Hey all,
Today we deployed a new feature to English Wikipedia -- a Draft namespace.[1] (For those not familiar, namespaces on our wiki are how we separate types of pages, like articles versus discussion pages.)
There isn't anything technically that exciting about this new namespace yet. One key feature is that it is not indexed, however, meaning drafts are hidden from readers using most search engines.
However, we think this idea show a lot of promise. In the future, we plan to experiment with additional software support for this namespace, providing tools to help create, review, and publish drafts with minimal headache. If encouraging new users to create their first articles in draft mode first really improves their retention and overall experience on Wikipedia, we do plan on rolling this out beyond English.
You can learn more about our evolving ideas on mediawiki.org,[2] and help answer open questions we've put to community members on Wikipedia talk:Drafts on English Wikipedia. Please participate!
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drafts 2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace
Very excited about the launch of drafts, congrats on the deployment.
For some reason indexing of new drafts in the internal search seems to be lagging (while new pages created in the main namespace show up almost immediately), any thoughts on why this would happen?
Dario
On Dec 17, 2013, at 6:26 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey all,
Today we deployed a new feature to English Wikipedia -- a Draft namespace.[1] (For those not familiar, namespaces on our wiki are how we separate types of pages, like articles versus discussion pages.)
There isn't anything technically that exciting about this new namespace yet. One key feature is that it is not indexed, however, meaning drafts are hidden from readers using most search engines.
However, we think this idea show a lot of promise. In the future, we plan to experiment with additional software support for this namespace, providing tools to help create, review, and publish drafts with minimal headache. If encouraging new users to create their first articles in draft mode first really improves their retention and overall experience on Wikipedia, we do plan on rolling this out beyond English.
You can learn more about our evolving ideas on mediawiki.org,[2] and help answer open questions we've put to community members on Wikipedia talk:Drafts on English Wikipedia. Please participate!
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Very excited about the launch of drafts, congrats on the deployment.
Thanks! We are too. Already one draft created by an IP has already been successfully published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:John_Wainwright_Evans
For some reason indexing of new drafts in the internal search seems to be lagging (while new pages created in the main namespace show up almost immediately), any thoughts on why this would happen?
We think this may be our slow non-Cirrus search on English Wikipedia. I'll make sure a bug gets filed, if it hasn't already.
Awesome!
Sydney
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 18, 2013, at 13:43, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org wrote:
Very excited about the launch of drafts, congrats on the deployment.
Thanks! We are too. Already one draft created by an IP has already been successfully published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:John_Wainwright_Evans
For some reason indexing of new drafts in the internal search seems to be lagging (while new pages created in the main namespace show up almost immediately), any thoughts on why this would happen?
We think this may be our slow non-Cirrus search on English Wikipedia. I'll make sure a bug gets filed, if it hasn't already.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
Exciting news, congrats! Michael Am 18.12.2013 20:05 schrieb sydney.poore@gmail.com:
Awesome!
Sydney
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 18, 2013, at 13:43, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Very excited about the launch of drafts, congrats on the deployment.
Thanks! We are too. Already one draft created by an IP has already been successfully published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:John_Wainwright_Evans
For some reason indexing of new drafts in the internal search seems to be lagging (while new pages created in the main namespace show up almost immediately), any thoughts on why this would happen?
We think this may be our slow non-Cirrus search on English Wikipedia. I'll make sure a bug gets filed, if it hasn't already.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
Way to go! Let me know if I can lend a hand with anything on that...
On 18/12/13 13:10, Michael Jahn wrote:
Exciting news, congrats! Michael
Am 18.12.2013 20:05 schrieb <sydney.poore@gmail.com mailto:sydney.poore@gmail.com>:
Awesome! Sydney Sent from my iPhone On Dec 18, 2013, at 13:43, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org <mailto:swalling@wikimedia.org>> wrote:On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org <mailto:dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Very excited about the launch of drafts, congrats on the deployment. Thanks! We are too. Already one draft created by an IP has already been successfully published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:John_Wainwright_Evans For some reason indexing of new drafts in the internal search seems to be lagging (while new pages created in the main namespace show up almost immediately), any thoughts on why this would happen? We think this may be our slow non-Cirrus search on English Wikipedia. I'll make sure a bug gets filed, if it hasn't already. -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:EE@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee_______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:EE@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
I like that! Thanks Steven and the team. Can't wait to hear from your first impression how people use the new namespace. :)
Cheers, Nicole
On 18 December 2013 17:34, Andrew Green agreen@wikimedia.org wrote:
Way to go! Let me know if I can lend a hand with anything on that...
