Research:Watchlist and Task Prioritization
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
[edit]Semi-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
[edit]Interviews will be held through March and a final report will be completed around mid-April.
Policy, Ethics and Human Subjects Research
[edit]This 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.