit summaries are by their very nature short and they can be empty, or very
cryptic or use unfamiliar jargon or link off to pages full of more jargon
[[WP:SOMEPOLICY]]. Messages on talk pages can be longer but not necessarily
any more helpful. For example, the default Twinkle response for a revert (level
1 vandalism) says that the reverted edit "did not appear constructive" and
points the user to the Sandbox (not helpful) or to the Help Desk (potentially
helpful). Also, the user did an original VE edit, they may be unable to
interpret a page they are pointed to which uses any markup example (which
occurs if they have done something wrong technically rather than policy-wise).
If they got this far, it is very likely that although the user knows their edit
was reverted, they may still not know why either in general or in particular
about what was wrong with their edit. Or they may know what was wrong but be
unclear on how to fix it. Why was my citation not reliable enough? Etc.
Assuming they have not given up, they will probably feel the need to talk to
someone about their reverted edit. Depending on how they were notified of the
revert, there are a range of places that they have been shown as a place to
have such a conversation. These include their own user talk page, the user talk
page of the person who wrote a message on their user talk page, the Help Desk,
the Teahouse, the article Talk page, talk pages of Wikipedia policies, etc. So
we don't know how they choose where to go but there are problems with all of
them. The first problem is technical. We are asking a new user who needs help
with Wikipedia to get that help via Wikipedia's methods of communication (Talk)
with which they are not familiar. Plus if they did their first edit with the
Visual Editor, they have the scary markup hurdle as well. So that's the
technical hurdle to asking for help.
But there are other hurdles in asking for help. They don't speak our language.
They don't how to provide a diff link for example, which may make it harder to
anyone to respond, particularly if their enquiry is not using the user account
(or IP) of the original edit (i.e. cannot connect the user account to the
problem edit). So their description of the problem could be quite confusing
which may make it hard for anyone to give them a good response and if the
person responding is not the reverting editor, then they may be unsure what
problem the reverting editor (who might be a subject matter expert familiar
with reliable sources for that topic, conventions in that topic space) might
have seen in the edit.
The final problem is social. Now some of the places I mentioned above are just
not good places to go. Responding on their User Talk page *should* work but
reverting editors do not appear to actively watch such accounts for responses
so their response may be ignored. So even if they successfully write a message
on one of these places, there is the possibility that nobody is actively
watching it, or that even if it is actively watched, or just not think it is
their responsibility to reply ("I didn't revert the edit, not my problem"). The
talk page of the reverting editor *should* get a response, but it depends on
their personal goodwill towards new users. Presumably the Help Desk or Teahouse
would respond, so these are probably the best places, but the newbie doesn't
know that.
Assuming someone does respond to their plaintive cry for help, how does the
newbie know they have received a reply? Remember they don't know about page
watching. While the folks at Teahouse etc do tend to ping (probably for this
reason), it's very possible that there may be a reply but they simply never see
it (again, if they become logged out, they will not see it). Again, are we
relying on alerts and notifications to reach them.
OK, let's assume they've received the reply. They may now have an answer they
can work with or they may have be referred to read a policy page (which they
don't understand) or told to ask the newbie to ask at a different Talk page
(e.g. the Help Desk often tells the person to ask the question on the article
Talk page).
I think if we draw the newbie revert experience out as a flow chart, it becomes
very clear that there are plenty of ways the newbie can reach a dead end or get
into an infinite loop, and perhaps not so many ways they can get to a
sufficient understanding of what they did wrong and how to do it right
(assuming it can be fixed, as Ziko points out, not all good faiths edits are
acceptable to Wikipedia).
What I think this enumeration of steps draws out is that the things we could do
to improve the new user experience are:
1. find ways to communicate with them so they know their edit was reverted in
the first place (if they have an email address for their account, email them).
Encourage them to add an email address at account creation by explaining the
benefits (currently it just says "optional" without explaining how it will be
used, at least there could be a link called "benefits of providing your email"
which could mention password recovery and easier ways to get help to provide
positive motivation to provide it)
2. provide individual feedback not generic templates in the first instance of
reverting (yes, I see the obvious problem with this and doubt we can do much to
change the behaviour of random reverting editors)
3. to get help, don't force them to use Talk, let them use email or chat (and
by chat, I don't mean IRC) that may be more familiar to them and make sure it
happens in a way in which they can't miss the reply
4. don't give them too many options on where to seek help -- try to funnel them
to a single place where they will receive individual specific help in
newbie-friendly language (the Teahouse is probably the best option if it had an
email/chat interface), this means making sure all the templated response
systems include this information prominently (or better still have a clickable
link, see below)
5. automate the asking-for-help process in some way so that if they talking
about a reverted edit, that edit is presented to the person trying to help them
(the not-logged-in problem, can't provide a diff problem), ideally an revert
communication (whether it be an alert, a user talk message or email etc) should
have a "click here to ask for help about this reverted edit" and that clickable
link will have the diff embedded in it
Apart from item 2 (which depends heavily on the time and goodwill of individual
users), these steps are all achievable. There may be some objection to
increased use of email over Talk because of the transparency but email
communication is supported by Wikipedia. And I can see if we encourage new
users to communicate via email.chat, then they may expect to continue to use
those communication methods to be their communication mode as they become more
experienced users. It may be that we need some email/chat gateway to Talk (but
then we have to be careful that everyone understands the visibility of the
email they will send). Or of course we could just ditch Talk completely and
move to Flow (or anything vaguely 21st century). Why should it be so easy to
have a conversation on Facebook and so hard on Wikipedia? (How many colons do I
need ...)
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Sunday, 30 September 2018 5:01 AM
To: Wiki Research-l <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are
published!
Kerry,
This discussion about reverts, combined with my recent experience on ENWP,
makes me wonder if there's a way to make reverts feel less hostile on average.
Do you have any ideas about how to do that?
Thanks,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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