Consumer Rights Wiki:Year one annual report
With the first year of the Wiki behind us, it's good to look back and see how its come along. We're a long way from where we started, and it's all thanks to your hard work! Louis kicked it all off just over a year ago with a vision that this site could act as a central location where a great deal of information about modern consumer abuses could be stored, and we're well on our way to making that happen.
The survey
Around the first anniversary of the Consumer Rights Wiki, as many of you will know, we released a survey to collect information on people's views and impressions of the Wiki, with the survey being advertised primarily through Louis Rossmann's Youtube channel. We did have some technical issues with the form and lost a number of responses, but the vast majority of responses were collected, and in the end we had over 2800! Thank you everyone for your engagement with the survey.
There are a number of interesting bits of info buried in the data, which has been collated into the images throughout this report. One of the biggest takeaways is that, even amongst Louis' audience (the vast majority of respondents were directed to the survey via his Youtube upload), we're still not anywhere near saturated in terms of people's awareness of the Wiki. This means there's lots of growing still to be done, so please spread the word to anyone who you think might be interested in using or editing the CRW!
The data
First, the good news! Readers have overwhelmingly indicated that they're happy with the quality of the content on the Consumer Rights Wiki. This is an important bit of positive feedback, as it validates the direction we've taken in trying to maintain a high standard for the relevance, verifiability, and neutrality of articles.
The response to the wiki's appearance was somewhat mixed, at least in comparison to your views of its content - the general impression seems to be that it could do with some work. Since the survey went out, we've been making some improvements to the front page, sidebar, and overall look and feel of the website, as well as making the mobile version more functional (though still far from perfect).
In general, it seems that most visitors only check out the wiki once, or a small handful of times, presumably when directly prompted to do so via a call-to-action in one of Louis' videos.
Regarding editors, we can see that whilst only a small number of visitors to the site do go on to become editors, there are a lot of you who have thought about giving it a go, and encouraging more of you to have a go at editing will be a major focus of ours over the next year.
The data from users who either intend to edit, but have not, or do not intend to edit shows that one of the main barriers to new editing is a perception that they lack the knowledge or skill to contribute. This is a myth that we must work to dispel, as the wide range of possible edits users can make means there's almost certainly something that everyone can contribute to the wiki.
Probably the trickiest area of the ones we need to improve, highlighted in the design data displayed earlier, is site navigation - users aren't particularly happy with the current navigability of the site. Often, articles will exist, but aren't easily searchable or in the category they would expect to find them. The two main areas where we think this can be improved are through increased cross-linking of pages, and improved search. Search is something we'll be working on with Jake (the wiki's dev) from a technical perspective, as well as increasing signposting to Special:SearchDigest, which compiles search terms that users are looking for, but are not finding on the wiki. This can serve as a good indication of which redirects and articles might be worth making, and is a way that makes it easier for people to help out with the site's navigability.
We've launched a request for comment on site navigability. If you know anyone with significant experience of wikis and how to make them navigable, please direct them towards this discussion, as it's somewhere that outside expertise could be very helpful!
Challenges and work going forwards
It's worth going through a brief overview of the main challenges we expect to work on as the Consumer Rights Wiki grows over the coming year:
The new user experience
A perennial challenge of community wiki projects, and perhaps the single most important thing to get right, is editor recruitment. We need to get as many new editors in as we can if we want to make the wiki a comprehensive resource, and that means making the new user experience as great as it possibly can be.
To this effect we're going to be working on a range of new user guides for common actions such as creating pages, inserting citations, making minor edits, using talk pages, and so on, which should serve to get new users up to speed without overwhelming them.
Article notices and moderation
One recurring pain point for new and veteran editors alike is the article notice system. While article notices are needed to ensure that improperly verified or aggressively worded articles are not presented uncritically to readers, the limited pool of users with the permissions to remove them can cause problems. The fact that edits that make changes to the lines they sit on get aggressively blocked by filters, even when the article notice is untouched, is also understandably frustrating for many.
To help with this, we're going to be modifying the administrator permissions system, so that we can increase the number of users with the ability to adjust article notices. The exact number of tiers/proposal for this is not certain, but a minimum will be the introduction of a 'superconfirmed' role, which anyone who has made contributions for around a month and seems to have a clear understanding of the wiki's content policies will be eligible for. This will greatly improve the number of editors who are allowed to modify article notices.
We will also be reviewing our edit filters, to see if we can reduce the number of false positives.
Institutional outreach
There are a number of groups and organisations out there for whom collaboration or partnership with the Consumer Rights Wiki might make sense. We would especially love to partner with universities, writing courses, or any similar bodies, with the goal of getting students writing articles on the wiki as part of their coursework; letting them practice an encyclopedic style of research and writing, whilst contributing to a worthwhile cause.
If you represent an institution that you believe would be able to work well together with the Consumer Rights Wiki, please get in touch with the wiki team at [email protected]!
Search engine indexing
We've had consistent technical issues with getting the wiki indexed by search engines ever since the wiki moved to the consumerrights.wiki domain. This is a problem we believe ourselves to be close to solving, but it is unfortunately quite hard to get insight into why search engines aren't properly indexing the site, so we can't be sure when it will be solved. Resolving this should substantially aid our organic growth over the coming year (as will the gradual picking up of our site for the training data of AI models), taking the wiki to new heights!
A community project
Above all else, the Consumer Rights Wiki is, unsurprisingly, a Wiki. This means that it is in all aspects a community project, and that any member of the community can choose to work on improving any aspect of the wiki, be it the content of articles, the wiki's policies and guides, or even the codebase. If you've been reading this, and any of the problems we face or improvements we need to make (or anything else about the wiki!) have left your fingers itching and you going 'I know how we should do that!', then you are absolutely encouraged to make your mark on the wiki and crank out some solutions.
If the thing you want to improve is in an area where you don't have direct permissions as a new user (for example: editing policy pages or the main page), then we'd recommend starting a Request for Comment in the 'Consumer Rights Wiki talk' namespace (for example, like this) where you lay out your proposed changes and see what people think.
If you would like to contribute to the Wiki's codebase, its open-source repository can be found here: https://github.com/FULU-Foundation/crw. Please contact Jake if you feel you have something you'd like to contribute there.
An announcement!
With all that said, we're very pleased to announce that the Wiki's browser extension has finished development! A huge thank you to everyone who's contributed to filling out the wiki's metadata, and to everyone who has contributed to the extension's conceptualisation and development along the way. A special thank you goes to Wayne, for kicking the whole project off, to Sarang for keeping it going, to Schang1146 for his contributions to the Cargo article metadata system, to Jake for managing the project, and to our contracted dev James Dumay, who has done a stellar job of implementing the search.
This also would have been completely impossible without everyone who has been dilligently filling out the metadata on wiki articles as part of the cargo-complete project. Thank you everyone!
The extension is available on both the Chrome and Firefox web-stores, so please try it out and let us know what you think! The entire database of article metadata is held and searched locally in your browser, so it's not sending your browsing patterns anywhere, and is fully open source and auditable at https://github.com/FULU-Foundation/CRW-Extension.
Chrome download link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/consumer-rights-wiki/bppajinomefndbbmopljhbdfefnefdha
Firefox download link: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consumer-rights-wiki/
Summing up
As we all know, wiki articles aren't supposed to have conclusions, so I'll keep this brief. A huge thank you to everyone for sticking with us and helping the wiki grow over the last year, and here's to many more years to come!
Someone's got to keep track of all this anti-consumer nonsense, so it may as well be us.
- Keith, Wiki manager