WikiProject X presentation
A fragment of the Garden of Remembering
WikiProjects
- Community spaces dedicated to specific subjects or goals
- Random example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Sanitation
- Like talkpages, just made out of the same things as articles and social norms
- We have no sensible social norms
IEG
- This was all James Hare's idea. Other people made it work too.
- Project to research and improve wikiproject experience
- Started in january, ran through september (extension)
- If you were at wikimania, you got the midpoint presentation from a more product-oriented persective
- Now you get the final presentation from the design perspective, or at least something very cranky.
What we did in a nutshell
- Establish problem in which most wikiprojects aren't very useful
- Try to figure out why, and what more useful ones do
- Try figure out what to maybe do about it
- Maybe do something about it
- try some things
- try some more things
- run into a whole lot of bugs
- come up with really horrible workarounds for bugs
- Run out of grant and ask for more money.
Actual process
- It wasn't actually that bad.
Research and outreach
- Set up a wikiproject for the wikiproject project on enwp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_X
- Solicited stories and volunteers from existing wikiprojects
- Looked at existing wikiprojects largely at random to get an idea of things
More research
- Once we had stories and volunteer projects, ran through the stories and volunteers
- Story analysis (common things, whatever)
- Component analysis [1]
- WikiProject Directory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory
- Because we needed to know what we're dealing with.
- What we're dealing with is terrifying.
The problem
- Yay we know what the problems are!
- WikiProjects are terrifying.
- No, really.
- For us, for new users, for people trying to maintain it all.
- No technical support for wikiprojects
- Everything needs to be done by hand
- Hard to maintain, difficult to navigate
- Few automatic updates/notifications
- No way for new users to find them and become engaged
- Unrealized potential
Mockups and test project
- I made some mockups. Yeah. [2]
- James turned one of them into an initial project. And then ran an editathon using it with some folks.
- So some testing happened.
- Some drinking happened.
- Some other things happened.
Much, much later
- More mockups
- I had this brilliant idea to mock up all the design elements in one place so I could template everything and quickly cross-compare the styles so everything remains consistent...
- This fell apart very quickly.
- Prototype: http://wiki.zaori.org/wiki/WikiProject_stuff/WikiProject_mainpage
- templates/formatting became basis for production template modules
- Tool development
- bots, bots, bots
- tasks, related, current discussions
- signup process
- suggestbot guy did suggestbot stuff
- This happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cannabis
Phabricator
- We requested a phabricator project.
- We started tracking project tasks and bugs.
- Really! https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikiproject-x/
Pilots
- Five pilots! Templates changed. Bugs showed up. Bugs got fixed. Hopefully.
- A few others got converted/made as well.
- At some point we established that this really, really isn't sustainable.
Serious problems
- Setup
- We have a wizard for signup. We need a wizard for project creation.
- We can't make a wizard for project creation because project creation needs to initialise the wizard for project signup.
- Initialising a wizard requires admin permissions.
- Also some other weird complications.
- Maintainability (now bots, off-project; horrible template soup)
- Cross-project integration (wikidata, commons, etc)
- Echo and Flow
- Simply put, we're not done.
The future
- More work on this is needed - more research, more development, more wrap-up
- Also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113973
