Hello, everyone!
I'm happy to say that we now have a new version of Article Feedback, which is ready for testing on our prototype site:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Testing_Feb_2013
We invite you to try out some of the new features described on this testing page, then share your thoughts with us.
This new version is expected to greatly reduce the editor workload by providing simpler moderation tools, as well as better filters to surface useful feedback and make the best comments more visible to editors. These new features were developed based on recommendations from many community members on the English Wikipedia and other projects around the world.
I have also posted a general description of the new features on this Request for Comments about the future of this tool on the English Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/Article_fee...
You are welcome to participate there as well (if you are a staffer, please your WMF account and refrain from voting in this community discussion), as this Request for Comments will close in a week, on February 21st.
Though the majority view is now against Article Feedback on the English Wikipedia, we hope that some participants will find these improvements valuable enough to vote for a compromise, so that this tool can remain available in some form to the many editors who find it useful.
Either way, once these features have been fully tested and debugged on our prototype site, we expect to release them on multiple sites such as the French and German Wikipedias in March 2013. You can view our proposed timeline for this project here:
https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aq_75_5y5sKWdG5...
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful team members who have made this improved version possible, including our developer Matthias Mullie, designer Pau Giner, community liaison Oliver Keyes and analyst Dario Taraborelli, to name but a few. It's a true pleasure and honor to be working with such an amazing team!
We look forward to your insights about this new version.
Regards as ever,
Fabrice
P.S.: I would also like to highlight two reports which demonstrate the thoughtful methodologies we used throughout this project.
* Moderation Tools Usability Study - by Pau Giner: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Moderation_Tools_Us...
* Feedback Quality Assessment - by Aaron Halfaker and Dario Taraborelli: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Article_feedback/Final_quality_asses...
Thanks to this careful work, we were able to develop much better tools and make more informed decisions as a result. We're very grateful for these important contributions to our project.
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
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