Wikipedia talk:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism/Planning/MidpointReport2016-2017

Questions and feedback on methodology

I continue to be concerned about the high expense and low returns of the Art+Feminism project – and the shifted approach off Wikipedia for event pages, as well as lack of assertive management of local events. I am also concerned at the amount of people working on this project who are not active Wikipedia editors and/or are providing guidance on how to edit when they are not editing. The current Program Manager has 58 edits but has not edited Wikipedia at all. How does that work?!?

Additionally, it seems that this project has pretty much become unmanageable and disorganized as it grows. The usage of the Outreach Dashboard was problematic because it was implemented out of context. Indeed the on-Wiki main page for A+F is a mess, is confusing, and most importantly, in contrast to previous years, the issue of finding local events was nightmarish to say the least.

I would also like the project to respond to the fact that I was banned from attending the MoMA event, especially given it is supposed to be a feminist open culture movement. Unless it is not. I don't recall people being banned from editathons in the past.

And bottom line: major concerns at the ongoing large funding support by Wikimedia Foundation of an initiative that does not have a clearer approach to onboarding and retaining new editors. This is a once a year optics-friendly press-massaging initiative that seems to be folding in on itself and not really producing meaningful results beyond its initial scope when it started. Bad implementation and bloated training does not seem like it is providing the kind of results that reflect well on Wikipedia or on the WMF.
-- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 09:55, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Metrics?!?

So if I read this finalized midpoint report, despite the fact that there is a paid staff member for A+F working on a regular basis, there is no metrics to justify the funding of this grant?!? I think this is a huge problem. Where is the explanation for the lack of funding? Why is there no funding?!? Who approved this midpoint report with no detailed metrics. I thought that was the point and justification for hiring a part time staffer. -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 10:03, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

This is really unacceptable. -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 10:05, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Dashboard feedback

I'm just seeing this now. Thanks so much for the great feedback on P&E Dashboard! It's just the right level of granularity to be really useful. A few of the things have been fixed in the meantime, and this is super great for prioritizing further work.--ragesoss (talk) 16:11, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Ragesoss, that's excellent that it is helpful. Is it possible for you to give us an update on what is fixed, what will be fixed, what we can workaround, and what can't be fixed ;-) and we can go from there? I don't want to create any extra work, so can be done in whatever form fits into your workflow. Then maybe we can have a conference call in early sept to discuss how to continue use for 2018 season. We will want to include that info in our grant renewal. THANKS! --Theredproject (talk) 13:12, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Theredproject I'm copying the relevant parts of the feedback section and adding my notes below.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

dashboard feedback notes and updates

Integration with Streak and Wordpress

We maintain two other databases of events: Streak and Wordpress. Streak is our customer relationship management tool that contains all of the contact information for all of our current and past organizers. We use this Gmail based tool to perform all of our communication with our organizers. At the strong recommendation of our UX Review from last year, we switched our main point of interface with our events from our on wiki meet up page to our new Wordpress website. This website has individual cards for each of the events, Is searchable by region, and organized by time. Thus we had three separate DBs: wordpress, streak, and dashboard. We tried to reconcile these programmatically, but were not successful. We ended up doing it manually which meant lots of work, and human error.

This would be difficult to do from Programs & Events Dashboard, unless record integration could be done strictly by username. I don't know any specifics about Streak or how you are using WordPress, but we can provide better machine-readable formats for all of the data that currently comes out of the Dashboard, if that's something that Streak or WordPress could ingest. Maybe you could walk me through how your Streak/WordPress setup works at some point.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Event organizers feedback

Here is a summary of feedback that comes from node organizers, and from the lead organizing team:

• Short URL: We really need a Short URL to be automatically created for each event! It is really difficult if not impossible to ask users to type that long URL in.
  • It would be possible to integrate something like this into the Dashboard, but there aren't any plans to do so at this point. The long base URL means it wouldn't be ideal even if it had that functionality. One option might be to add a URL shortener plugin to your WordPress site, and then have organizers register a short URL like "art.plusfeminism.org/join/Boston2018" that redirects to the URL.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Start/End times: somewhere between 5-10% of the events had issues with the start and end time of their event. In many cases this was a time zone issue, but the more problematic were events starting after the finish so locked out. Two concrete suggestions: The code should be able to do a simple calculation and check to see whether the end date is before the start date, and if so alert the user and not allow the submission of the form. Secondly the code should check for all contributions on the day of the event, rather than for the specific three or six hour window specified in the start and end times. This would ameliorate the problems of time zone. We understand that there are some questions about "accuracy" in the concern that there might be others that are doing "other" Wikipedia work that day, but we find that the majority of the work done on a given day is in the spirit of that particular editathon. In fact we find that for most of our participants any further work they do over the next month is also in the spirit of the out of the phone, as we specify it as a one-month block.
  • It's no longer possible to have the end time before the start time; there is an error message pointing out the 24-hour time format so that the creator can change it.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
  • The dashboard does continue pulling in revisions that happen for some time after the end of the event, but these are not counted in the stats. The simplest way to work around this is to set the end time later. A longer term solution might be to separate stats start/end from in-person event start/end (but there aren't currently any plans to do that).--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Sorting events: As campaign managers we had difficulty sorting, changing and deleting pages. You can't tell what the location is, because that is in the institution field; that needs to be searchable. or displayed on this Campaign view.
  • I've filed issues for sorting and for searchability, from within a campaign.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
• Duplicate events: People are creating duplicate events. This causes some confusion! They don't know how to delete. And they don't have permission to change the title of their own events. Users should have permission to edit their events that they have created.
  • Users can now rename or delete the events they create (or more specifically, the events for which they are registered as a facilitator).--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Events Missing campaigns: Many people failed to attach the AF2017 campaign. All events created with the A+F program template should automatically have the AF2017 campaign attached.
  • All events created with the template, via the campaign page, had the campaign. The missing ones were created without starting from the campaign page / template. The interface has been updated to steer people to campaigns as the starting point, rather than creating separate events that end up in the default 'Miscellanea' campaign. I think this will be much less of a problem next time.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Article lists: No one really was sure how to handle article lists. The system built in to Dashboard comes from Wiki Ed, but doesn't really make sense for AF. Many organizers have long term lists, and it doesn't make sense to type them all in (100s of articles). New organizers are unable to learn this second new system, so don't use it.
  • This makes sense. I can't think of an easy fix for it. In some cases, being able to paste in a long list of titles would make it easy enough to be useful. In other cases, maybe having it linked to a wiki page so that it pulls all the blue and red links on that page would be a good approach. There's no work currently planned in this area.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Legacy meetup pages: We had challenges with people wanting to use meetup pages. We had spent 3 years training our organizers to use meetup pages, and then right as they started to get comfortable, we asked them to switch horses. Some (10%) stuck with meetup pages, or used both. This was a drag on our reporting process, and also required us to confirm which was the actual active one. This was exacerbated by the presence of a dozen+ additional meetup pages that were created before the full announcement went out directing organizers to use dashboard.
  • Additionally about 10% of events simply declined to use dashboard or meetups to track their info, or had to reverse engineer it when we asked after the fact. This is not something we have experienced in past years...?!

