Talk:Structured profiles

Comments and Feedback

Feedback on user profile

Hi Vibha, thanks for reaching out to me on this! Here is a bit of feedback on this document. I am not sure if I'm not already a step ahead of the process with this feedback, so see what you want to do with it. Remember that I am an "old" editor, with a long history on the projects, but also that I am not a prolific editor by any means (my focus is organisational). notafish (talk) 10:48, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

• I am completely sold on the idea of user profiles that are "streamlined", because I believe it encourages people to fill it and present themselves quickly when they start working in the projects. It can be daunting to have a red link and an empty page, so this might help.
• I find the "communicate intent" idea fantastic. I find it is super important to know what the reason for an editor being an editor might be, as this probably will allow to a) look for the right people if I have a problem b) understand why people are doing what they are doing. So that's great.
• You have to keep in mind that streamlining the user profile also means that one person may want to have different profiles on different projects/languages (I work on fr:wp, de:wp, en:wp, meta, commons and I have different profiles on each, which focus on different things depending on the project).
• Now on the metrics of social value (p6 of your doc), I think we have to be extremely careful. Right now you have:
  • Edit count
  • Articles created
  • Files uploaded
  • Last activity

I'll go about those one by one.

Edit count

This metric is something that can be extremely disputed if it is shown by default. For many reasons.

• Edit count is not the same metric across projects: On Commons for example, 1 edit might mean 2 hours of work (looking for the copyright of a file, talking to various users across projects to ask them to remove the file, deleting or tagging the file for deletion etc.).
• Edit count is not the same metric depending on editing style: There are people who like to open a page, make all their changes, save. Others open the page, make one change, save, open the page, make their change, save. One will have 1 edit, the other 20 for the same amount of "work".
• Edit count does not necessarily mean quality edits: Some vandals have a pretty high edit count ;) Just sayin'.
• Edit count can be daunting for new users: If I see lots of people with hundred thousands of edits, I might be scared.
• Edit count is a road from Zen Wisdom :)

  A novice was once curious about the nature of the Edit Count. He approached the Zen master and asked, "Zen master, what is the nature of the Edit Count?"

  "The Edit Count is as a road," replied the Zen master. "You must travel the road to reach your destination, and some may travel longer roads than others. But do not judge the person at your door by the length of the road he has travelled to reach you."

  And the novice was Enlightened.

• Possible ideas:
  • Allow people to not show edit count if they don't want it on their user profile (on/off possibility)
  • Allow edit count to show edits across projects (cumulative rather than just on the project you're on) and maybe add "XXX edits across XXXX Wikimedia projects), ie. single login edit count.
  • Allow fuzzy edit count (more than xxxx edits, for example)
  • My husband proposes an edit count that shows only the edits over a past period of time (e.g. XXX edits in the last 30 days), less daunting than 300 000 edits :).

Articles created

More of the same remarks, there are people who have a million edits and have never created an article (the Grammarians, for example, or Spelling Freaks) and people who have created tons of articles but have worked them on Word before they put them in the projects so have little edit count. Same ideas apply (on/off, across projects...), you probably want to approach this metric with caution.

Files uploaded

Really relevant on Commons, and there are projects where you *cannot* upload files anywhere else than Commons, so this definitely HAS to be counted across projects. ON/OFF idea applies.

Last activity

That is a really cool thing to see, I find, but it should really take into account the activity across projects. I am not an active en:wp editor, but I am definitely still "active" on the projects and reachable if anyone has a question and they come across my user page in a proejct where I haven't edited in years. :-)

Also I think date of account creation is a good measure that's not there at all. Obviously if someone has been on the projects for years, their edit count will make more sense (giving context to the user).

New User profile

p 9/10 of your doc.

• I find the "appears to be a new user" to be a very interesting feature, as well as the direct link to edits and talk (see if they need help).

Anon profile

I would actually have a profile for anons as well. Although this is subject to their IP being fixed or not to have any kind of a relevance, I suppose. Voilà, quite a lot, hope that helps bring some of the stuff in perspective. notafish (talk) 11:13, 1 May 2013 (UTC) notafish this stuff is super useful to think about profile concepts. What information would users want to see in an anon's profile?

