Lastly, we recommend further discussions between the community and the foundation on how to give readers a voice on our sites. Suggested topics include how to make it easier for readers to comment on articles they read — as well as how to enable readers to participate in decisions that impact them, so that we can better serve the needs of all our users in the free culture movement.

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Hello everyone, As many of you know, we have been testing an improved version of Article Feedback v5 in two pilots on the English and French Wikipedias throughout 2013. The main purpose of this experiment was to increase participation on Wikipedia by inviting readers to leave comments on article pages. The French pilot just ended last month, providing informative results about this experiment. In the final RfC we ran on the French site (1), about 45% of respondents wanted AFT5 removed everywhere, while 38% wanted to keep it an opt-in basis, and 10% on help pages only (2); nearly everyone agreed it should not be on by default on all 40,000 pilot pages, let alone on the entire French Wikipedia. Their concerns are is consistent to what we heard from editors on the English and German pilots: overall, a majority of editors do not find reader comments useful enough to warrant the extra moderation work. Based on these pilot results, we recommend that Article Feedback be removed from our two pilot sites at the end of the month, as outlined in this report (3) — since the tool is not welcome by a majority of editors, despite its benefits to readers. Fabrice, I commend you for authoring this report. It is honest, straightforward, and thoughtful -- and, I imagine, not easy to write. I think it demonstrates a high standard of professionalism with respect to feature development. It makes me proud to be a WMFer when I see us act with such self-awareness. It's an example I'll try to emulate. _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

Hi folks, We just removed the Article Feedback Tool from both the English and French Wikipedia sites today at 19:10 UTC. This means that no feedback can be posted or viewed anymore on those sites. In coming days, we will archive the feedback data in a public hub, so it can be accessed without the tool. We will post on this thread as soon as that data archive is available, as well as on this English Wikipedia tallk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_… Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this experiment -- we hope you learned as much from it as we did. :) Regards as ever, Fabrice On Feb 28, 2014, at 8:51 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi everyone, As recommended in our report (1), we now plan to remove the Article Feedback Tool entirely from both the English and French Wikipedia sites this Monday, March 3, at 19:00 UTC (11am PT). So any editors who wish to transfer useful feedback to their article talk pages should do it this weekend, using the built-in 'Discuss on talk page' tool (2). We will also archive the feedback data in a public hub, so it may be accessed even after the tool has been disabled. We appreciate all the good insights we've received from team and community members about our Article Feedback report and recommendation to end this experiment. We appreciate their observations (3) (4), many of which match comments from our own team retrospective (5). And I'm particularly grateful for Ori's kind words below, which mean a lot to me. :) Many great feature ideas have been proposed in these discussions, which generally make good sense to me: I wish we had the resources to build them as part of this project, but my hope is that some of them will be useful for future projects. In my view, a key issue for this project is that we took on a very hard problem with insufficient resources to effectively solve it. Our small team engaged community members extensively throughout this experiment, and we were grateful for all the good recommendations we received; but we simply did not have the capacity to build all these features with a single contract engineer. This taught us an important lesson, and we are now staffing our teams more effectively for projects of this size, such as Flow. On the whole, I think we all gained from this project, despite its setbacks. A lot of the code and research tools we developed for Article Feedback are now being used by other projects, so this experiment is helping improve Wikipedia in more ways than one. In times like these, I am reminded of Thomas Edison's words about his own experiments: 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.' We too have learned a lot together from this exploration -- and I am very grateful for everyone's willingness to experiment with us. I look forward to more collaborations with you all in the future. Onward! Fabrice (1) Article Feedback Report: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Report (2) 'Discuss on talk page': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_Feedback/Help/Editors#How_c… (3) AFT5 Report Discussion: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback/Version_5/Report (4) AFT Talk page on English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_… (5) AFT5 Wikimedia Team Retrospective: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1t0as8SIgDDCv_MJL3NxWtDS… (6) Gerrit ticket: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/112639/ (7) Bugzilla report: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61163 On Feb 13, 2014, at 12:22 PM, Ori Livneh <ori(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Fabrice Florin <fflorin(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: Fabrice, I commend you for authoring this report. It is honest, straightforward, and thoughtful -- and, I imagine, not easy to write. I think it demonstrates a high standard of professionalism with respect to feature development. It makes me proud to be a WMFer when I see us act with such self-awareness. It's an example I'll try to emulate. _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

Thanks for very swift answers! Follow up question: Is WMF in any way looking into making MediaWiki more suitable as a learning platform (think Moodle or similar platforms) or would it be up to chapters or volunteers to make it happen? Med vänliga hälsningar, Jan Ainali Verksamhetschef, Wikimedia Sverige 0729 - 67 29 48 Tänk dig en värld där varje människa har fri tillgång till mänsklighetens samlade kunskap. Det är det vi gör. Bli medlem. 2014-03-03 22:38 GMT+01:00 Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: I think we should be very careful about any extension added to the cluster - AFT5 is very complex, and if there are use cases that require this kind of functionality, they should be examined independently, rather than assuming AFT5 is the answer. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee