Talk:Reading/Trust

Hey @Jkatz (WMF). I was talking briefly with @Moushira about this at all-hands. Wikipedia Library team spent half of last year preparing and running a pilot directing readers to a Research Help portal that explains "how and why wikipedia works, and how you should use it."

We did this by placing links to the portal under the ==References== section of 10,000 articles on English Wikipedia split across the two best organized WikiProjects: Medicine and Military History. The results of the tests indicated that readers and editors with under 100 edits were very supportive of a link to the content. Experienced editors were less pleased. We summarized our findings in a comprehensive report.

In Q3 we are running a banner campaign to get further feedback on the page content; we're also working with a Library School researcher to evaluate the UX of the page. We'd like to explore a way to share this content more systematically with readers, while letting experienced or all logged-in editors ignore/dismiss the content. Part of trust is understanding. Hopefully we can work together on this aspect of the problem. Cheers! -Jake

One thing that I've always thought would be interesting/useful is to get a sense of the standard deviation of editors to edit ratio - who is the top editor of a page? How are edits spread across all the editors? It can be alarming at times when you know what you are doing to view history and realise an article is mostly edited by one person - I've seen this a lot in building the reading trending service: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Edit_based_trending_service - and I'd be interested in exploring this more on an article level rather than over a duration of an hour. The work we did in mobile way back in 2014 was supposed to kick off this kind of work by making readers more aware of editors

This is an interesting approach, or other kinds of visual indicators that may indicate what went into a particular page. I really like the box at the top of [current events] that alerts readers that things might be quickly changing. Other things I might be curious about:

- How does the page I'm reading compare to a "typical" page in this subject? Does it have more editors? Less? Was it edited more or less frequently than a page with similar topic? Traffic levels? Some other indicator?

- How many editors have edited the page in the past [duration of time]?

- How many other pages on a similar topic has an editor edited?

- What percentage of contributions to this page were made in the last [duration of time?]

- What percentage of edits to this page were made by accounts that are older than [duration of time?]

- What percentage of edits on this page came from desktop vs. mobile? (This might not be as helpful to the reader as it may be to editors or product folk.)

- How many people have been blocked from editing this page?

Caveats with all of these: Not sure if these are the right things to measure, or in the right ways. Throwing them out for discussion. Also know that sites that favor longevity over other factors sometimes have issues with people selling accounts.

@JSutherland (WMF)'s excellent research paper demonstrates several of these already: http://joesutherland.rocks/607journalists.pdf (pages 31-42) cc: @Jkatz (WMF)

Hello,

I wanted to point you to some similar discussions in this space, as there may be room for overlap, or they may just be interesting points of comparison.

- "In workshops with journalism leaders, we've built a list of indicators of trustworthy news based on user views we've collected through in-depth, ethnographic interviews." [1]

- A project to facilitate collaboration between Wikimedians and The International Fact-Checking Community.

- In one sentence the Wiki Feed project creates an algorithmic (news) feed of wiki pages from recent edits or other data like page views, with an open, collaborative and forkable feed algorithm. (mockup)

- A prototype for aligning trust indicators with the schema.org standards in order to implement a simple, best practices based system for including trust indicators on news platforms.

[1] https://scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/journalism-ethics/programs/the-trust-project/indicators-of-trust-in-the-news/

Thanks! Added these to "discussions" section.