Like the metrics

I first interact with other editors on article Talk pages, where a specific issue is being discussed. In thinking about a pop-up in this context, I'm primarily interested in user experience because I want to know whether I'm dealing with an experienced editor, a newbie, or someone in between. Edit count and years of participation, while not perfect measures of this, do offer some guidance. In addition, the pop-up tool could also allow editors to self-identify as newbies. That could be really useful to all parties. I'm less interested in the number of articles created, because new articles are often esoteric enough that there's not that opportunity learn how to collaborate. Whereas participation in more visited articles forces you to interact. For me, other details--languages, location, interests, intent---are not of immediate concern and would just be a distraction in a pop-up. It's only after a longer collaboration, where I have a sense of a person, that I might venture on to their user and talk pages. (But that's just me, and I have minimalist sensibilities.)

As for non-registered editors, I don't see the value of these metrics here, as several users may be sharing an IP address, But other identifying information could be useful. Occasionally, the organization (typically a college or school district) associated with an IP address is identified. That would be very useful on a pop-up and could even be a deterrent to bad behavior. Barte1 (talk) 16:50, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Languages

Should user profiles include languages so that at some point we have a better sense of which languages a user wants to read and write in? Barte/ Notafish?

Page/project title suggestion

Wikipedia and other wikis already have "user profiles". We just call them userpages, and they're unstructured wiki documents with lots templates special made for them. Consequently, I think the more appropriate name for this page/project is something like "structure profiles" or "structured userpages". The name user profiles is really only appropriate in the mobile context, where userpages don't yet get integrated in to the site's design even when you're logged in. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:48, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

That Makes a lot of sense, thanks for suggesting. Vibhabamba (talk) 00:00, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

"Structured Profile" was used for a time before it was turned into GlobalProfile. This page should probably be merged with that.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 01:04, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Good call Jorm. Will do on both counts. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 01:10, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, I meant merging both projects together, actually. This seems like a facet of the larger "Global Profile" project than its own thing, unless we're specifically calling it out as prototype work for the larger project. "GlobalProfile" was chosen as a name over "Structured Profile" because the concept of structured data about people wasn't as compelling as having globally structured data about people.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 01:24, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

There were suggestions of using 'Global Structured Profile'. Vibhabamba (talk) 21:10, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

A profile is something the users create themselves, perhaps along some structure. The Special:UserProfile is anything but a profile, it's just a random agglomeration about some futile stuff a bot somewhere gathered. The only thing currently existing that deserves the name "profile" in it is the user page. The Special:UserProfile pretends to be something that's far from what it is. BTW: Where is the needed community validation process of this "feature", i.e. where did you go active to the communities about this? --♫ Sänger - Talk - superputsch must go 05:38, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Current Data Set from Group Discussions with Users

• Banner Image
• Barnstars
• Location
• Last Seen Online
• Trophies or Achievements in featured articles
• Avatar
• People I edit with
• Mentors
• A freeform input field for explaining intent
• Velocity (Activity over a fixed period of time)
• People whose work I am interested in
• Languages + Fluency
• Project Groups that I am interested in
• Date of Account Creation
• Years of Participation or actual year of joining
• Indication of being a new user
• Thanks Received
• Articles created with Page Views on Articles you create
• Files Uploaded with Page Views on Files you upload

Annual plan 2013-14 passage (moved from page)

This project is (or seems to be) also mentioned on the WMF annual plan 2013-14:[1]

This set of additional hires would be primarily focused on two areas that are known to be strongly linked to user engagement: identity and affiliation. The first area describes changes to how a user is visible in our projects, extending unstructured user pages with globally shared profile information that can be surfaced throughout the user experience.

[...]

Even if we begin hiring for this team in 2013-14, the full team is unlikely to be in place until close to the end of the fiscal year. Early engineering efforts will likely focus on user profile improvements but may not go past the prototyping stage.