Wikimania 2012/Nifty tools


 * Article Feedback Tool v5 — (see below) the new feedback tool tries to editors with feedback
 * AutoWiki Browser — some people like it; for Windows only I think
 * Visual Editor — a WMF experiment
 * New Pages Feed — an experiment, part of Flow
 * Twinkle — a gadget that automates various editor tasks (rather oriented around Wikipedia workflows, and requires MediaWiki 1.17, with Resource Loader; current release in July 2012 is MW 1.19)
 * SMW+ — the evolution of SMW and Halo (see it in action at Space-db.com)

Article Feedback Tool
We heard about this from Fabrice Florin, an interesting character at the Foundation — ex-TV producer at MTV, media guy, internet entrepreneur.

The basic idea is to link readers' comments with editors who can act on them. E.g. 'the first paragraph is confusing' or 'it would be good to have a picture of this' or 'this page is too long'. It's very important to WMF that the comments are as actionable as possible. Brandon Harris said he'd rather the feedback was menu- or checkbox-based so devs could build tools to sort it more easily.

The tool has now beed rolled out to 5% of English Wikipedia.

Quick description of the pilot project:
 * For 6 months, the tool was on 0.65% of English Wikipedia
 * Received 160k comments
 * 70% of these were positive, 98% from anonymous users (not logged in)
 * Editors rated 45% of the comments as useful, actionable items

After full deployment, they reckon on receiving about 1.2 million posts a month (!), compared with about 2.1 million edits in the same period.

The final step in the feedback process for the user is a 'call to action' which invites them to edit the article — most people don't realize they can edit Wikipedia, i.e. that 'anyone' means 'you'. An indirect call to action resulted in an increase of 22% of respondents editing the article, while a direct call got a 158% increase in edits. However, a large number of those edits were reverted within 7 days, so they preferred the smaller number of better edits.

Florin praised the community for the excellent feedback and engagement from the editor community about the AFT.

Here's a BBC article on increasing engagement, via @fabriceflorin on Twitter.

WikiTrust


WikiTrust is a fascinating project to overlay a heatmap onto pages (see example at right), to show how many edits parts of the page have had. This is a proxy, in theory, for trustiness.

I didn't hear of this at Wikimania, but Florin's presentation reminded me of it. Anyone can enable it on Wikipedia, but it does slow down pageload time quite a bit (obvsly).

Non-MediaWiki stuff I heard about

 * VUMI — open source 'conversation engine'
 * Truth Goggles
 * Space-db — a wiki with deep Semantic Mediawiki integration
 * Software Carpentry — awesome training website
 * Saylor.org — (yet another) free online education effort
 * MonmouthpediA is awesome!