Context:
People may first come to the wikis to edit on a specific topic. However, they’re more likely to stick around and continue as editors if they know that their contributions are valued and that they can connect with like-minded people. This way, the tough stuff about the wikis can be outweighed by the good stuff. There are many ways of sharing and surfacing the good stuff, but one of the most powerful ways is through recognition by other editors. In fact, studies have found that receiving a thanks has a positive correlation to at least short-term editor activity (see Thanks for stopping by).
However, editors may receive minimal recognition for their work, especially if they are junior editors or newcomers (see Research:WikiLove and Thanks for stopping by). Meanwhile, experienced editors often face burnout, and they may also find that while they receive recognition, it is not proportional to the efforts that they exert and the impact that they have on the wikis.
For this research, we want to focus on 3 forms of recognition on the wikis: thanks, wikilove, and barnstars. We chose these three because a) they are widely-used forms of recognition on the wikis, b) they can be identified and measured, and c) they are features that we feel more confident that we can conduct interventions/experiments on, if we find that there are opportunities we should explore. However, we recognize that there are other forms of on-wiki recognition (e.g., a positive user talk page comment, a DYK, etc) that we will not include in this research.
We want to learn more about the status quo of these 3 forms of recognition today, and we want to know opportunity areas in possibly improving how these forms of recognition are discovered, used, or understood by editors. In other word, how we can make recognition more discoverable, more user-friendly & accessible, and potentially having more value/meaning (with more information behind it)? This is because we hypothesize that, if we can eventually create an experience on the wikis in which a) people are recognized more often, and b) receive recognition that is likely to be meaningful to them, then more editors will feel positively about their work and be more likely to stick around as editors.
Description:
Research goals:
- Establish an understanding of status quo today for how junior and experienced editors interact with and perceive recognition on the wikis, so that the Connection team can better understand the opportunities and gaps related to recognition on the wikis today.
- Determine how junior and experienced editors may perceive potential feature improvements to the recognition experience on the wikis, so that the Connection team can better predict community adoption and/or concerns.
Demographic target of research:
- Editing expertise: We want to know what junior editors think and how this may compare to how experienced editors think about recognition, in particular thanks/wikilove/barnstars.
- Junior editors (10-100 editors)
- Experienced editors (500+ edits)
- Language wikis: We want to see how there may be differences between editors in larger and smaller language projects (so, ideally 2 large projects & 2 small projects, with a preference for English & French for larger, due to our existing community contacts with those wikis).
- English
- French
- 2 smaller wikis
Expected Deliverable:
- Insights from junior and experienced volunteers collected via:
- Interviews
- And perhaps also a survey
- A report that provides:
- Findings on research questions shared in the research questions doc
- Opinions/feelings from interviewed subjects on our potential feature ideas (also shared in the doc)
- Recommendations on opportunity areas for improvements
Estimated Effort:
We've talked about this being about a 2 month project.
Priority:
I need this task resolved in:
- 1 month.
- 3 months.
- 6 months.
- Whenever you get to it :-)
Ideally, this task would be resolved in about 2 months, but there isn't a firm deadline. With this work, we will be better informed to make decisions about potential project ideas that we work on in Q3 and Q4 of this fiscal year.
Other/more info:
- I have collected a list of related past research in the recognition research questions doc.
- Our team designer, @JFernandez-WMF, will be working on some design examples to complement this research (see epic T404245), with 3 sub-tasks, including:
For use by WMF Research team; please leave everything below as it is:
- Does the request serve one of the existing Research team's audiences? If yes, choose the primary audience. (1 of 4)
- What is the type of work requested?
- What is the impact of responding to this request?
- Support a technology or policy need of one or more WM projects
- Advance the understanding of the WM projects.
- Something else. If you choose this option, please explain briefly the impact below.