This task outlines a proposed enhancement for a later version of the Editor help panel/Focus on Help Desk EPIC which enables viewers of Help Desk responses to provide feedback about how useful/helpful they found an answer.

Rationale

• In other community-lead help forums, the ability to “+1” on previous questions is commonly seen. It encourages both popular questions to be surfaced more prominently, and potentially reduces the amount of duplicative queries.
• An interesting finding from the MoodBar experiment (see T206714 for an overview) was that when users received feedback they marked as ‘Helpful’, their edit counts increased, whereas those who received feedback they did not mark as helpful had a lower edit count than not when they didn’t receive an answer at all. It would be useful to track whether a similar effect is experienced and look at ways to improve editor communications if it is shown to be the case.
• Asking for feedback on whether a response was helpful could be a reason to re-contact a lapsed newcomer who received a response but didn't edit. Another way to re-engage someone.

Proposed design

Interaction steps

1. User clicks to view a response to a question they asked on the Help Desk page from an email mention notification.
2. It is expected that they will open the Help Desk in the web browser anchored to their specific question and the full response.
3. The user is prompted to “Thank” the respondent if they think the answer was helpful.
4. After choosing to thank/not thank the response, the user may scan other questions in the page and similarly choose to “thank” other replies that they find helpful.

Additional idea

An additional idea was mentioned at Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 by @Bmueller, when we were talking about WMDE's experiment with the Teahouse Extension. We talked about how experienced editors who answer questions frequently don't find out if their answer was helpful. We could encourage newcomers to click a "Thanks" button on the help desk, as opposed to just in the history page. Perhaps this would close the feedback loop and be encouraging to those who answer questions.