Wikipedia talk:Snuggle/Archives/2013/July

Visibility of Snuggle activities

Hello future Snuggle users. A design consideration for Snuggle has come under question recently that I would like to have a public discussion about. How public should activities in Snuggle be? Right now, there's really only two types of actions that can be taken in Snuggle:

• Categorizing users as good-faith, ambiguous or bad-faith
• Performing actions that affect the wiki (e.g. send a message, invite to teahouse and report abuse)

The latter activities are already public since all edits in Wikipedia are public, but the former (user categorization) could potentially be hidden within Snuggle and only made visible to Snuggle users. In a recent update to my work log, I posted a screenshot of an activity monitor for Snuggle that would make the two activities (categorization and user actions) public.

My intention is let the transparency inherent in a public activity log encourage good behavior among Snuggle users through a sense of accountability. I find visibility to be a good strategy in general for Wiki activities. This is something I've incorporated into the development of Snuggle (see the work log) and my research activities (see my contribs on meta:Research). However, some of the alpha testers have brought up concerns about problems that could result from making this log public. I'm making this post to give everyone a chance to chime in.

What do you think? Should your Snuggle activities be made part of a public record or should visibility of the activity log be restricted in some way? --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 20:22, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

I just tried out Snuggle tonight for the first time. The logo is incredibly cute! It looks like a cross between an element from the Periodic Chart and a Chicklet chewing gum quadrilateral. I found it easy to use, well designed, intuitive. I am willing to trust you with my log-in credentials, as you are a member of WMF. Also, I wanted to say "THANK YOU!" for not logging me out of all 28 Wikipedia-related websites when I logged out of Snuggle. I don't recall which toolserver does that, but it is very annoying! Anyway, to get to the point, and specifically why I am commenting here, is that I would rather not have my activity on Snuggle be too accessible. I don't have any specific recommendations as to what "too accessible" entails. I realize that that is vague, but my concern should not be a high priority for you, as I'm a small, minor Wikipedia participant. But since you asked, I am responding. Transparency is generally for the best, but there's also security by obscurity, which isn't fool-safe, but in this case, it probably need not be. --FeralOink (talk) 05:16, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your concern. Just letting me know helps me make better design decisions for Snuggle. I'm interested in ways to both have self-policing in Snuggle and not make you feel uncomfortably exposed. Could you tell me how you think about Wikipedia's openness? For example, Special:Recentchanges and Special:Contributions publicly list your activities. Do you feel as uncomfortable on wiki? --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 15:03, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi EpochFail,

I can see this is an area where it is difficult to make the correct design decision.

I think the reason that classifying users in Snuggle feels different to the vast majority of Wikipedia edits is that it involves making a judgement about other users. People tend to keep their thoughts about others to themselves. This is perhaps compounded on Wikipedia by maxims like assume good faith, no personal attacks and don't bite the new comers. Even {{uw-v1}} uses quite neutral language and tries to assume good faith. In contrast, classifying a user as "bad-faith" is very personal.

I think we have two issues:

• Will this feeling put-off a lot of potential Snuggle users
• Beyond the feelings of potential Snuggle users, what are the practical implications?

In most cases the practical implications a nil. However, I can imagine you might get a few exceptions. These would come in two categories:

1. Good-faith editors who are insulted by being classified as bad-faith. Hurt feelings and possibly one less user.
2. Bad-faith editors who get jollies by creating multiple accounts and seeing how they get classified. There are a whole load of WP:BEANS ways I can imagine some saddo getting his jollies out of it.

A relevant guideline for point 1 is WP:BITE, a the relevant essay to point 2 is WP:DENY. These suggest that a degree of privacy would help the project.

On the other hand, I can see the point about accountability and all keeping an eye on each other.

I think possibly the happy medium is to restrict visibility Snuggle results to other Snuggle users, but this doesn't stop the saddos creating a an account to log in to Snuggle to see how their socks are doing. So you could restrict it to some subset such as those with reviewer rights, or those that have classified more than 100 newbies, but that invites accusations of a kabal... so whatever you do there is going to be an issue. It's just a question of picking the option which minimises the down side.

This isn't a massive issue at the moment because Snuggle is relatively little known. It would be good to make a decision before it does become an issue.

