WikiGrok Prototype

Sherah Smith, London, 2014

BACKGROUND

WikiGrok is an experiment to determine the feasibility of mobile-based micro-editing of Wikipedia.

It harnesses the capabilities of a game built for our sister project, Wikidata, to provide interaction within regular Wikipedia that anyone can use to add to the knowledge base.

GOAL

The goal of this research was to observe people interact with the Wikigrok version a micro-contributions beta feature and determine:

1. Do users notice the call to action?
2. How do users respond to the call to action?
3. How do users’ expectations of what is being prompted match up to our intentions for this feature?
4. Did users understand the overall purpose of the feature and also the contents/purpose of the ‘tell me more’ link?

QUESTIONS

To get started, we asked people a few basic questions first:

1. What kind of phone do you use/what OS?
2. Do you use a tablet, and if so, what model/OS?
3. Do you use a computer, and if so, what model/OS?
4. Do you ever use Wikipedia? (The goal of this question is to find out if they know you can edit Wikipedia or not. If they answer, "Yes, I use Wikipedia", we ask "how do you use it?" If they describe that they read, mostly and don't mention editing, then we ask "Do you know that you can edit Wikipedia?”)

Prototype v1

A prototype in JavaScript/HTML/CSS using MeteorJS. It was very basic to quickly get feedback.

We discovered, after showing it to a few people, that users thought it was a "quiz" and didn't understand what it was for.

Prototype v2

Based on that feedback, we included more help.

FINDINGS

When asked to describe the page, users do not actively describe or mention the Wikigrok feature.

A few users seemed to think that this was either a new way of editing, or that agreeing to help would take them to the edit page.

Users did not have issues interacting with the feature.

A few users indicated that the task was quicker/easier than they had anticipated.