OpenStreetMap 開放街圖
3 years of welcome messages, more than 3400 of them
於 2016年十二月13日 由 SimonPoole 以English發表。 上一次更新在 2016年十二月14日。Three years back I started sending welcome messages to new mappers on behalf of SOSM, using a simple tool chain based on the RSS feed of new mappers from Pascal Neis.
The message is not customised as from the beginning it was seen as a replacement for the welcome message that had gone away with the web site redesign. The text (in 4 languages, no Romansh version though) is designed to welcome the new contributor and give pointers to the resources available nationally.
Has it worked? Difficult to say, as the whole point was a replacement of something that existed before, we didn’t expect drastic change and we didn’t get it.
And, no, I’m not stopping :-)
討論
由 Andy Allan 於 2016年12月13日 11時16分 發表的評論
You could try an A/B experiment for a while - take the next 1000 users, send welcome messages to 50% of them, and then see if there’s any difference between the two groups of users.
由 Vincent de Phily 於 2016年12月13日 16時30分 發表的評論
Or even compare against all the users (in other locations probably) which you didn’t welcome to see if, for example, the retention ratio is better ?
由 Andy Allan 於 2016年12月13日 16時32分 發表的評論
Vincent de Phily - you would need to choose them randomly for it to be effective. If your choice of send/not-send is based on a particular factor (e.g. location) then it skews the results of the experiment.
由 SomeoneElse 於 2016年12月14日 01時35分 發表的評論
A while ago I did have a look at the retention rate in the Polish community, where 75% were welcomed and 25% not (see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/welcomewg/2013-March/000022.html and the links back from there). There wasn’t an appreciable difference when I looked between 2 and 3 months after the message was sent (or not).
What I didn’t look at that would have been interesting was contribution quality, and I’ve not gone back to look at longer term retention (anyone can do this - just look at new Polish mappers from that period whose UID was divisble by 4 or not).
由 SimonPoole 於 2016年12月14日 11時16分 發表的評論
@Vincent de Phily the difficulty is naturally that, on a larger scale, we don’t actually know who got a welcome message or not (only who we sent one).
The more general problem with measuring the success (or absence of such) is on the one hand that the numbers are very small: we would expect perhaps 10% of contributors to edit more than once and an even smaller number to become regulars. Halving the numbers to do A/B testing (I wouldn’t want to stop for a while because sign ups very often depend on external factors which we can’t control) is not going to help with that. And on the other hand that effects may be hard to measure, contribution quality particularly. We do know, as already said that there hasn’t been any drastic changes, wit: http://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries&country=Switzerland which would appear to be stable (contrary for example to Germany where the number of daily editors has been going down for a while).
Interesting enough one thing has subjectively changed over the last 2-3 years: we have a lot less broken municipality boundaries than we used to have (it used to be a at least once per week, and now that is extremely rare), but that could just as well be due to better tools.
由 mmd 於 2016年12月16日 18時43分 發表的評論
Well, it would be interesting to hear if you’ve got any feedback from new mappers? Did they find the welcoming message useful/interesting/helpful?
I used to monitor my area for new mappers for some time, try to guess what they’re most interested in and sent them some customized hints. Certainly, that approach doesn’t scale at all, but it would be interesting to if such targeted hints would be more effective, or if it just doesn’t matter.
由 SimonPoole 於 2016年12月16日 19時00分 發表的評論
@mmd rarely, however I do superficially check contributions and if necessary follow up with a 2nd message or changeset comment, that will typically get some more feedback.