On 18/12/13 13:10, Michael Jahn wrote:
Exciting news, congrats! Michael
Am 18.12.2013 20:05 schrieb <sydney.poore@gmail.com mailto:sydney.poore@gmail.com>:
Awesome! Sydney Sent from my iPhone On Dec 18, 2013, at 13:43, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org <mailto:swalling@wikimedia.org>> wrote:On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org <mailto:dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Very excited about the launch of drafts, congrats on the deployment. Thanks! We are too. Already one draft created by an IP has already been successfully published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:John_Wainwright_Evans For some reason indexing of new drafts in the internal search seems to be lagging (while new pages created in the main namespace show up almost immediately), any thoughts on why this would happen? We think this may be our slow non-Cirrus search on English Wikipedia. I'll make sure a bug gets filed, if it hasn't already. -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:EE@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee_______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:EE@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
2013/12/19 Nicole Ebber nicole.ebber@wikimedia.de:
I like that! Thanks Steven and the team. Can't wait to hear from your first impression how people use the new namespace. :)
As there has been talk about introducing such a namespace in other language versions please note that the German community declined to create one in 2007 already. So in order to have the draft namespace introduced in German Wikipedia we would need to hold an RfC again (which I, for one, would reject because we already have a user namespace for that which is the usual way to use, and IPs will be happy to use pages under Benutzer:Artikelstube for creating new pages).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_eines...
Regards, Jürgen.
On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Juergen Fenn <schneeschmelze@googlemail.com
wrote:
As there has been talk about introducing such a namespace in other language versions please note that the German community declined to create one in 2007 already. So in order to have the draft namespace introduced in German Wikipedia we would need to hold an RfC again (which I, for one, would reject because we already have a user namespace for that which is the usual way to use, and IPs will be happy to use pages under Benutzer:Artikelstube for creating new pages).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_eines...https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_eines_Namensraumes_%22Entwurf%22
Regards, Jürgen.
Yeah, I should explain more regarding our plans for future rollout....
We are interested in supporting drafts because we think it can lessen the number of brand new editors who leave disappointed because their articles were quickly deleted. The theory is that, by giving people time to develop articles more slowly, we'll let them learn about the minimum requirements for sourcing, notability, etc. before the article is subject to strict review.
But we don't yet actually *know *that will improve retention of new articles and new editors. It's a hypothesis that we need to prove or disprove with data. Unless a community requests it, we don't plan to rollout drafts to other Wikipedias outside English until we've objectively proved or disproved our theory. At that time, then we won't need to speculate about whether drafts are beneficial or not in a Request for Comment: we'll know for sure either way.
I do think it's admirable that German Wikipedia avoided creating a mess like the backlog English Wikipedia has at "Articles for Creation". That kind of bureaucracy is very anti-wiki. However, if we can create better software support for drafting articles, then I think it will be a complement to normal page creation that will work for most of our larger Wikipedias. (We probably won't recommend that any small Wikipedias use drafts.)
Regarding the comparison with userspace drafts... if you check out our mockups for future enhancements ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Design_for_Draft_namespace.pdf) you'll see that we're planning a large amount of functionality to assist with drafts that can't be added to user subpages. However, there's nothing preventing a community from continuing to allow userspace drafts alongside the Draft namespace. That's what English Wikipedia decided to do.
2013/12/19 Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org:
Regarding the comparison with userspace drafts... if you check out our mockups for future enhancements (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Design_for_Draft_namespace.pdf) you'll see that we're planning a large amount of functionality to assist with drafts that can't be added to user subpages. However, there's nothing preventing a community from continuing to allow userspace drafts alongside the Draft namespace. That's what English Wikipedia decided to do.
Thanks for elaborating, Steven, but I think the point is not about drafting articles in the user namespace _alongside_ the draft namespace. We would probably decline to introduce a draft namespace in the first place in dewiki. I hope very much that we won't have another conflict as we had with the visual editor earlier this year. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a place for endless experiments. It is not the WMF to decide on the policy in language versions. This is up to the community.
Regards, Jürgen.
On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Juergen Fenn <schneeschmelze@googlemail.com
wrote:
Thanks for elaborating, Steven, but I think the point is not about drafting articles in the user namespace _alongside_ the draft namespace. We would probably decline to introduce a draft namespace in the first place in dewiki. I hope very much that we won't have another conflict as we had with the visual editor earlier this year. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a place for endless experiments. It is not the WMF to decide on the policy in language versions. This is up to the community.
