On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 6:16 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi!

> The idea is that we can implement some revolutionary ideas for our
> portal page, things that are completely different than what the current
> portal page looks like, and deploy it on this site for real users to
> use. But without imposing a disruptive user experience to our users. We
> can put a link to this page on the production portal page (in the
> bottom?), and users can have an option to bookmark the page, and maybe
> make one of the experiments their default.

This looks pretty cool, though I think we need some explanation why
these pages are shown.

Agree. Note that these are early prototypes, they haven't gone through any product/design/community/engineer reviews. They're here mainly to illustrate the idea. Nonetheless, I love seeing feedback already.

Also, if you look at it, number 4 is porn site. Which is I guess
accurate according to data, but this would produce several problems -
starting from obvious appropriateness and PR issues, and to the problem
of what happens when companies (even much less controversial than porn
sites) learn that they can be easily featured on the front page of
Wikipedia. So we may want to be careful there.

Good points Stas. The Reading team is also interested in trending articles. There will be a meeting soon to discuss all together about the issues around this feature and the possible implementation(s). Thanks for bringing this up.

^ Deborah: you can start a list :)

Also, https://people.wikimedia.org/~jgirault/react-top10-languages/ is
buggy for me: for Hebrew, it shows the name as: <bdi
dir="rtl">עברית</bdi> (yes, with HTML tags visible).

Good catch. There are bugs indeed (as well as many minor improvements to do), and they'll have to be fixed (as much as we can) before we deploy to our users.

Again, these are early prototypes :)

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 6:52 PM, billinghurst <billinghurstwiki@gmail.com> wrote:

Julien,

I would like to see some examples that are run for the sister wikis,
at the moment the trend is for the examples to be very wikiPedia
specific. It would be useful to see how these things are useful for
the whole wikimedia set of sites.

I'd like to point to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T110070#1653320 where Dan explains better than me that we are not responsible for the sister portals.

Not that we don't care, but we just don't have the resources to improve all sites at the same time, so we decided to focus our efforts on the portal that gets huge traffic.

Jan and I have met mxn (the maintainer of sister portals) in person, and he was convinced that the new typeahead would be a great improvement for, at least, www.wiktionary.org .

Jan coded the typeahead feature in a way that's exportable. If the community wants to follow our path and implement what they like from what we do, they sure can. The code is open source, and we may even find some time to help if needed.

Also for portals, there would be
value in providing results in other languages, and sisters. That we
limit a search result to the one place we stand rather than the
neighbourhood in which we live, indicates living in a world with
imposed blinkers.

Agree.

This is something we definitely want to explore. We have an incredible amount of knowledge, why should we only expose a part of it to our users?

But this kind of test is hard to do right now without changing the page too much. This is exactly why I feel having a faster, more revolutionary train - that does not impact our users negatively - will drive discovery up.

Thank you for your comments.

Please keep telling us what you think about this.