Subject: Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Apps] Stripping content inside brackets from the first sentence of articles
My experience with WMF launches shows me that there are a few golden rules:
1: Don’t do contentious changes without working on the root causes of why some things are contentious
2: Measure the shit out of it.
3: Be prepared that it will still be contentious and rollback.
4: Analyze the data, find more solutions
Isolate:
1: Measure user response to the bracketed text
2: Graph user response to the bracketed text
3: Add graph to every single follow up action that you do
4: First add all the code to parse what is in there.
5: Log what is in there (or do it based on a db dump)
6: Classify what is in there (yes, that means manual labour, make it a wikigrok-like game ? ) Note, the long tail is probably more interesting here than the 80% that you already know about.
7: Ask for semantic classes and help rolling them out, so it is easier to strip this stuff.
8: Start by stripping things that are duplicate (if in infobox then strip, else not)
9: Selectively strip something like IPA, because you have measured that people are not interested in it
10: Intelligently output what remains in there (if everything hidden, skip the () altogether, take care of trailing , etc).
Hope that helps you forward.
DJ