• • • Hopefully less of an issue next year? It's pretty easy to populate an event with the list of editors afterwards, if you have the usernames, but not sure if there's anything else on the tech side to address this.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Onboarding new editors

• Preload draft: If organizers add suggested articles, they should default to the preload draft template. Ideally this would be campaign specific (we have an AF artist specific one that is tagged by year).
  • Wiki Education has some longer-term plans in this area, but probably won't have significant progress in time for AF2018. There's a lot of potential for scaffolding the process of drafting a new article, especially if you know the genre ahead of time. If I had some extra time to build out features for A+F specifically, this seems like a productive thing to work on.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Delays access to user pages: It is harder than before to get people quickly to their user page, so they can add some text and blue link it.
  • I'm unclear what you mean here. Is it just that the user page is not linked directly from the editors list (because the username links to Special:Contributions)?--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

• Unclear joining process: The join/enroll process isn't as clear as it might seem, and we think we lost a fair number of users in this process:
  • The non enroll code URL doesn't have clear "join" button so we had to use a second bit.ly with the code built in (people don't realize they need to "join" and then have trouble with the code
  • People thought they just had to authenticate with OAuth. They didn't understand it was a two steps process. During our sweeps of the room at MoMA we caught many people who thought they were logged in, but in fact had only done OAuth, not full login.
  • We should be able to disable the enroll code for specific campaigns, or events. Or at least for a specific time period (eg week of the event).
    • It's now possible to remove the enroll code for an event.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
    • Fixing the OAuth/enroll flow is trickier, because it relies on things going relatively smoothly on the Wikipedia account creation/sign-in side, which isn't always the case. I did some exploratory work on something where facilitators could create accounts *for* new users and enroll them at the same time, but I may not be able to take that up again before AF2018.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

International / localization

• Geocode notices aren't going to work for dashboard. This is how *some* local Wikipedians find out about events. You could potentially put the geocode in for the main meetup page, with notification that they should find the event on the external page?
  • Why not? Are external links not allowed?--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
• Dashboard is not localized beyond English. Commentary from an organizer: "As I mentioned in my correspondence with McKensie, we did not make a Dashboard event because it didn’t make much sense: the Dashboard is in English and we could not assume all our attendees would be fluent in that language."
  • The AF template isn't localizable, but the Dashboard interface has i18n support, is substantially translated in many languages.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

Metrics

• Latency issues: Our organizers were very confused by the latency in the dasbhoard statistics. We fielded MANY panicked emails from people who were convinced nothing was working right, because the statistics were not updating in realtime. This indicates that UX expectations are that they would be realtime. Suggestions:
  • clearly indicate that "The statistics update once every X hours" directly below the list of stats
    • It's been on the backlog for a while, but I'm not sure whether we'll be able to tackle this before AF2018. (Currently, the cycle is about 1 hour.)--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
  • enable more frequent dashboard data cycles on high use days. or more frequent data cycles *just* for the events that are actively happening. So the 20 events that happen on a given saturday are prioritized and are updated once an hour, while the remaining 1000 events are on the regular 1 per day cycle. (Is it actively cycling through every event in the whole system, even the ones from months/years ago at the same frequency as the ones that are more current?)
    • Eventually, I'd like to do pretty much exactly this. In the meantime, we can add an 'update stats now' button for short events that will refresh most of the stats within a few seconds. (This feature exists already, if you add "/manual_update" to the event URL, but there's no button to advertise it.)--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
• Facilitators aren't automatically counted. We understand that in other scenarios (e.g. education courses) the focus is *only* on the participants, but here we are equality concerned with the facilitators. We would like a toggle switch for the campaign that would allow us to count the facilitators, and others to not count them.
  • Facilitators should add themselves as Editors. There may have still been bugs related to this during AF2017, but now it should be straightforward for facilitators to also join as participants.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
• More detail for reverts. We would like see reverted edits on the Dashboard alert page. Right now just PROD and AfD. No idea how many edits are reverted. We recognize that this may not be possible directly from the dashboard, but may require a MySQL Quarry query.
  • That would be a nice feature to add. No current plans for it, though.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)