*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
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@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.
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/deleted-uploads
-- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
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 http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2014-09-01 22:28 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com:
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@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.
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/deleted-uploads
-- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
-- Jon Robson
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Just an idea: The „problematic“ images comes (mainly) from Special:Uploads, iirc? So maybe should focus on improving the contribution of images to an article directly (as it was the „upload“ button near the edit pencil).
I feel we can learnt a lot from this
+1
understand more about how people used photo uploads and see if there are any useful findings amongst
this experiment. +1
Freundliche Grüße / Kind regards Florian
-------------- Von: mobile-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mobile-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Amir E. Aharoni Gesendet: Montag, 1. September 2014 21:40 An: Jon Robson Cc: mobile-l Betreff: Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Mobile web] Important: putting the mobile web upload features on ice
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 http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2014-09-01 22:28 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com: 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@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.
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/deleted-uploads
-- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
-- Jon Robson * http://jonrobson.me.uk * https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson * @rakugojon
_______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Florian Schmidt < florian.schmidt.welzow@t-online.de> wrote:
Just an idea: The „problematic“ images comes (mainly) from Special:Uploads, iirc? So maybe should focus on improving the contribution of images to an article directly (as it was the „upload“ button near the edit pencil).
That's what I assumed, too, but actually the quality of uploads (e.g., the percent of images deleted) was not much different depending on where they came from (Special:Uploads or in-article upload).
I feel we can learnt a lot from this
+1
understand more about how people used photo uploads and see if there are
any useful findings amongst this experiment. +1
Freundliche Grüße / Kind regards Florian
Von: mobile-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: mobile-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Amir E. Aharoni Gesendet: Montag, 1. September 2014 21:40 An: Jon Robson Cc: mobile-l Betreff: Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Mobile web] Important: putting the mobile web upload features on ice
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 http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2014-09-01 22:28 GMT+03:00 Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com: 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@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.
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders
- http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/deleted-uploads
-- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
-- Jon Robson
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l