"Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."
AUSTIN, Texas—The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February's Know2Comment, an open source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site's comment section.
[NRK is "Norsk Riks Kringkasting" Norway Public Broadcasting - Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRK -- MEM]
"It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."
The story has since been told a few times, but Grut's recent refresh on the topic is just as compelling for its comment-section impact as it is for NRK's thought process on how to make Internet media a better place: invite readers to have an active stake in improving it.
[...]
... Grut had his own eureka moment while showering before biking to the office: why not a quiz? A WordPress plugin could force users to correctly answer a few multiple-choice questions before the page's comment field would appear. Once he got to the office, he and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source.
"Naturally, this was paid for by Norwegian people, so you can thank them if you want to implement it," Grut said when emphasizing that he was happy if more sites tried it out.
Should you slap the plugin into your own WordPress install, it's then a matter of having a story author or editor come up with multiple choice questions (and Grut says he's still unsure whether basic facts or fuller comprehension make for better quiz questions in this case). He admits having no A/B testing data to confidently determine Know2Comment's impact, but he says "99 percent" of NRKbeta's most frequent users were "overwhelmingly positive" about the function.
Still, he and NRKbeta have softened their use of the plugin in the past 13 months. "In the first period after we did this, we thought it was really fun to write these quizzes," Grut told Ars Technica. "We had a good time writing them. But then we realized not every article is in need of this. We are a tech site; we don't have a lot of controversy, so there's not a big need for it. We use it now on stories where we anticipate there'll be uninformed debate to add this speed bump."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/0...
[NRK is "Norsk Riks Kringkasting" Norway Public Broadcasting - Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRK -- MEM]
"It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."
The story has since been told a few times, but Grut's recent refresh on the topic is just as compelling for its comment-section impact as it is for NRK's thought process on how to make Internet media a better place: invite readers to have an active stake in improving it.
[...]
... Grut had his own eureka moment while showering before biking to the office: why not a quiz? A WordPress plugin could force users to correctly answer a few multiple-choice questions before the page's comment field would appear. Once he got to the office, he and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source.
"Naturally, this was paid for by Norwegian people, so you can thank them if you want to implement it," Grut said when emphasizing that he was happy if more sites tried it out.
Should you slap the plugin into your own WordPress install, it's then a matter of having a story author or editor come up with multiple choice questions (and Grut says he's still unsure whether basic facts or fuller comprehension make for better quiz questions in this case). He admits having no A/B testing data to confidently determine Know2Comment's impact, but he says "99 percent" of NRKbeta's most frequent users were "overwhelmingly positive" about the function.
Still, he and NRKbeta have softened their use of the plugin in the past 13 months. "In the first period after we did this, we thought it was really fun to write these quizzes," Grut told Ars Technica. "We had a good time writing them. But then we realized not every article is in need of this. We are a tech site; we don't have a lot of controversy, so there's not a big need for it. We use it now on stories where we anticipate there'll be uninformed debate to add this speed bump."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/0...
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