Research:MoodBar/Response team call to action

MoodBar	Pilot: Early data (July 2011 - September 2011)	Stage 1: Usage and UX (September 2011 - May 2012)	Stage 2: Impact on editor engagement (May 2012 - September 2012)
MoodBar Feedback Dashboard Mark as Helpful	First month of activity	Time to first feedback Response time Effects of UI changes Email confirmation	Observational study Controlled experiment design Controlled experiment results Response team call to action

Measuring the effect of Moodbar on retention

The three types of mood that new users can select when posting a message.

As part of our research on the effectiveness of MoodBar, the response dashboard, and the mark-as-helpful extension at improving new editor engagement, we are performing a two-stage experiment on editor retention. We are going to temporarily disable MoodBar for all new accounts registered in a given time window and measure how many of these new editors are retained compared to new editors retained when MoodBar is enabled as usual.

Why this experiment

We are interested in understanding whether receiving a response to feedback, and in particular a useful one, can improve the chances that newly-registered editors will be more engaged in editing Wikipedia in the first 30 days of their activity. To test this hypothesis, we need to increase the volume of responses sent through Wikipedia's feedback response dashboard.

Increasing the number of response posts will let us attain the level of statistical significance required to detect a meaningful signal from the data of the two groups. To measure significant differences in retention of new users we need at least a 6x increase in the number of responses sent through the Feedback Dashboard.

How you can help

If you are interested in helping this project by volunteering in the response team, here's how you can help:

• Sign up on the list of participants below
• We need you to respond to as many feedback messages as possible using the feedback dashboard.
• The effort we ask from you is time-limited. We need your help until June 19th, midnight UTC at the latest.
• Try to answer to new as well as old feedback messages. You can load old feedback messages in the dashboard by simply scrolling down to the bottom of the dashboard page. You can easily find unanswered posts by using the filter on the right.
• If you have already taken part in the feedback response team, please follow your normal pattern of activity. If you think that a feedback message does not require a response, then do not feel compelled to post one. If you have never taken part in the feedback team response, please read the instructions for how to respond to feedback here.
• Respond to posts that have been already responded to only if you feel that some useful information may have been missed by the previous response(s). Again, your own judgment will be the best guide here.

Please note that we recently increased the visibility of the link to MoodBar, and as a consequence of this action we are seeing roughly twice as many feedback messages posted on the English Wikipedia on a daily basis. Therefore there should be plenty of work for everyone!

Sign up to participate

Please add your name to the following list if you want to volunteer for this task:

• Junkie.dolphin
• Callanecc
• Theopolisme
• Salma Vian
• Riley Huntley
• Tow

Get in touch

For any question on this experiment you can contact us by mail:

• Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia <gciampagliawikimediaorg>
• Dario Taraborelli <dariowikimediaorg>