Steven Walling wrote:
Prioritizing recommendations for registered users
makes sense not
just because it's technologically easier, but because we know registered
editors make the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia.
From my impression regarding main namespace, 80% of
edits by number are made by unregistered contributors, of which 80% are vandalism. The
latter doesn't justify ignoring the former, perhaps, though - I'd be very
interested in making more features available to unregistered contributors where doing so
is not too much effort.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Musings_about_unregistered_contributors contains detail on
this matter (which, from what I could see, are best addressed by the Growth team).
Steven Walling wrote:
We generally don't ask permission to enable
extensions. Thats a technical
decision that gets made as part of the deployment cycle.
Nobody prevents you from asking, though, if you like. The Multimedia Team tries to start
doing so. :-)
However, could you please write up a note, once a week perhaps, which I could distribute
to affected Wikimedia projects - with notes on planned releases, new feature additions,
and how to test them? I'd like to talk to the people myself, perhaps, if you
wouldn't like to waste your time: following the release plans is not very easy right
now, as you're sending them out to mailing lists and there's no centralised
releases and big changes calendar thing for Wikimedia Engineering Teams.
Steven Walling wrote:
Plus,
recommendations is not a new extension, but is an optional feature of an
extension that has been deployed to many Wikipedias for a long time
(GettingStarted). We'll simply turn it on for a short time as part of a
test, then turn it off while we analyze the results.
Ah. It'd be nice to have people know about the wonderful work you're doing; more
on this in the above paragraph.
Steven Walling wrote:
The primary purpose of the new functionality is to aid
new editors, and it
won't be presented to any existing registered users (not even on an opt-in
basis). There's no point in polling existing community members about
functionality they will not see. Running a short A/B test, in concert with
usability testing, will provide us with an objective look at whether a
particular feature helps new people contribute to the encyclopedia more or
less.
I imagine some people clearly remember how they got started and what helped and what
didn't. Would be interested to collect thoughts on that and show them this ongoing
work.
Steven Walling wrote:
As for enabling recommendations on other Wikimedia
projects... we have no
idea whether the recommendations will work for *any* project. Testing on
Wikipedia is our first focus. From a practical standpoint, the size of
large Wikipedias let's us run a comparatively short test to tell us
statistically significant results. If it ends up being a success, then we
should talk about whether the recommendations will work for
non-encyclopedic projects as well. It would definitely be cool to have
recommendations for editor communities like Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and
Wiktionary too.
Good! :-)
By the way, is it possible to limit the suggestions to a certain category (or exclude a
category)? Some projects appear to archive their articles and suggesting to edit them
would make no sense, even if the topic is very similar.
svetlana