Wikidata:WikidataCon 2017/Notes/Understanding Differences between Power and Standard Users in Editing Behaviour over Time

Title: Understanding Differences between Power and Standard Users in Editing Behaviour over Time

Note-taker(s):lkastler

Speaker(s)

Name or username: Cristina Sarasua (criscod)

Contact (email, Twitter, etc.): sarasuaifi.uzh.ch

Abstract

One of the major challenges faced in Wikidata, like in any crowdsourcing project, is to attain a high level of editor engagement. There is a clear need for attracting new editors and growing the community, but at the same time, retaining existing editors is also crucial for the success of Wikidata.

While Wikidata has currently thousands of active editors, only a few of them are power users who perform large amounts of edits, and/or stay long in the project. We conducted a longitudinal study to compare the editing behaviour that editors with different levels of engagement exhibit over time. Our analysis covers Wikidata edits over almost 4 years and monitors editing behaviour in a session-by-session- and monthly-basis. We observed multiple dimensions, such as the way the participation, the volume and the diversity of edits done by Wikidata editors change. Using the findings in our exploratory analysis, we define and implement prediction models that help us predict whether (i) an editor will contribute with a high volume of edits or not, and whether (ii) an editor will stay long in Wikidata or not.

The goal of the talk is twofold: first, I would like to present and discuss the results of our data analysis (30 minutes). This work was a joint work with Alessandro Checco (University of Sheffield), and Gianluca Demartini (University of Queensland), in collaboration with Djellel E. Difallah (New York University), Michael Feldman (University of Zurich) and Lydia Pintscher (Wikimedia Deutschland). Second, I would like to start a discussion on how we, as a community, could intervene in order to try to convince standard users to become power users (15 minutes). Examples of topics that would be interesting to discuss in this direction are:

• Understanding power users
  • What are the good and bad habits of power editors? And what are tips and tricks that they recommend?
  • How and when do power users decide what to edit?

• Defining actions towards an increase in the number of power users
  • What should be strengthen in terms of dissemination and training?
  • What kind of assistive tools could we implement for standard users?

Idea to be discussed

We propose to work on the development of a methodology and tool that helps standard users to decide what to edit and helps them understand how to do it best.

We would like to provide an entry point where

• editors define their resolutions (e.g. I want to edit at least twice a week) and intentions ("I want to help with anything related to the city of Zurich, because i love it :)"). It's important that they define what they would like to achieve.
• editor identify themselves with roles (e.g. "I want to be a data quality ninja!") that are presented by the tool. We can define roles manually with expert people, and also learn some common tasks programmatically.
• power users (i.e. experienced and knowledgeable editors), data providers (e.g. Open Data Zurich people) and community managers indicate data needs and start calls for actions (e.g. "we need to back up facts about Zurich with more references to NZZ"
• power editors, hence, no longer only patrol, but also ask for action and there is a better process for sharing knowledge
• power editors share best practices, and they could even enable 1:1 online contact with other standard users (if they are willing to do so voluntarily)
• the tool narrows down possible options from the millions data items and all the possible types of tasks, and suggests the standard users editing routines
• standard editors can define their missions individually and socially (i.e. shared mission with other editors. This could be useful for example for preparing a mission saying "let's ensure that all districts in Zurich are well described with as many types of items as possible".

Important principles

• editors should ultimately pick what they want to work on
• it's not about concrete task assignment, it's about narrowing down the options and encouraging them to develop editing habits, by enabling them find valuable work to do
• it's not about increasing the motivation of editors who are not motivated, it's about supporting editors who are intrinsically motivated and aligned with the community's values, but currently feel overlwhelmed and don't manage to decide what to edit in a regular basis or don't mbanage to organise their volunteer work

Idea: after the panel on challenges in Wikidata, we could also use these collaboration set up (power users - standard users) not only for sharing best practices in the process but maybe also for enabling this contact to exchange knowledge about th data modelling (for data quality assurance)

Some questions for the discussion proposed by the speaker

@ Editors, Community Managers

Are there people overwhelmed who don’t know how to contribute best?

How do we collect and disseminate tips and tricks about deciding what to edit?

How can we enable 1:1 collaboration between power editors / data providers and standard users?

@ Researchers, Developers

Related theories to consider?

What Wikidata tools to integrate in the process?

Collaborative notes of the session

dedicated, intrinsicly motivated editors prefered over extrinsicly motivated editors.

"Wikipedians are Born, not Made" study (2009) http://katie.panciera.net/PancieraGROUP2009.pdf

data-driven study to understand power and standard editors and their differend behaviour

• analysing contribution, participation, and diversity to predict volume and lifespan of different types of editors
• wikidata edit sessions defined longer than normally in wikipedia
• editors with longer lifespan tend to maintain constant contribution and participation. they tend to increase diversity in their edits
• prediction of lifespan better for power editors
• how to help standard editors to develop habits?
  • standard editors creating intensions and resolutions
  • power editors oublish call for actions
  • proposal of a tool to help establishing a connection between both sides

Questions / Answers

• community projects help to build connections
• considerations to extend the research?
• language might be interesting to look into for helping standard editors
• some wikipedia have a mentoring program with varying success
• contribution campaigns are a good way
• egitimate prefericial
• community is fairly invisible to new editors. pointing existing groups to the editor do not exists
• what about regular methods like groups and blogs?
• have you try to identify paid editors? - they are hard to identify, but it might be interesting to do that
• improving notifications might be useful to provide recommendation to point to suitable projects