On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Edward Saperia <ed(a)wikimanialondon.org>
wrote:
While I am a great supporter of your team's work,
I'd just like to comment
on the above;
Wiser community members are aware that they are part of a powerful
ecosystem, and that taming this ecosystem is a far more leveraged pursuit
than doing the work yourself. Creating additional endpoints for onboarding
processes that you're exposing to new users should be something that all
projects are excited to take part in, so hopefully you'd want to poll the
community for the valuable "Yes, and..." responses you'll get.
If you find you don't get responses like this, perhaps you might want to
consider re-framing your new functionality as open infrastructure that the
rest of the community is invited to build on, for example maybe
wikiprojects themselves could specify the suggestions that are shown to new
editors who edit in their subject areas?
Given appropriate tools to track effectiveness, this could create a huge,
open environment for experimentation that could find interesting solutions
faster than any engineering department ever could on their own.
*Edward Saperia*
Hi Ed,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. What Oliver said about "appropriate
tools to track effectiveness" is correct. Additionally though, I should
note that what we're building in Growth is already an open platform. Just a
very experimental and not particularly well-documented one. ;-)
The very simple recommendations engine we've built is a part of the public
MediaWiki API.[1] If there are WikiProject members or others in the
community with the technical chops and will to extend what we're doing for
different use cases, we'd be happy to help with advice and code review.
In the meantime, however, our team's goal is to find the right kind of
editor for Wikipedia, get them contributing, and get them to stick
around.[2] We're going to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
1. See the 'gettingstartedgetpages' portion of
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
2.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/2014-15_Goals
--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/