Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/ArticleFeedbackDeployment
This draft is for a Tech blog post that is scheduled to be published on Tue. July 10 by 2pm PT, after review by Guillaume and Tilman. Please add your comments on the Talk page, or make edits directly on this page, depending on your level of confidence. Thanks!
Article feedback v5 starts wider deployment on Wikipedia
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I am happy to announce that Wikimedia's editor engagement team has started a wider deployment of Article Feedback version 5 on the English Wikipedia.
This new version of Article Feedback provides a new way for readers to contribute productively on Wikipedia. It engages them to make suggestions about articles they are reading — and invites editors to improve these articles based on this feedback. Our research also suggests that this new tool can help readers become editors over time.
We are currently testing this new tool on 3% of the English Wikipedia, and plan to gradually increase its reach to 10% by the end of July 2012. After final testing and debugging in the coming weeks, we expect to release this new version on all English Wikipedia articles in early fall — then to other projects in the following months. (Note that we will then retire the earlier Article Feedback version 4, which was based solely on user ratings, without comments.)
Based on our research, we now project a significant amount of feedback when the tool is fully deployed on the English Wikipedia. As a result, we believe that this new tool can enable a new form of participation for Wikipedia readers, most of whom do not currently edit the encyclopedia.
To learn more about Article Feedback v5, watch this quick video tour, read our walkthrough tutorial or check our help page.
We invite you to try out Article Feedback now, on one of these pages:
Please let us know what you think of this new tool. We welcome your questions and suggestions in the comments below — or on the Article Feedback Talk page.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the Wikipedia community members who helped create Article feedback. Over the past nine months, we worked closely with many experienced editors to design features that serve the needs of readers and editors alike. This deployment is an important milestone for us all, and we look forward to more collaborations on future editor engagement projects.
We hope you find this new feature useful. We can't wait to see it used more widely on Wikipedia!
Fabrice Florin, Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation's Editor Engagement Team
P.S.: If you are attending Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC this week, we invite you to join this talk on Article Feedback.