I think that whatever decision we come to, the biggest thing is to not advertise the existence of Snuggle to newbies. It's not like its a top-secret project, its just that occasionally someone will misclassify a newbie. That shouldn't be a biggie because it shouldn't negatively effect the experience of a good-faith newbie (relative to a situation of Snuggle not existing) but we don't want to bite anyone.

Yaris678 (talk) 18:09, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your write-up Yaris678. I found your perspective very informative. I'm planning to set up an IRC office hours to discuss this issue and others that have come up. I hope that, together, we can come up with a solution that will work. I'll be sending out a message to the sign-up list once I've settled on timing. --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 15:20, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

When I brought up this concern in the IRC session earlier today, no one was interested in advocating that Snuggle actions be less visible. In fact, we discussed some ways to make Snuggle activities even *more* visible. I'm not quite sure how to move forward with this issue. It would help if I had a proposal for how we could maintain the self-policing nature of Snuggle and also make activities less visible. Without that, I don't know how to move forward in dealing with this concern --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 00:52, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Ping @Yaris678: and @FeralOink:. --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 00:53, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Given that Snuggle is a promising new application, I believe that its activities should remain completely public for the time being. You might consider something similar to the Stiki leaderboard. Is there a quantitative score for desirability? If so, you could post the average score for the newbies that a Snuggle user rated as good faith versus bad faith. Andrew³²⁷ 06:01, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I am thoroughly against anything like the Stiki leaderboard. We would not want to have the competition atmosphere rising within Snugglers too. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 07:02, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

It wouldn't even have to include number of edits made, it could be arranged alphabetically or by date of first use of Snuggle and only contain editors with ten or more uses. I just think some accountability could be useful in the long run. Andrew³²⁷ 12:01, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't think we should get to worried about presenting summary statistics. Yes, it is possible that it would encourage undesirable behaviour. Number of classifications of users could encourage people to classify recklessly. Something on the accuracy of classifications could dissuade people from considering hard cases. But then again, we've worried about people obsessing over edit count for years and actually the encyclopedia mostly gets on OK. I think edit count is always going to be a more tempting stat to game because it is so widely known about. Therefore the risks from Snuggle stats would be significantly less than a risk we are already coping with perfectly fine. Yaris678 (talk) 18:46, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Login in an external site

Thank you for your work! I wanted to test but then I saw the login option and I wondered what does it give. But first of all it felt awkward to put my credentials in an external site. Thoughts?--Qgil (talk) 18:11, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

That's a good, healthy reaction. When you put your credentials into Snuggle, you're trusting me (the only developer and root on the web server Snuggle runs on) to only pass those credentials onto the Wikipedia API and not store anything. There's good reason to trust me (I'm WMF staff, I've signed an NDA to not share your credentials, my code is open source, etc.), but I'd much rather that you didn't need to trust me (or my code) with your credentials. Sadly, there's no proper facility in MediaWiki to allow me to allow you to log in and perform actions that affect the wiki without taking your password (see OAuth for a potential solution). I'm currently working with devs at the WMF to get OAuth support implemented as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I'd recommend that you either register a legitimate alternative account that you only use in Snuggle or you could simply wait for OAuth support (might be available in a month or so). In the meantime, you'll be able to browse Snuggle and examine newcomer behavior without logging in. --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 19:21, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Ok, this is good to know. Maybe it would be useful to explain this with a little disclaimer somewhere near the login form? Not that it would make any difference from a privacy point of view, but have you considered hosting Snuggle at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ ?--QuimGil (talk) 19:00, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Aaron has looked in to hosting Snuggle at wikitech: (a.k.a. WP:LABS), but they need to support OAuth first. Please see User talk:EpochFail#Snuggle on Labs. Best. 64.40.54.163 (talk) 01:44, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! It's true. Snuggle was originally hosted @ labs, but due to the OAuth issue, I moved to the University of Minnesota server we're on at the moment (GroupLens Research is my research lab within the University). I like the idea of adding info about how login information is handled to the UI. I'll add that to the top of my list of updates to Snuggle's UI and do my best to get it pushed out before the holiday. --EpochFail^{(talk • work)} 15:16, 3 July 2013 (UTC)