Comments on: Enticing Wikipedians back… with bacn

By: Oop

Oop — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:45:46 +0000

Actually, you might have a much better success rate if you tried to find why people actually left in the first place and then possibly attempt to fix it. Sure, that would take lot more manual labor, but it might result in a better working environment for us all. For starters, there could be a little questionnaire about the causes of leaving for former active Wikipedians (which those who would take a wikivacation for a specific period could just turn off).

By: Maryana Pinchuk

Maryana Pinchuk — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:28:00 +0000

Very true, HenkvD. We did indeed have similarly-sized control groups (who received no email) for each set of emails sent, and a small percentage of users did return independently. If you’re interested, you can find more details about our methodology and results on the Meta page.

By: HenkvD

HenkvD — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:15:20 +0000

To be a proper scientific experement you should have similar groups to whom you don’t send an e-mail. How many would have continued after 30 days inactivity?

By: Steven Walling

Steven Walling — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:55:53 +0000

Hi bawolff: On the privacy issue... we checked with legal first, naturally, but the privacy policy is extremely clear: "The email address put into one's user preferences may be used by the Foundation for communication." We only emailed editors who have opted in to email though, so these are people that could be emailed at any time through the Special:Emailuser function. If you're interested in how we sent and tracked these emails, there is a lot of detail on Meta documentation page. To give you a short answer: we used the Foundation's installation of CiviCRM, which does track open rates with a web bug. This means that opens were not recorded for people who do not choose to turn images on or that do not accept HTML email at all. For the clickthrough tracking, we did not use a bug, we simply added a token to the link. Other than those two things, all analytics we did were manual.

By: bawolff

bawolff — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:35:15 +0000

>”The percentage of people who opened our emails was about 27-28 percent”

How was that tracked? web bugs in email, token in link that gets recorded when people request the page. /me thinks web bugs if used would be on the questionable side. Just a token in the link is probably ok I guess – I know people need/like analytics, but I’m not really a fan of tracking in general unless widely discussed.

To be totally honest, I don’t really think this is an appropriate use of wikipedians email addresses unless the individual opted in, or there was a largish community discussion and the community liked the idea.

By: Anya

Anya — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:17:02 +0000

there are some academic papers out there that support the idea that giving people reminders to contribute will get them to contribute, though it’s not necessarily clear whether the contributions will be sustained over time. i’m glad to see the effect somewhat observed on wikipedia too. what also apparently helps is if the emails have specific contribution goals or suggestions (such as “we are trying to get X more articles written this week) or if people are compared with others (such as “editors like you have edited Wikipedia 10 times this week and you’ve edited 6 times”).

nice job guys! pretty cool that you can see that long-term lapsed editors are probably not going to be affected by email reminders.

By: Mark A. Hershberger

Mark A. Hershberger — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:40:45 +0000

> 2. Scrap the wiki editor, or at least bring it up to a currentday standard

Efforts are underway: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/12/changes-wikipedia

Re share/like buttons: if you can find a way to do it in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy and that the community can agree on, then I don’t know why you couldn’t fix it by changing a template or two.

By: josecuervo86

josecuervo86 — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:07:21 +0000

+1 to Carsten’s proposal

By: Carsten

Carsten — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:34:04 +0000

don’t know why I ever write an answer to these requests for an answer, the odd chance that anyone will read it is probably infinitesimal. But here are some thoughts which I think will help:
1. Why on earth is there no Facebook like/share buttons on the wiki topic pages? this would drive traffic and increase the engagement, ultimately resulting in more editors.
2. Scrap the wiki editor, or at least bring it up to a currentday standard, with true wysiwyg, inline dropdowns and other software guided text entry stuff which would decrease the learning curve, and alleviate up front clean texts.
Just a thought or two