Grants:IdeaLab/Quick quality triage functionality (QQT :)

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Quick quality triage functionality (QQT :)

Allow readers to quickly rate articles on their usefulness and other parameters to quickly highlight articles that need urgent improvement *according to readers' expectations*, not just editors' standards.

idea creator• SSneg

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created on09:30, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Decrease minimum threshold to contribution (rating an article is obviously easier than editing an article, both technically and psychologically) and leverage the collective opinion of thousands of end-users, i.e. readers of Wikipedia to improve article quality.

What is your solution?

This is used on many help/reference/documentation sofwares. Add a "Was this article useful? Yes / No" buttons at the bottom of each article. If a user clicks 'No', it should expand into a secondary menu with "This article wasn't useful because it's..." with choices like "incomplete", "offensive", "wrong", "poorly formatted", "inconsistent", "requires illustration" etc.

This will allow thousands of readers to contribute in a simple, non-technical way to improving Wikipedia and leverage their collective opinion to guide editors' efforts. Obviously, such functionality will quickly reveal articles that are simultaneously low quality and have high traffic.

More importantly, it will help assess articles as seen by readers/users/consumers, not by editors/authors/contributors, providing an alternative viewpoint and a shortcut to adding value to the end-users of the knowledge we jointly create.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

I mostly edit RU wiki. IRL I am an e-learning developer turned software entrepreneur. Love tech and UX/UI challenges.

Endorsements

• A very similar project to this was actually developed by the WMF and was tried out on English, French & German Wikipedia but then was deemed not very successful and was discontinued -- it turned out the feedback and ratings were not very helpful to improving articles, and editors had concerns. So the code already exists as a mediawiki extension. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback for more details; also here is the wrap-up of why the project wasn't continued. So it's a good idea, but turns out to be quite difficult to implement well, and we might be better off trying out new things. -- phoebe | talk 15:17, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
  • It is not very similar. It is exactly what I had in mind! :) I'll try and read through that feedback but as far as I understood the acceptance rate of the new tool was 40-60% on various wikipedias (which I think is huge given how change-resistant editor communities are) and the tool allowed to convert some 3% of readers into editors (which is an incredibly high ratio if I understand correctly). SSneg (talk) 15:55, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

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