User:SuggestBot/Interviews/User-49

As part of our current research study we would like to know a bit more about you and your involvement on Wikipedia and your use of SuggestBot. Your participation is voluntary, meaning you are free to not answer any questions or withdraw at any time. You can find more information about the study and contact information in the consent information sheet. To respond you can edit this page and write the answers below the questions like it was a talk page. If you wish to submit your answers in private you can email us directly.

If you have questions about any part of this, feel free to let us know. I (User:Nettrom) am the researcher responsible for the project and I’ve got this page on my watchlist so I can respond fairly quickly. I might also stop by to ask some follow-up questions, e.g. to clarify if there was something I could not understand. Regards, Nettrom (talk) 18:10, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Articles you are interested in.
1. How do you decide which articles to work on?
  1. Often it's just by complete accident - I either link through from something else, or its because I'm generally browsing Wiki and find something amiss. Also I occasionally work on topical articles - like for instance I've recently been working up Olympic related athlete articles to run in Did You Know for the 2012 Games.
2. Are there certain features of Wikipedia that help you make these decisions, e.g. recent changes, community portal, WikiProjects, etc?
  1. Categories - especially stub categories, but the project tags on talk pages help a great deal, as I usually click through the ratings there to see the stubs or start class articles, and then refer to the better classes of articles to see the proper structure (if its a subject I'm not familiar with) or as something to aim for.
3. What kind of things to do on Wikipedia do you find most interesting?
  1. Expanding articles - particularly stubs. I used to work up a lot more Good Articles than I do now, I to be honest I find stub improvement just more satisfying. It's nice when you open an article which is three lines and you leave it with five paragraphs. Especially regarding biographies as its surprising how much information you can find on a stub bio if you're willing to spend the time looking. And occasionally you end up adding so much information that it becomes good enough to be a GA. Doesn't happen often. I also create little "projects" in my head, like improving articles relating to the 1948 Olympics, or the Queens Park Rangers football club, or Michelin star restaurants in the UK.
How much time (in hours per week) do you generally spend on Wikipedia?
1. Usually I spend most evening sitting in front of the TV on Wiki doing work. So I'd say three to four hours an evening, and then eight to ten hours on a weekend depending on if I'm in the house or not.
When SuggestBot has posted suggestions to you, what do you do with them?
1. I have a look through them to see if there are ones I can fix up. I might not do them straight away, but certainly I do refer back to the SuggestBot postings later when I'm stuck on something to work on and I need inspiration.
What makes a specific suggestion from SuggestBot good or bad for you?
1. I guess the only "bad" is when it's something I've heard of, which does happen. But for the most part SuggestBot comes up with articles I've never heard of but is related to subjects I'm interested in. The only time it doesn't do so great is when I'm really working on random articles during a month which I expect simply throws the searching algorithms off.
We have recently run an experiment where we added information about the suggested articles, in your case icons similar to this one:
1. How did you interpret the information?
  1. I generally look at the lowest scores first, almost as a sort of priority system as presumably those are the worst (for whatever reason) articles.
2. How did you use that information when thinking about the suggestions?
  1. Only what to prioritise really.
3. What other types of information would be helpful?
  1. Article size could be handy, as could the date of the last edit. But I wouldn't claim either as priorities - perhaps a function could see people having additional information added as an option they could turn on or off.
Do you have suggestions for how to improve SuggestBot? It could be specific types of articles or work you would like to see added, things that need to be improved, or anything else for that matter. Let us know what we should work on!
1. I wouldn't say to suggest specific types of articles, but perhaps exemptions - like for instance I could specify the a category of something like "Canadian television shows" and then no articles from that category would be suggested, regardless of what I edited.Miyagawa (talk) 19:36, 10 July 2012 (UTC)