This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. See m:Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages for summary of multi-wiki discussions. |
This is an RFC relating to the Related Pages extension. It is currently available in beta. You may test it by enabling Related pages under Beta features in Special:Preferences. The WMF is not looking to deploy it at this time, and does not want to push it on Wikis that do not want it. We are willing to make reasonable changes if they will make the feature desirable or more valuable. This is an experimental use of the RFC process and has no outcome other than to generate feedback for the WMF. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading team wants to know:
Collaboratively drafted by Alsee, Melamrawy (WMF), and Jkatz (WMF). Alsee (talk) 08:07, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
The Related Pages extension (also known as the Read more feature) is an experiment carried out by the Reading team in order to further engage readers and help them learn more. It is primarily geared towards users who are interested in learning, but do not have a specific goal in mind. A user reaching the bottom of an article is shown the title and lead image for three articles that relate to the article they just finished. The related articles are selected by software based on textual similarity to the current article, with a preference for articles with many inbound links, and a preference for articles carrying the templates for Featured article, Featured picture, Featured sound, Featured list, or Good article. (More details at Related_pages#FAQ.) Editors may override these software selections by adding up to three ((#related: page title)) to the page.
The premise of Related Pages is that users who get to the bottom of an article have passed over blue links and "See also", have finished the article, and are still interested in reading more. Surfacing articles that are similar might be exactly what they are looking for.
While Related pages is primarily intended to increase learning by offering suggestions to the reader, learning is a very hard value to measure. As a result, we have been looking at engagement with the feature. This has been released on apps and saw a 16% click-through (for users who saw it). On mobile web, there is a 19% click-through (for users who saw it) The desktop numbers are much lower at 3.4%. While this rate is far higher than the rate of any 3 links on the page (see Research:Improving link coverage) and certainly higher than those towards the bottom of the page (see graph) there is some concern that this is simply because there is an image. To counter that, there is data that suggests the new clicks are additive--meaning they lengthening reading sessions and are not taking clicks away from other links, but these results are not definitive.
Rationale: If readers are offered suggestions that are similar to the topic they are reading about, this will further engage them, it will further educate them about the topic they are looking for, and supports a richer reading experience for those who are just randomly browsing topics.
We are using the RFC process as an experiment to see if can be a useful tool for determining product direction.
If the feature is deployed here or on other Wikis in the future, how can we improve or change the feature? More specifically, is there anything that would need to change before you would want it on your wiki?
Our first step in testing new products is to make them available under Beta features in Special:Preferences. Logged-in volunteers can try experimental new features. This is where we are now.
Next steps:
If Beta goes well then our next step in testing is normally to see how it performs for a limited number of randomly selected logged-out users (A/B testing). Due to privacy reasons, the best metric we have is going to be the % of people who see related pages who click on them--we are aware that this is not an ideal metric, but it is directionally helpful. For logged-in users, currently on mobile we are seeing a 19% Click-rate and a 4% click rate on desktop. Another alternative would be to run a survey to see if users who click on a related page entry have any difference in satisfaction over other users, but self-reported satisfaction results rarely change.
Or we can partially roll it out on several wikis at a time and see. The argument for the latter is that this has been on the apps for almost a year and seems to be doing well.
Or this can be just one of the extensions available for enabling on individual wikis which happened to request it per standard procedure Requesting wiki configuration changes.
Please discuss on this page's talk page.