Hi everyone,
Last week the Editor Engagement Experiments team deployed a new extension
to all wikis, Extension:Campaigns (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Campaigns).
The campaigns extension does one thing: if you add "campaign=example" to a
link pointing at the account creation form, it logs the campaign name at
the time of signup.
This capability has been around a long time in some form or another, but we
disabled it so we could get to work on our redesign of account creation and
login. Now that's it's finished, we wanted to make it available again.
There's more in the documentation I linked to above, but the general point
is that this gives us a low cost, minimally invasive way to figure out how
many people are coming to sign up via a particular avenue.
Among our first test cases, my team would really like to know if
significant numbers of people are signing up via the links English
Wikipedia puts in system messages directed at those viewing semi-protected
pages and anonymous editors. I've put up a proposal about this on-wiki at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Let.27s_fi…
If you have any questions about how campaigns work and how they might be
applied elsewhere, please speak up. :)
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Hi folks,
Here's a quick update on today's notifications release on the English Wikipedia.
The main features this week are new links to diff pages, which were requested by a number of power users for talkpage messages (1), as well as for mentions and thanks notifications.
These diff links now appear both on the notifications flyout, near the timestamp ('View changes') -- as well as in the plain text emails.
We are now working on a couple more features in coming weeks:
* HTML Email notifications (2)
* Improved Notification Structure (3)
* More Metrics Dashboards (4)
Once these final features are done, we plan to start deploying Notifications on more wiki projects, starting with Meta and a couple non-English Wikipedias. In the fall, we hope to take on more features, as time and resources allow. For more information about our next steps for this project, check our 2013 plan for the E2 team (5).
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ryan Kaldari for all his fine work on Notifications: he has now joined the Mobile team, where I am sure he will continue to amaze us with cool new features. Many thanks as well to Benny Situ, who will be leading our development work on Notifications going forward, and is the man to talk to about engineering questions for this project.
Please let us know if you have any questions about notifications. Enjoy the new features!
Fabrice, on behalf of the E2 team
(1) Bugzilla Diff Links - Bug #48183:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48183
(2) HTML Email Spec:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#HTM…
(3) Improved Notification Structure:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#Imp…
(4) Notifications Metrics Dashboards:
http://toolserver.org/~dartar/en/echo/
(5) Editor Engagement Features Plan:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement/2013_strategy_planning_(Fea…
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Hi everyone,
WMF researchers have agreed to participate in an office hour about WMF research projects and methodologies.
The currently scheduled participants are:
* Aaron Halfaker, Research Analyst (contractor)
* Jonathan Morgan, Research Strategist (contractor)
* Evan Rosen, Data Analytics Manager, Global Development
* Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager
* Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy
We'll meet on IRC in #wikimedia-office on April 22 at 1800 UTC. Please join us.
Pine
Hi all,
For those of you who use GuidedTour, I wanted to share that today Matt
Flaschen deployed two relevant updates:
1. We made a fix for bug 52369, which means we're accurately detecting
whether VE is present or not, and delivering the correct tour. Our current
strategy for dealing with the fact that there are two editor interfaces
side-by-side is to have a separate tours VE and for wikitext editing
introductions, and deliver one or the other based on whether VE is present
or not.
2. Tour makers, you can now change the name of the buttons in your tour
scripts, insteading being stuck with using "Next" or "Okay" for the default
actions. Now, code like the following actually works:
buttons: [ {
action: 'next',
name: 'A different name here'
} ]
Let us know if you have any questions.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
I am going to bet that if we exposed the name of the editor adding a link in page-linked notifications we will substantially increase their impact on editor engagement.
Proposal
Let's replace:
Rim Fire was linked from List of wildfires
with:
MelanieN added a link to Rim Fire from List of wildfires
Rationale
• page-linked notifications will scale at a faster rate than Thank notifications (they are currently generated at a 2x rate and keep in mind only newbies are opted in by default)
• as of August, 1 out of 5 recipients of page-linked notifications have a lifetime editcount smaller than 100
• these notifications mostly* deliver positive feedback: knowing that a page got linked somewhere else in Wikipedia is currently the only user-generated positive signal other than Thanks that I can receive on Wikipedia
• for existing users (who by default are opted out from receiving page-linked notifications), exposing the author will provide readily available information on who's doing what
• for newbies, we'll reinforce the perception that it's not Wikipedia creating a link but another human being who (1) liked your work enough to award you a link and (2) you may want to connect to as someone with similar interests (yeah no, need to wait until an interest graph is implemented)
• we have solid evidence on the negative impact of automated, dehumanized messages
I really don't think we need to A/B test this but I wanted to hear from you if this change has enough support to be implemented and if there are other concerns.
Dario
* the main exception to look out for is links from project-namespace pages where, for example, AfD notifications happen.
Greetings,
I've started a draft of the requirements for the first release of Flow to a
real live Wikimedia project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/MVP.
This is still just a draft and very much open to more input, so please have
a look and let me know what you think, either here or on the talk page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Flow_Portal/MVP.
As I think some of you know, we've shifted the focus of our first release
from user talk to WikiProject talk (yay, pivoting!) to give us some time to
figure out how to deal with bots, tools, and user
warning/messaging/blocking workflows. Instead of trying to solve all those
hairy problems in our first release, I want to be sure we can first and
foremost handle the core peer-to-peer discussion/content collaboration that
talk pages are meant for, and I think a WikiProject talk page is a good
test-bed for making sure we've got those pieces nailed down. The plan is
to:
1) Build a fully functional prototype on Labs based on the above
requirements, in order to let the community come kick the tires.
2) Specifically invite facilitators and members of some active WikiProjects
(on enwiki, but not necessarily enwiki only) to give the Labs prototype a
try and see if they'd be willing to trial a beta version on their
WikiProject discussion space for some period of time.
3) Release to a few WikiProjects that are game, gather data, bugs, feature
requests, and keeping working to make Flow the most kick-ass wiki
discussion/collaboration software of all time :)
4) When we're comfortable that we've satisfied the requirements for
WikiProject talk, we'll begin working on the next set of requirements for
other discussion spaces (probably user talk).
So, that's the short-term roadmap! Right now, Andrew and Erik B. are
working on point 1) and will hopefully have something to share publicly in
the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned, and if you have any comments/feedback
on anything Flow related, don't hesitate to chime in :)
--
Maryana Pinchuk
Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org