I fully agree that the Foundation staff have pretty much no business setting individual project policy. But this isn't policy, it's software. It's the WMF's responsibility to develop and maintain the software that makes it possible for the community to do its work. Decision-making about technical changes is a partnership between many parties -- editors/admins of local projects, Foundation staff, and volunteer technical developers of MediaWiki.
In general, anyone not interested in experimentation has forgotten what Wikipedia is, and where it comes from. The entire Wikipedia project is one of the riskiest and most outlandish experiments with the production of knowledge in the Internet age. People not willing to try new things to make sure Wikipedia evolves along with the rest of the Web should just leave the project now, because you're going to be unhappy as things change.
We're not testing the draft namespace in the name of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. We're doing to it to help community members, especially new ones, have an easier and more rewarding time expanding the encyclopedia. And we test our changes to software so that we're not making decisions based solely on our personal opinions, but based on real data about what works and what doesn't.
2013/12/21 Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org:
I fully agree that the Foundation staff have pretty much no business setting individual project policy. But this isn't policy, it's software. It's the WMF's responsibility to develop and maintain the software that makes it possible for the community to do its work. Decision-making about technical changes is a partnership between many parties -- editors/admins of local projects, Foundation staff, and volunteer technical developers of MediaWiki.
I beg your pardon, Steven, but this is really missing the point. The WMF obviously plans to introduce technical features without even asking the community beforehand. But these new features will change the way we work in Wikipedia fundamentally. It is a matter of policy where we draft new articles.
We have just experienced the massive and embarrassing failure of the visual editor in both the German and the English Wikipedia. What we need least would be another confrontation between the Foundation and the community.
I am not quite sure whether you have been told about this, but German regulars are more and more annoyed by the impression that the WMF does not respect their idea of how the project should be run. They are feeling all the more frustrated to hear that the WMF plans to introduce any technical feature by force we do not want to have in here.
To cut a long matter short: If we have any namespace or not is up to the community, not the WMF. We will have to hold an RfC beforehand.
Regards, Jürgen.
On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Juergen Fenn < schneeschmelze@googlemail.com> wrote:
I beg your pardon, Steven, but this is really missing the point. The WMF obviously plans to introduce technical features without even asking the community beforehand. But these new features will change the way we work in Wikipedia fundamentally. It is a matter of policy where we draft new articles.
We have just experienced the massive and embarrassing failure of the visual editor in both the German and the English Wikipedia. What we need least would be another confrontation between the Foundation and the community.
I am not quite sure whether you have been told about this, but German regulars are more and more annoyed by the impression that the WMF does not respect their idea of how the project should be run. They are feeling all the more frustrated to hear that the WMF plans to introduce any technical feature by force we do not want to have in here.
To cut a long matter short: If we have any namespace or not is up to the community, not the WMF. We will have to hold an RfC beforehand.
Let me be clear: I don't mean that I'm not interested in what the community thinks on German Wikipedia. What I am saying is that an old RFC from 2007 is not a reason to dismiss an idea before we've actually explored it.
From the discussion on the Kurier I can see that there are a variety of
opinions about whether it might be useful on German Wikipedia to have drafts. Some think it's an idea with potential, others are skeptical. We'll know more in the months to come.
Hello
There were a discussion about draft namespace since few months on French Wikipedia, which ended one week ago, without success. Your announcement restart it!
I'll try to give you some details soon.
Benoît Le 18 déc. 2013 03:27, "Steven Walling" swalling@wikimedia.org a écrit :
Hey all,
Today we deployed a new feature to English Wikipedia -- a Draft namespace.[1] (For those not familiar, namespaces on our wiki are how we separate types of pages, like articles versus discussion pages.)
There isn't anything technically that exciting about this new namespace yet. One key feature is that it is not indexed, however, meaning drafts are hidden from readers using most search engines.
However, we think this idea show a lot of promise. In the future, we plan to experiment with additional software support for this namespace, providing tools to help create, review, and publish drafts with minimal headache. If encouraging new users to create their first articles in draft mode first really improves their retention and overall experience on Wikipedia, we do plan on rolling this out beyond English.
You can learn more about our evolving ideas on mediawiki.org,[2] and help answer open questions we've put to community members on Wikipedia talk:Drafts on English Wikipedia. Please participate!
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee