Wikipedia talk:User Advocacy

Problems and solutions

Note: This is a reply to the thread at WP:VPR#User Council, but posted here to avoid overwhelming the thread.

There are 2 aspects to the communication channels problems: Quantity, and Location. (This goes for any example, from ARB/ANI decisions, to MoS changes, to site-code changes.)

Quantity of items

Some people want to know about all the hundreds of plans/changes/decisions going on weekly.

Most people only want to know "What's going to effect me?"

Quantity per item

Some people want ALL the details, and will be upset if core aspects aren't mentioned.

Some people just want a brief synopsis in clear non-technical English.

Some people want terse bullet-point summaries.

Location

There are a large number of locations that people expect/want/wish their news to be browsable.

Some people want it all in one spot and only one spot.

Some people want each communication placed in a topic-appropriate location and then mentioned in numerous other places (often leading to fragmented conversations at each external "pointer").

Some people want mass-duplication of anything relevant, pasted to everywhere potentially relevant (eg the 3 Flow portals at mediawiki/meta/here).

Add to which: Some people are reluctant to leave their "home" wiki, for a variety of reasons. (Some are described at m:Not my wiki)

On En.Wp alone, we have all of these:

• the 5 Village Pumps
• WP:Wikipedia Signpost
• WP:CBB
• WP:Software notices
• WP:Update
• WP:Dashboard and Template:Noticeboard links (compendiums)
• etc

Then the meta / foundation / mediawiki wikis, and their various structured locations for centralized or separated discussion.

Plus all the

• official blogs,
• the unofficial/personal blogs,
• IRC,
• and the voluminous mailing lists.

E.g. If we added all the technical discussions from the various locations, into a central page such as WP:VPT, it would be overwhelming. But that's essentially what a few people want (I.e. A say in every matter, and every matter brought to their home-wiki, and every matter discussed in the place they feel is most appropriate).

Problems

Nobody has time to keep up with all the news.

If we attempted to utilize the CentralNotice or Watchlist notices more, then people would become message-blind. (E.g. I sometimes close a banner in instinctive irritation (as I frequently see the same banner across multiple wikis), and then moments later I wonder if it was something new I might have wanted to read...)

If we send global talkpage messages, then some users will be frustrated by the "spam" that they weren't personally interested in.

Solutions

• The meta:Global message delivery/Targets are a step in the right direction, but can get overwhelming and ignored. They require user-signup.
• WP:Notifications (available now) and WP:Flow (coming much later in the year) will help solve a large number of these issues. (Particularly in the later stages of Flow's development, which is many many months away)
  With Notifications we need to work carefully to avoid the message-blindness/spam problem, as those are push notifications. Note that Cross-wiki notifications are on the Roadmap.
  With Flow we will have to rely on user's pulling themselves into the discussions and workflows they wish to take part in, but it will work a lot more smoothly and efficiently than the current setup, in a plethora of ways.
• Cross-wiki watchlists are a frequently mentioned, and long wished for feature. mw:Watchlist wishlist and WP:Cross-wiki watchlists are the most uptodate listing of aspects to that, that I know of. That's tangential to this problem though.
• The listings of news hubs (those mentioned above, and others) could be better organized, and better linked. (E.g. Wnt noted at the VPR thread that m:Tech/News isn't linked at the top of WP:VPT) ← This is what we can do, as a group - organize them on this page, and then try to fix any glaring omissions / errors that we find.

Hope that helps. –Quiddity (talk) 05:35, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm, maybe I should just post it in the VPR thread... I get the feeling no-one is clicking through to read it here. :/ Thoughts? –Quiddity (talk) 00:48, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

I clicked through to read it, but I'm not sure about others. If you'd like my honest opinion, I think many Wikipedians just like to criticise things. Criticize new articles, criticize new users, criticise RfA as broken, criticize ArbCom as too lenient/too harsh/ineffective, blah, blah, blah. At a recent VPP thread where people were criticizing other software changes I proposed that interface changes could be announced on a subpage of VPT that would be transcluded on the main VPT page similar to the way WP:ANRFC works, but it did not elicit any response. Maybe that's an option people would find helpful. 64.40.54.37 (talk) 03:00, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, kind anon! I will leave this thread here, where there is more light than heat. Honest (insightful/curious/empathetic) opinions are always welcome.

Re: transcluding news from a subpage into VPT - that's similar to how the tech-news-digest gets placed there every week. Hmmm, I guess perhaps, you're proposing that a separate thread get started for each of the major points in each issue, rather than a single digest bundling them all? And on a separate (but transcluded) subpage, so that people could watchlist it separately, rather than the overactive VPT itself?

That might be useful... I wonder how much more work it would be, for whoever writes up the digest each week? Hmmm. From a glance through the histories of past weeks, guillom and odder (and drop-ins each week) do most of the work on the English versions, and it takes them a number of hours over the course of a few days. Ah, there's a good writeup about the project at m:Talk:Tech/News#Background.

I was initially thinking you meant inter-weaving the threads, time-stamp-appropriately, which is what Flow will enable: the ability to watchlist independent threads, and transclude various low-frequency boards into a single high-frequency board, with various meta-data/topic tags&methods to allow editors to keep up with as much or as little as they please. But I now see that you specified transcluding it in a single place (underneath the ToC). That might work.

And now I have 1am brain-seize. Time for sleep. I'll ping guillom in this thread, so he can look and comment at his leisure, sometime over the next week or so. –Quiddity (talk) 08:09, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

"you're proposing that a separate thread get started for each of the major points in each issue, rather than a single digest bundling them all? And on a separate (but transcluded) subpage, so that people could watchlist it separately" Yep. It would look the same as WP:ANRFC and be set up at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Announcements. Each item would have a seperate === Level 3 === header. The whole thing would be transcluded to the top of VPT as thread number one just like WP:ANRFC is at WP:AN. That way it would be highly visible and people could watchlist the seperate Announcements page.

"I'll ping guillom in this thread" Thank you. If we believe this might help the situation, perhaps we could be WP:BOLD and just fix it ourselves. 64.40.54.109 (talk) 18:28, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Thinking about this a bit more, perhaps an easier first step would be to just post m:Tech/News (the way it is—as a digest) to an Announcements page. We could just make the Announcements page and update m:Global message delivery/Targets/Tech ambassadors#Community pages to point there. Then just transclude it to the top of VPT. That way it wouldn't involve any extra work for Guillaume and the rest. 64.40.54.109 (talk) 18:48, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

I welcome ideas and solutions that improve dissemination of tech news :) And I'm happy to try and make this easier if I can (even if, the less additional work for me and other tech ambassadors, the better, to be honest!). guillom 09:59, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Guillaume. Sounds good. I'm striking the suggestion for seperate line items as I think the digest would be sufficient. 64.40.54.171 (talk) 00:49, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Do you think we'd want to duplicate the subscription? Ie. Have both WP:VPT and WP:VPT/Announcements subscribed to the Global Delivery. Otherwise, some editors will miss it in their watchlists, if they're not subscribed to both...

Are there any other news sources that (c/w/sh)ould be placed in /Announcements at first? –Quiddity (talk) 18:50, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about that. Being an IP I don't have a watchlist so... but you're right, people watching VPT currently see TechNews when it's added. Moving it to an /Announcements page would mean they'd no longer see it. To be honest, I've never really given much thought to watchlist stuff, so I guess I don't have a good answer. Sorry. As for other things to add, perhaps a coming next month section detailing the things that will be changing in the coming 4 weeks or so. 64.40.54.109 (talk) 06:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

• Note: I just saw wikt:Wiktionary:News for editors, which provides "recent clarifications of or changes to policy or best current practice, major changes to templates, and the like". It looks like updates are watchlistable, and when the page is changed a WP:NOTICE is added (to get through to editors who don't use watchlists). That might be a good model to consider adapting ideas from. –Quiddity (talk) 20:43, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Good find, Quiddity. Yes, that looks like a winner to me too. I think it's a better idea than an /Announcements page. The closest thing I can think of on enwp is WP:NEWS, but it's not quite the same thing. Perhaps we should be WP:BOLD and make a Wikipedia:News for editors. I'm a big believer in just fixing things when it's possible. 64.40.54.103 (talk) 01:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh, it already exists, but it redirects to Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia#News, which is also different. 64.40.54.103 (talk) 01:41, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: Bold - I'd like to get a few more details thought about, and hopefully feedback from a few more people (RA?), before we make a page (So that we can brainstorm specifics at the new page. Because getting people to watchlist and participate in each new location is hard!) -

