Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-03-31/Recent research
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Purely symbolic" barnstar-like awards increase editor retention on German Wikipedia
[User Name]
with the award
Edelweiss with Star
of the Portal Switzerland
for contributions to the German language Wikipedia.
sgd. The Project Edelweiss-Award
Example award (author's translation, from the paper)
In a large-scale randomized experiment on the German Wikipedia, new editors who were presented with a barnstar-like award on their user talk page were 20% more likely to remain active during the month afterwards. This statistically significant increase in the number of users coming back to contribute further persisted for a full year (four quarters). It also appeared when only considering article (mainspace) edits.
The "Edelweiss-Auszeichnung" was awarded in a monthly process. All users who had made their first article edit and at least one other edit, with at least five days between their first and last edit, were considered initially eligible for the award. This was followed by semi-automated screening process, "developed in consultation with experienced community members", to remove e.g. blocked users, corporate accounts and "advertisers". Apart from this, the award (in its lowest level) was not based on any assessment of the quality of the user's first edits. It was handed out by the author using a role account to around 150 users per month. The award's "description does not contain any explicit performance criteria for getting the award, other than that the editors have made their first contributions to the German language Wikipedia in the previous month; it is mentioned that there were more than 4,000 newcomers as potential candidates in a given month." The author notes that
- "randomly bestowing awards seems to be an almost impossible endeavor, because awards are designed to be given to individuals who excel in their tasks. However, this experiment shows that it can succeed if two important conditions are fulfilled. First, a basic preselection has to exclude obviously undeserving candidates, such as vandals. Second, subjects who by chance do not receive the award should be an unidentifiable group who ideally are ignorant of the award’s existence."
The screening process seems to have been reasonably effective in weeding out bad-faith contributors, with only 2% of the awarded users and 3% of the control group having been blocked after more than two years.
The paper also emphasizes that close coordination with the editor community, and the attachment to a thematic portal (similar to a Wikiproject on the English Wikipedia) were important to the award's success:
- "practitioners’ endorsement is most likely to be vital for any such endeavor. The backing and trust of several highly reputable community members were central to this experiment. These contacts were established via telephone calls, which were followed up by regular roundtable meetings with a group of editors willing to tackle the retention problem with the help of the experiment. They became official founding members of the project, which was thus institutionalized under the umbrella of the Swiss national Wikipedia portal, providing the award with considerable repute and a formal character ..."
Review 2
- Reviewed by ...
Briefly
Conferences and events
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
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References
- Supplementary references:
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