Thank you to everyone who was involved in answering the wiki's survey this year. Whether you're a regular editor or simply just a reader, it has been extremely useful to gauge feedback from the community. So without further ado, here goes.
The survey received 2,374 submissions, which is 877 more responses than last year's survey received.
The following methods were used for promoting the survey:
- The wiki homepage
- The wiki sidebar
- In the wiki news section
- In a Yew Grove thread
- In a /r/RuneScape thread
- In the #welcome channel on RuneScape:Off-site/Discord
918 of the clicks through to the survey seem to come only from the sidebar module, which suggests that it was extremely effective in catching people's attention and directing them to the survey. We didn't really track clicks from anywhere else, as we tended to use a direct link to the survey in those places.
During the survey, a different set of questions were provided for people that answered that they have never edited or barely ever edited. Some questions that I will mention below are for those responses, so do not be confused if you never saw those questions when taking the survey.
Graphs
These are not necessarily shown in the order that they were included in the survey.
This makes sense. Most of our survey clicks I assume came from the wiki itself, as we had much broader promotion than last year. The sidebar promotion for the survey seemed to be a big help. This graph looks more or less the same as last year's graph for the same question.
Now this is slightly more interesting. There are less people that don't edit the wiki compared to last year. Of course, the fact that there were a lot more responses may have something to do with it though. The good thing to note is that every piece of the pie chart looks like it has expanded a bit compared to last years results. There are more people editing a few times a day, occasionally, and rarely. Any edit is an edit, right? I'm glad that we seem to have more of these.
I think the obvious points to make about these are that our quests/skill training guides should be maintained more regularly than they currently are. As with anything in the game, with time, things can become outdated. Our calculators could probably do with refining. Update articles, while not really useful to people, aren't complex or particularly time-consuming to maintain, so I don't think this graph gives us reason to start considering devoting less resources to them. It's nice to know that people think drop tables are helpful, as we tend to spend a fair amount of time (especially during events) working on them to ensure they are accurate.
These are pretty self-explanatory. There's a fine balance between a high quality article and those that have a lot of unnecessary information, and I think this graph proved that the former is much more favoured by our readers.
Out of everything in the survey, this is something that confused me the most. Apparently, our community efforts are never heard of. We didn't really touch on this in last year's survey which is why I wanted to include it this time around. I think there are a few potential reasons for these results. With the Events Team I think at least on places like the RuneScape subreddit, we spam it quite regularly with our "___ event is starting in ___ minutes" posts and that kinda pisses people off. I don't think anyone really knew our Discord server existed, though we do have a pretty obvious message in the sidebar about it. Our in-game clan isn't really advertised much anymore, but I guess it's not going to get that much attention from non-editors. Our Twitter account isn't great. If we're honest, it's used irregularly and doesn't have as much interaction with the community as it could do. The subreddit interaction is perhaps better than most other things, which I'm glad about - I've been making a little bit of an effort to interact with people there (such as sharing analytics earlier in the year). Lastly, there's a little bit of negativity about The Wikian than the other community efforts and I think this could in part be down to spite because of the title's exclusivity, but also because of the way we give it out (I'll touch on this later).
I would have cut the 'Never heard of it' bars out of this graph, however I think they're really important to include given that it indicates that we aren't pushing our community efforts near enough as much as we should be.
I guess the people here that answered that it was very hard to edit are either casual editors or those that only edit on occasion. I think if we take all of the results from each of these answers and put them together, we can conclude that our editing guides could do with being refined, and we should provide help for editing some of our most common types of templates.
It's good to see that more people seem to be using the source editor than Wikia's VisualEditor, as the VisualEditor is fairly bad. Of course, if the wiki was running on an updated MediaWiki version and used the actively maintained VisualEditor extension, it would run and behave a lot better. It's not actually a bad editor, but Wikia's version of it is. We should continue to push users into learning more about editing source wikitext.
- Dark mode isn't really that important, but can be nice to develop when there's nothing else to work on.
- Articles about JMods aren't really important either, so we should probably reduce the time we spend on maintaining these articles.
- Invention is important. I'm not sure if Gaz' project is still going on, but it is vital that we continue our work on invention related info if we haven't covered everything already.
- Missing images are kinda important. I guess they make things look nice.
- It is a mixed bag as to whether ironman support is something that we should dedicate time to, but I feel like we should make an effort to make our info ironman friendly where possible.
- Quick guide chat options are more or less the same. If we're able to add them in we should, but it might not be too necessary to make extra effort in going through and replaying quests or something for these.
- Existing guides are obviously getting more and more obsolete after each update, so there should probably be a conscious effort to improve these. Things like our money making guides are some of the biggest issues, I think.
- I'm unsure as to why guides on editing the wiki didn't get as much support as I'd assumed, but I guess editing isn't really something that most people are interested in.
It's nice to see that most people who have edited have created an account. There's not much more to say about this question other than that.
Multiple choice
For these questions, I'll post the top answers and their percentages/results compared with all of the other answers in the question.
Is there any reason that you haven't edited much, if at all?
Out of 2,208 responses
- I hardly ever find anything that needs editing (1,150, 52%)
- I'm afraid of getting it wrong or breaking something (1,046, 47.4%)
- I'm not interested in editing (687, 31.1%)
- I don't understand how editing works (537, 24.3%)
- I don't want to create an account (409, 18.5%)
- It takes too much time and effort (242, 11%)
Other answers include: the rules are confusing, someone tells me I'm wrong, always gets reverted, lack of experience, I did not know I could edit
What kind of edits have you made?
