Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Badges/research

Research

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Have the research be done in three parts, namely answering these main questions:

Question 1: How are badges currently being used on Wikipedia? What are some common practices? Methods:

  • Survey overview of common projects
  • “Comparative Analysis”?
  • Interviews with project organizers

Question 2: Do badges increase editor retention and activity? Methods:

  • Collect user editing behavior over time:
  • Divide users into the following groups:
Users who participate in the Teahouse with an invite to participate in the badge program (+TH, -BG)
Users who participate in the Teahouse without an invite to participate in badge program (+TH, -BG)
Users who get a Teahouse invite and an invite to participate in the badge program but don't participate in the Teahouse (-TH, +BG)
Users who get a Teahouse invite but no invite for badge program and don't end up participating in the Teahouse (-TH, -BG)

Question 3: What do we know about people that are using badges? Methods:

  • Track where users are coming from when they respond to the invitation to participate with in the teahouse with or without badges.
  • Survey demographic questions:
  • Gender
  • Age
  • Motivations for editing
  • What they do with themselves
  • Articles they like to edit the most (projects they participate in)

Question 4: How are badges perceived by the people involved (hosts and guests)? What are people’s reactions? Methods:

  • Track badge usage rate and nominations
  • Request comments, questions, and suggestions
  • Survey questions about how they felt their badge experience went

Question 5: What aspects of badge design affect the success of the system? Methods:

  • Track badge usage rate and nominations

Prior research

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Background Research

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The following is a list of some of the information available on badges and how they relate to reputation systems, games, and motivation. Not an exhaustive list by any means and more research will be added as it becomes known:

Mozilla Open Badges Project
Games and Gamification
Badges in Reputation Systems, Community, and Identity
Badges are one of several ways for people to display their reputation on or offline (others include leaderboards, ratings or special names). If they are properly awarded for mastering or achieving something they can signal to others information like skill-level, dedication, age (newbie or expert) or even friendliness of a user. When thought of in the context of reputation systems, the value of badges to users lies in their ability to solve the problem of information asymmetry.
Badges in Learning and Badges as Certification
Examples of 'Failed Badge and Extrinsic Award Systems
Motivation on Wikimedia Projects

See also

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