On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 4:08 PM, svetlana <svetlana@fastmail.com.au> wrote:
I'd like to see this for anonymous contributors -- for the post-edit it should be easy, for the flyout version it needs some thinking on possible implementation.

Ultimately whether we present recommendations to anonymous editors will depend on how the recommendations are generated. Right now, both the post-edit and flyout versions are based off your last edit, so they theoretically could work for any editor. Like you hinted at, the flyout is harder since you don't know if the person has actually edited before (or if it was someone else from that IP). 

Any kind of filtering that looks at something more sophisticated would likely require have more persistent history about an editor, and thus might not work for unregistered users easily.  Right now, for example, we already know that SuggestBot has a lot of success by combing through a user's entire edit history.  

Our strategy will be first to figure out what works well for making good recommendations, then see if we can extend it to unregistered users if possible. 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. Providing personalized functionality to only registered users is something that's a pretty common pattern on wikis, whether it's notifications, watchlist, or other things. 
 
Steven Walling wrote:
> The next step for this project is to A/B test this with newly-registered
> users on Wikipedia.

Please (kicking and screaming ;-):
- Ask at a local village pump and get community approval for enabling this extension.
- Also test this at other Wikimedia projects, not only Wikipedia.

We generally don't ask permission to enable extensions. Thats a technical decision that gets made as part of the deployment cycle. 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. 

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. 

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. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager