User talk:CountryBot

Page rate

The page rate template is apparently incorrectly rounding the ratings. I have found at least two instances of a 3.10 being assessed. Unsure of whether a 4.0 or 3.1 was intended. Thank you.Marcus Qwertyus 19:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This has been resolved in r84702 and will be deployed shortly. --Trevor Parscal (talk) 20:36, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. Thank you. Marcus Qwertyus 21:23, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

List of Minerals

I deleted "Article Feedback category for pilot project" from the List of minerals (complete). I'm updating it, and it needs a lot of time. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 19:26, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine. Kaldari (talk) 19:47, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've done the same for List of churches preserved by the Churches Conservation Trust in South East England. It's full of redlinks, clearly not "complete", and not appropriate for this sort of questionnaire.--Peter I. Vardy (talk) 22:11, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why?

Page User:CountryBot says "Add 3,000 articles to Article Feedback pilot project. (Requested by WMF, see Talk page)". Which talk page ? I've spent a few minutes looking at the articles listed at User talk:Kaldari#Article Feedback pilot project and still don't understand the reasons for wanting article feedback and how long our articles will have the survey tag on. My initial response is that it's a bad idea - unnecessary cruft - if readers think there's something wrong with an article there are already several (more constructive) ways of indicating this. The "please take part in a survey" popups that appear on so many websites are annoying when you just want to get some info - does WP really need to start going down that road ? DexDor (talk) 19:51, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. --Peter I. Vardy (talk) 22:11, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. I've included a brief summary of the rationale behind the article feedback tool at User talk:Kaldari#Article Feedback pilot project, which I think was posted after DexDor's last comment. But really quickly, the main goal of the feedback tool is less about providing a mechanism for readers to let editors know if there's something wrong with the article (the ratings categories are nowhere near specific enough for that) and more to provide a barometer for what readers think the quality of the article at a given point in time. Another goal is to see if ratings can be an effective on-ramp for other forms of participation. I'm personally very hopeful that the tool can be a potential on-ramp given the recent data on participation on English Wikipedia.

Regarding the survey, we're running it to get a better qualitative understanding of the motivations users have to rate articles in the first place. Do they want to share their opinion of the article? Or do they simply want to be involved with Wikipedia and the rating an article is an easy way to do so? We won't be running this survey for an extended period of time -- only long enough for us to get a good read on the data. As you stated, we should be sensitive to the proliferation of surveys.

Would it be okay to keep the ratings tool on the page for the next several weeks as part of the experiment to help us understand whether it's actually valuable? Howief (talk) 23:13, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Another goal is to see if ratings can be an effective on-ramp for other forms of participation. I'm personally very hopeful that the tool can be a potential on-ramp given the recent data on participation on English Wikipedia. It's late and I'm tired, but is there a version of that in plain English? Mr Stephen (talk) 23:57, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Adding clutter to articles (especially for people with small screens or who need to use large text) and further complexity to WP should be avoided unless there is a good reason. Having looked at the arguments I don't think the survey is likely to help readers, editors or reader-editor conversions. Where people have been tasked to improve articles then this facility could provide feedback on how well they are doing, but this is not the way WP is normally editted and there are numerous flaws in using the survey in this way (e.g. if an article has a long list of references then IP users are less likely to notice the survey) – getting articles to GA status would be a better goal. Having a feedback survey (like you might get at a hotel for example) implies that WP is providing a service that is expected to reach a certain standard – quite the reverse of suggesting that WP is an ongoing activity that you (the reader) are encouraged to assist. As for improving reader-editor conversions (if needed) - my suggestion would be a "Add criticism" button or one-line box on the article page. Having said all that; I'll leave the survey tags for the trial period. DexDor (talk) 08:25, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please direct feedback about the project to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Workgroup. Thanks! Kaldari (talk) 17:32, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No. I object to useless (and possibly counterproductive) clutter being added to en:wikipedia articles; therefore MediaWiki is not the appropriate place for this discussion - there may be other wikis for which using this functionality would be beneficial, but en:wikipedia already uses other mechanisms to rate articles (e.g. GA) and to suggest improvements (stub cats, fact tags, redlinks, task forces ...). Any proposal to add a "Rate this page" panel more widely across en:wikipedia articles should be justified in terms of a benefit to en:wikipedia, not because the folks over at MediaWiki like the functionality. Also, can you stop talking in terms of the system (e.g. "main goal of the feedback tool is ... to provide a barometer ...") and start talking in terms of users (e.g. "It will benefit wikipedia readers because ...") ? DexDor (talk) 22:34, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The pilot project is to collect data to see if such a feature would be "useless" or not. It may turn out to be highly useful to get new editors contributing to articles. It may turn out to be a complete waste of space. Until the Foundation collects the data, no one knows. Regardless, any feedback you leave here will never be seen by anyone involved in the project. (I just ran the script for them, and then asked them to add some explanation here since people were asking.) If you want to set up an RfC or something, that's fine with me. Otherwise, you're just shooting the messenger. Personally, I would suggest just waiting a few weeks to see what the data shows, but if you want to try to end the pilot project early, that's fine with me too. I no longer have anything to do with the project, so I really don't have any opinion. Kaldari (talk) 02:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Kaldari is right -- we don't know if this will be a useful feature, so we're trying this experiment in an effort to get more data. In terms of benefits for users, the ratings would give readers something that helps them interpret the quality of the content. While this may be less important for critical readers that are reading articles in detail, but may be important for readers that are either trying to get a quick understanding of something or looking up a specific fact. The other thing I would mention is that the existing mechanisms for rating articles and suggesting improvements all require some knowledge of Wikipedia (e.g., how does a user know how to add a citation needed template?). These mechanisms work great for existing editors, but probably don't work well in engaging pure readers. I'm curious to see whether engaging readers in this way will lead to more becoming editors.

Also, agree with you re: keeping unnecessary clutter out of Wikipedia pages. We shouldn't just put things on the page without some benefit to some group of users or to the community. Part of what I think we need to figure out is whether the benefit of having this tool is worth the additional clutter. Howief (talk) 18:00, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback re "Feedback"

How did the 3000 articles get chosen? [As I wrote that I saw the little blue aliens in Toy Story crying "I'm chosen, I'm chosen!" Moral: Be careful what you wish for.]

I'm a more-or-less principal editor to/on/of a page that I've put a ton of work into, I and a few others, including drawings I've done, arguments I've fought, sleepless nights I've suffered, anxious moments, etc. I'm finding the ratings of the page fascinating. As a writer of all sorts of prose including two stints through creative writing classs, what I discovered is: we who take the craft seriously benefit most from criticism. "Praise to the face is disgrace" as Ernie Hemingstein used to say (and knowing that guy, probably ad nauseum). (Never mind that students in the writing class would break down and cry under the criticism of their works. I've wondered if the classes weren't there, really, to develop our ability to suffer (severe) in-your-face criticism. (Think: standing motionless as a drill-sargeant yells in your face: been there done it; creative writing criticism is worse.)) Moving on: . . . I'm saying that even though it may be painful, feedback is useful to those editors who "have eyes to see". And a metric averaged out is not such a bad thing either, especially if the average throws out the outliers. (Standard deviation wouldn't be such a bad secondary metric, either). Bill Wvbailey (talk) 22:00, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The articles were chosen semi-randomly. Feel free to remove the category from any articles you don't want the interface on. Kaldari (talk) 01:30, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

page blanking

fyi, your bot has blanked at least two pages: New York state elections, 2008, Foreign relations of France. 66.57.71.63 (talk) 07:56, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that. I'll try to make sure that doesn't happen again if we run another batch. Kaldari (talk) 17:35, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]