Wikipedia makes it easier for new volunteers with a heart under the belt to get stuck with a special ‘love button’. Logged in users have various ways of their ‘WikiLove’ direction writers express themselves.
Logged in users see a user-page on the test page of Wikipedia a heart to the WikiLove-page leads. Here they can have their gratitude, compliments, or encouragement showing to a user by means of a message and a logo such as that of a star, glass of beer or a kitten. On the 29th of June will be the feature to go live on the English Wikipedia site.
The functionality should be mostly new writers motivate to continue with their voluntary work. Research by Wikimedia shows that 78 percent of volunteers indicate that compliments from others the main reason is to do more. At the same time finds the wiki-foundation that the editing and writing of articles are becoming more and more difficult has become, and the probability has become larger that new users with corrections and criticisms.
“The quality and reliability to increase, its advanced automatic mechanisms developed that new users get acquainted with standards, policies and conventions. The show of appreciation towards other users is however still a manual affair,” says Howie Fung, product manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.
