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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 end middle point 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