Research:Watchlist and Task Prioritization
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
An account holder can maintain a list of articles/pages on a Watchlist, which is a Special page that displays changes made to said pages and their associated talk pages. Recently, a subsection of wishes within the Community Wishlist was grouped to form a Task Prioritization focus area. A few wishes posed involved the watchlist, and it emerged as a clear area for further study; it plays an important role as one of the key pages filtering for recent changes on wiki. With this project, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of how moderation/patrolling use cases transpire on the page and how the watchlist fits in more generally to users' on-wiki task workflows.
Methods
editSemi-structured interviews will be held with participants (from moderator/patroller type user groups) on English and Romanian Wikipedias. The interviews will consist of questions about usage, sentiment, and observations of their workflows on Watchlist.
Timeline
editInterviews will be held through March and a final report will be completed around mid-April.
Policy, Ethics and Human Subjects Research
editThis study follows the Wikimedia Foundation's data retention guidelines and data publication guidelines.
Initial survey/screener respondents will be able to review the project's privacy statement, and scheduled interviewees will review and sign a project-specific release form prior to participation.