Topic on Talk:User Interaction Consultation/Readers thank editors

As an editor

• I like being thanked for specific edits I made (as is currently possible via the History tab)
• I like seeing people link to Wikipedia articles I've written from other websites to help people explain things
• I like seeing people quote Wikipedia definitions that I wrote in their presentations

I think I would like it if there was some way of people to rate Wikipedia articles. If articles that I've written would get a high rating, then that would be thanks enough. Unfortunately, from the Article Feedback Tool we learned that many people will use such a voting mechanism to rate how much they like the topic of the article instead of the article itself...

As an editor I would not be very interested in getting non-specific "thank you"s, because I happened to be the person that created a stub on a topic or was the last person to revert some vandalism to an article.

Hi Ruud, so you would like to:

Enable non-logged in to use Extension:Thanks

Get notifications, whenever your article has been referenced?

Get notifications when text you contributed is highlighted and copied?

• Enable non-logged in to use Extension:Thanks

  That could be useful, yes. It's always a bit hard to predict how this feature will be used by anonymous users, though. Now I get at most a few "thank you" notifications per month. I like that. But if would start getting several such notifications per day, it would get annoying quite quickly. I guess this won't be much of a problem, but that's just a guess.

• Get notifications, whenever your article has been referenced?

  That really depends on what you mean by "referenced". Now I occasionally notice people referencing Wikipedia articles I've written on StackOverflow. I you can manage to somehow automatically notify me when this happens, then I might like that. Implementing this would seem rather hard, though. Which sites are you going to scrape for such references, and when does an article count as having been written largely by me? (The person who wrote the first revision of the article, is probably not going to be a useful proxy for this.)

  On the other hand, I also used to have that Echo feature enabled that would notify you whenever a internal link on Wikipedia was added to an article you created. As this resulted in several notification per week, if not per day, this got really annoying, really quickly. So if that's what you mean by "referenced", then no.

• Get notifications when text you contributed is highlighted and copied?

  No. Rather often at conferences and other meetings I've seen people quoting Wikipedia definitions on their slides. Once or twice even of definitions I wrote. I found this flattering. This is very different from getting a notification every time someone selects or copies a piece of text I've written. That would, again, just get annoying very quickly. (Not to mention the possible privacy violation of the person doing the copying.)

Hi again, Ruud :)

On the use for Thanks for non logged in users, I will look at the history of discussions, possibly this has been discussed earlier, and as you anticipate, it might result in too much noise.

On the issue of articles being referenced, well, it doesn't have to follow the Echo behaviour, but from what you explained earlier, I understood, that like the example you gave, if someone mentioned your article in stackoverflow, then you have means of knowning where was a stub that you started mentioned. Although, as you say, how would this factored, would starting the article be more important than the % of content you added, or vice versa?

On adding your content that you added to slides, I totally understand the point, but I imagine the first step is to find out when was your text copied and pasted, as probably this is what the people who used it in their slides must have done in order to add it. Do you have other suggestions on how to implement this, automatically, without having the person who copied your text drop a line on your talk page, for example.

I see the suggestions are around the theme of "appreciation", how can readers engage with editors in a way that makes readers conscious of the effort and people behind Wikipedia, and makes editors realize the value of their work? I think we can brainstorm more ideas around those lines, if you would like, it is very interesting. Thanks Ruud for taking time to actively contribute to this consultation. :-)

In general I like the idea, but what do you want to achieve exactly, what behavior you want to encourage? The main author of an article might be neither the one who created it or one of the five most recent editors, but someone between. I wonder whether the notification system ( as we know it) should be used. Wouldn't an editor receive a huge number of notifications, especially when he writes about popular topics? Maybe the editor would fail to notice those notifications that require action.

See also the near-identical suggestions at phab:T89577 by Kaity (2015), and Author Thanks by Jorm (2014). Also the related phab:T58155.

Personally, I like the idea of encouraging pure-readers to interact with the site, with the hopes that this is a step towards editing. However, I'm wary of actually sending a Notification to any editors. Some of the comments in the links above have detailed the concerns, and suggested that if implemented it would have to be limited to registered accounts to prevent abuse/robot-spamming/etc.

One slightly tangential idea...

I think what readers ought to know, is how many editors have edited an article, and how many edits the article has had. This will entice some of them to learn how it's all made.

I think what authors want to know, is how many people are reading the article (not how many people are inclined to find and push a 'thank' button, a very limited subset).

So, I'd like these numbers to be highly visible on each page:

• Number of page views (all time/this year)
• Number of editors (all time)
• Number of edits (all time/this month)

The last two are available at the "Page information" link in the toolbox, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Shakespeare&action=info#Edit_history - The first is more complicated, because of the historical mess of pageview-stats, but "this year" or "this month" stats could be shown e.g. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-30&pages=William_Shakespeare

I like the idea of making the number of readers more visible. I sometimes check the pageview stats of articles I've written and I think seeing that lots of people read my article (when I ask for this information) is more gratifying and less intrusive than getting "thank you" notifications pushed to me. It would also offer an easy hook in the interface for getting access the to full pageview statistics, which are currently quite well hidden.

(The "problem" with this approach is that it's editor-centric instead of reader-centric, which isn't exactly what the Reading team is looking for.)

The other problem with page-views, is that (IIUC) it would interfere with page caching. I'm not sure how we'd work around that.