• Eg. What other content would it have/need? Who is volunteering to run it initially? How would it want to overlap with the existing News hubs? (Wikipedia:Update is currently updating quarterly, and seems to be powered entirely by the efforts of User:Dank. The WP:CENT and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia policies and guidelines often overlap with WP:The Signpost. There are different urgency-levels to each item, and some only apply to a few people. etc)
• Are we intending a trickle of high-urgency/widely-applicable news, or a stream of medium/medium news, or a river of everything?
• Maybe we could just harness the workflows and pages of The Signpost, to get a weekly update, and then transclude that into the new News hub?

(Tangentially, RA made an interesting comment regarding how individually-tailored he would like the news stream to be. (I think this is currently impractical to do, but is the kind of thing that Flow is being specifically dreamed of handling. But, that's probably 6 months away or more.)

Thoughts? –Quiddity (talk) 02:56, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

• Good questions Perhaps we should start from the beginning (i.e. people felt they were not adequately informed about the VE switchover). So... 1) What is the most visible page on Wikipedia? And, 2) what changes are likely to make people frustrated? Looking at it like this, I would say 1) the main page and 2) changes to the user interface. Perhaps we could create a new section at the top of the main page that lists changes to the user unterface, but that would only be viewable by logged in users. I would have said "every page" and suggested m:CentralNotice, but people mentioned they missed that because of banner blindness. I think it would help a lot if we got more input from the rest of the community, but they seem to not be participating here. 64.40.54.29 (talk) 20:06, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Roadmap

I'm not entirely sure if this is what you're loooking for at Wikipedia:User Advocacy/Roadmap or not, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to list this stuff.

• Software projects for the next year can be found at mw:Wikimedia Engineering/2013-14 Goals, which is still being developed
• Stuff for the next few months can be found at mw:Roadmap
• Currently scheduled software deployments are listed at wikitech:Deployments
• Stuff that's happening now is covered at m:Tech/News/Latest

If this is not what you're looking for, please excuse the mistake. Best. 64.40.54.171 (talk) 01:32, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Those links are great. Thanks! It will take a little bit of digging to get my head around the information there but, basically, and personally, I'd like to see an easy-to-comprehend roadmap (with dates) that a user can understand at little more than a glance (e.g. max 5 seconds of scanning and a non-technical user will feel comfortable they will be able to understand what they see).

The goal, to my mind, is to provide visibility, prioritising clarity of visibility over detail of visibility. Links to resources like above are more capable of providing detail and are not of interest to a typical user. --RA (✍) 10:14, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, I've made a stab at putting together a user-orientated roadmap. It will need to be prettied up and developed but can I ask someone to review it for accuracy. --RA (✍) 22:00, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Good job, RA. I think people will find that very helpful. 64.40.54.109 (talk) 06:34, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

One other link that has detailed goals/targets/release dates is the recently published 2013-14 Annual Plan for the Foundation. (Q&A, if it is unfamiliar.) There are also monthly engineering reports about what has actually been accomplished. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:25, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Wow. Good read. Thanks very much, Steven. I knew the foundation was well-informed, but they are much more aware of life in the trenches than I realized. There's so much I want to say. Is there a feedback page for the 2013-2014 plan? I think most people cannot post to wmf: pages such as wmf:Talk:2013-2014 Annual Plan Questions and Answers. I know IPs cetainly cannot. Is there a talk page on meta: or something where people can post their thoughts about the 2013-2014 plan? Thanks. 64.40.54.109 (talk) 06:10, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

There's a discussion ongoing on Meta Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:01, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you 64.40.54.164 (talk) 05:10, 11 July 2013 (UTC)