As a simple user I can only say that I understand the situation and hope
that it will come to life to some time in a future incarnation. I really
miss a way to upload missing photos from the phone that would be as easy as
posting a photo to Twitter.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2014-09-01 22:28 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com>om>:
I think this makes sense based on the time this has
been consuming
from our side.
It would be great to leave the code in a form, that allows 3rd parties
and certain projects to re-enable it if they are finding it useful and
allow for a resurrection later on if necessary. As we build Wikidata
mini games, who knows we might dream up a useful way of improving the
quality of uploads. I can imagine a 'Is this a copyright violation?'
type mini-game, or can you find a picture of this object mini game, so
it would be good to keep these options open.
If nothing else, I feel we can learnt a lot from this. My
understanding is we've never taken a close look at where deletions
come from on certain projects, and whether the quality of photos from
tablets is any better than phones. It would be great to analyse the
existing data we've collected and understand more about how people
used photo uploads and see if there are any useful findings amongst
this experiment.
Jon
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 11:20 PM, Maryana Pinchuk
<mpinchuk(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
tl;dr:
The Mobile Web team has decided to hide the uploads features (upload &
add
to article + upload from left nav) on the mobile
site until we have the
time/resources to rebuild them into a more productive contribution
stream.
Background:
Before wikitext or VE editing, the mobile web team built an
upload-to-Commons pipeline as the first proof-of-concept of mobile
contribution. When we first launched the two upload features (upload and
add
to article + upload to Commons via the left nav)
~2 years ago, we saw a
high
ratio of these images being deleted (because they
were copyright
violations,
test images, selfies, etc.). Since then,
we've continued to make
incremental
improvements to address these issues: we added
interactive tutorials and
instruction screens, and also gradually increased the permission levels
required to see these features (from everyone –> logged-in-only –>
autoconfirmed only –> 10+ edits).
However, despite all these changes, the ratio of kept to deleted uploads
has
not changed significantly; though the absolute
number of uploads per
month
has gone down,[1] 70-80% of these files still get
deleted.[2]
This is both a crappy experience for the end-user and a major headache
for
the team – in addition to the pure engineering
effort of continuing to
adjust the parameters of the feature, every incremental change to the
workflow requires a browser test rewrite, analysis time to figure out if
the
improvements have actually made a difference, and
lengthy back-and-forth
communication with a very unhappy set of Commons admins on Bugzilla. And
none of the changes to date seemed to have made much of a difference.
In trying to address these issues, we've shifted from focusing on the new
user persona to the power user... but we're not explicitly revisiting the
interactions, messaging, or feature set, because we don't have the
bandwidth
to make larger changes. I.e., despite the fact
that the feature is now
not
even being shown to brand-new users, we still
show a tutorial targeted at
people who've never contributed before. I think we've reached diminishing
marginal returns on incremental improvements at this point. If we want
uploads to succeed, we need to start from scratch: decide who the
persona we
want to target is and then build the set of
features that this user is
going
to need.
But rethinking how to instruct newbies (since tutorials don't seem to
work)
or coming up with a whole new workflow aimed at
experienced users isn't
something the team can take on at this point. It requires dedicated
product
and design attention and quite a bit of
engineering work, none of which
we
have the resources for.
Since our focus for the year is new active editors and uploads are not
part
of our annual targets, I recommended to the team
that we hide the mobile
web
uploading features for now and revisit them
either later this year or
next
fiscal year. The team agreed to this at
today's planning meeting, and
we'll
be making this change in the coming days.
I know it's not a great feeling when the software we create isn't a
rousing
success, but I think it's really important to
be upfront (with ourselves
as
much as with the community) when we see that a
feature just isn't doing
what
we want it to do. Lila has been talking a lot
lately about how it seems
like
we've been trying to do! all! the things! in
WMF engineering – which
comes
at the cost of fragmenting our attention and
making it hard to really
excel
at any one of those things. I think she's
totally right, and I'd like to
see
our team lead by example and strive for more
focus and rigor in terms of
what we work on and how :)
As always, if you have questions/concerns, feel free to voice them here.
I'll probably communicate this more broadly sometime early next week.
1.
http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders
2.
http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/deleted-uploads
--
Maryana Pinchuk
Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
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--
Jon Robson
*
http://jonrobson.me.uk
*
https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson
* @rakugojon
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