Out of 166 responses
- General spelling fixes and minor edits (151, 91%)
- Uploaded or edited images (88, 53%)
- Reverting vandalism (72, 43.4%)
- Created new articles (70, 42.2%)
- Created or modified templates/modules (65, 39.2%)
- Contributed to on-site discussions (52, 31.3%)
- Adding charm logs (40, 24.1%)
Other answers include: anything, major rewrites, translations/interlanguage links
Open questions
For these questions, I'll show a tag cloud of some of the most reoccurring words, then go into more detail about some responses that kept popping up.
What part of editing has been most difficult for you to do in the past?
The biggest issue people seem to have is either with the editors (particularly the source editor), and editing templates. I think there isn't a lot of documentation on how to edit certain templates on the wiki. Documentation on how to use them is nice, but if something goes wrong or needs changing then it should be clear to editors - especially new editors - how to fix this.
The responses to this question also featured some criticism on how we handle people that are making edits, e.g we don't handle the edits with good faith. There seems to be a slight problem with the way that "admins" act in this regard when reverting changes, though I suspect that the use of that word is probably down to the confusion about it being a wiki that anyone can edit, and not every long-term user is an "admin".
Do you have any suggestions on what would encourage you to edit?
The answers to this question were mostly an overwhelming amount of "if there was a guide". I think that with this coming up as an answer so much, we should push the guides we have at RuneScape:Editing to be more visible. Having it nested under a menu at the top of the page is accessible, yes, but many people just won't look there. I should note that we included a link to the editing guides during the survey, and a lot of responses here seem to reflect the fact that they only noticed we had guides because of that link.
As you'd expect, there is a fair amount of requests for incentives, which I think we do try and provide with things like The Wikian title. I guess we don't make that visible enough either though? Perhaps it might be a good idea to look into running editing competitions with in-game monetary rewards or something like that, which could perhaps get a lot of people into editing.
Is there anything that you think could be improved that hasn't been mentioned?
To be honest, I think it's clear to see what the majority of responses to this question were by looking at the tag cloud above. According to a lot of people, our guides are outdated. The main guides that came up specifically in answer to this question were our money making guides and monster/boss strategy guides. I know that a lot of editors probably aren't interested in PvM much, but it might be a good idea to try and find some of the people that are to help improve the monster guides.
The money making guides are in a sorry state. Unfortunately, with how RuneScape is, it can be hard to provide up-to-date money making methods and ensure that the guides are always detailing the most efficient and "best" methods. We already took steps earlier this year to reduce how obsolete the guides are by removing those that have a negative profit from the list on the article, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
Calculators fall into a similar bracket - they work, but people tend to use sites like RuneHQ and Tip.It for their calculators as they are up-to-date and have more features. I think we can definitely make an improvement to improve our own calculators, but I imagine that knowledge of editing them is something that not a lot of people have. Aside from guides in editors' userspace, we don't have any actual guides that detail how to modify these.
There are also some mentions of preferring there to not be a requirement to have an account. I feel like this is something that has been misinterpreted or hasn't been clarified enough. Anyone can edit wiki articles, apart from those that have some kind of protection (which not many do). While it is better to create an account to be able to get better recognition and to edit protected pages, it isn't a necessity. I'm not sure what we can do to clarify to people that editing is possible without an account, but maybe it's something we should think about.
There are some suggestions on systems like being able to request for other editor's/admin help (I guess this similar to the issue system that Gaz was working on at one point. I'm not sure what came of that though.
Is there anything else you would like to say?
Users have resorted to using Adblock (I wouldn't blame them) and some are having problems using the wiki altogether in conjunction with playing the game because of the amount of ads on the screen. Maybe it would be useful for Wikia to see how much their ads are actually impacting readers and cut down on them. Though, maybe I'm just too hopeful.
I don't understand what exactly has caused typing something into search that matches an existing page title to go to the search results instead of the page. It is annoying, and has been picked up on by a few people in this survey. There are also responses about the lack of responsiveness of the search bar. Ball is in your court here, Wikia.
Other than a lot of Wikia-related stuff, there are a lot of "thanks" and "keep it up". I think this shows that the content that we create is used by many, and found helpful by the wide majority of the community. There has never really been a good way to give thanks for edits or contributions, so it's nice that this can happen through the medium of an anonymous survey. In the future it could be nice to have a "thanks" system on the wiki for edits that isn't intrusive and generally helps people feel encouraged to edit more.
Discussion
This thread took far too long to write - I will email Wikia with a link to this thread to help discuss some of the points raised by the survey. https://i.imgur.com/xHR7zpA.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/6encXAo.png 20:49, September 17, 2017 (UTC)
Support - "2,374 submissions, which is 877 more responses" - How many of those were flarefox though? Or did you cut them out before showing us the results?--
Scuzzy Beta
21:09, September 17, 2017 (UTC)
- Flarefox did spam some responses but got bored after about 10, he definitely didn't influence anything other than writing "flarefox was here" in every field lol (which wasn't taken into account anywhere) https://i.imgur.com/xHR7zpA.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/6encXAo.png 21:15, September 17, 2017 (UTC)