Some thoughts from [[Wikia]]'s Danny Horn

Some thoughts from Wikia's Danny Horn

I had lunch with Danny Horn today. Danny's a product manager at Wikia, and he's doing great work on incorporating measurement into product development and experimenting with new ideas in a systematic way.

Turns out they're using Google Analytics for click-tracking. Apparently, it's crufty, but it works. They've found some interesting things. For example, they found that anonymous users tend to click on the section edit links to edit, whereas experienced editors tend to click on the Edit tab. Danny experimented with making the Edit tab bigger and by making the links green to stand out more. That did result in higher-clicks, but he hasn't checked yet whether the Edit-to-Save ratio has gone down as well. (Note that this idea cropped up during IRC office hours/2010-03-31.)

Danny also did a lot of qualitative work to try to understand why new user editing behavior. He's concluded that new editors are more likely to edit when there's already a lot of content there. For example, new editors are more likely to edit long articles than short articles. This makes sense (in retrospect); after all, one of the hardest things to do on a wiki is figure out where to put something. If the content is already there, that tells you where things go, and it's easier to edit something that's already there than it is to create it from scratch.

One of the things Danny is working on now is experimenting with badges to encourage participation. Originally, he wasn't excited about the idea, but when he tested a prototype with experienced users, he noticed everyone reacted with a visceral, "Oh!" when they saw they had acquired a new badge. Behavioral economics backs up the idea that rewards like this can incentivize behavior, and there are many great examples of this on the web. (There's also a proposal on this wiki: Proposal:Add game-like features.)

Two quick thoughts based on Danny's work:

  • For the purposes of this task force, I lean more and more toward building our own open source tools (or on top of an existing open source package) to do this sort of thing. I'm amazed at how much Danny has learned just through click-tracking data, and we could build on top of Nimish's user experience click-tracking work to implement the same functionality fairly easily.
  • Danny's work aligns very well with Howie's emphasis on user segmentation and the notion that we may want to treat different user segments differently. Optimize the interface for encouraging new users to contribute and for helping new users become experienced users.
Eekim00:48, 6 April 2010

If you haven't seen it already, please take a look at the stackexchange communities like http://cooking.stackexchange.com. They have mastered badges. The head coder Jeff Atwood runs a blog at http://codinghorror.com which might have some good ideas.

69.142.154.1010:02, 10 August 2010