Regarding discoverability. I think there is a bigger problem: We have an
issue of discoverability of work for Wikipedians. I remember in my first
days as a Wikipedian, I would go to the main page and then click on random
pages until I would find something to improve. A friend of mine in his
early days was clicking on Special:Random in English Wikipedia and
translating the results to Persian (wasting energy that could have gone to
translating more important articles.)
I dream of a day that I could have only one personalized dashboard page
(linked at the top of every page next to my user page) which would have
boxes with stuff like:
- Recentchanges: Unpatrolled edits, live
- New files uploaded to be reviewed
- Articles to improve or create in the topic I set (basically my tool)
- Articles in topics I set that need attention (clean up tags, etc.)
- Links to places I find useful: WP:ANI, WP:SPI, etc.
- Random small clean ups suggested: e.g. a feed of possible spelling
issues or typos to check or fix.
- A personalized todo list I could add personal notes
- Events that might be happening around me
And of course each user could customize to their needs, some contributors
prefer patrolling, some prefer copy-editing, some prefer content
improvements. We could add some fancy graphs for positive reinforcement. It
can also have tabs for "my dashboard", "recommended dashboard for
patrolling", etc. Sorta like bloomberg terminals even.
One symptom of the lack of such a page is that many users use their own
userpage as a partial replacement for a dashboard and their user page has
become a list of links.
It's not even that hard to implement (at least a basic version of it). A
tech-savvy Wikipedian could potentially make this via a gadget, taking
advantage of Special:BlankPage and some user json pages to hold the
preferences (similar to Twinkle)
Thankfully, Growth features added this dashboard for newcomers, but I want
it to be expanded to old-timers too (and tailored and customized of
course). I know there is also Special:Contribute
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contribute> being thought too and
that can is also similar to what I have in mind (even the design is similar)
Sorry for the brain dump!
Am Di., 19. Sept. 2023 um 19:22 Uhr schrieb Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158(a)hotmail.com>gt;:
Vector2022 has, actually, a place called Tools. It
comes in the edit menu,
just below the language switcher. The problem is that... most of them are
not tools. Indeed, the Design Team decided to bury the sister projects
inside the tools menu. So, yes, we do have a place called tools, where
actual tools could be located.
------------------------------
*From:* Asaf Bartov <asaf.bartov(a)gmail.com>
*Sent:* Tuesday, September 19, 2023 7:13 PM
*To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
*Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Tool to find articles to create or improve
in non-English Wikipedias
On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 8:49 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Toolhub is still something external!
Let me introduce the point: the Research team has been working in great
tools to help with editing. They made an exciting showcase in Wikimania.
None of them are reachable while editing.
We are here in the same case: the translate tool could accomodate a
suggestion button that feeds from the varied tools we have.
I agree. To me it has always seemed odd that Mediawiki's *core interface*
has no large friendly button called "Tools". It could lead by default to
project-space:Tools, i.e. to Wikipedia:Tools on Wikipedia. From then on,
it's up to the community to curate the page usefully, probably including
explaining about Toolforge and directing to its various directory
meta-tools. But it's that first *invitation* and *discoverability* of the
very notion of tools that's missing, for even some experienced editors.
If some people agree, perhaps they'd be interested in starting a
discussion on
Mediawiki.org making the case for it, addressing the
(inevitable) objections people may have, discussing the design and location
of the button, etc. I don't know if the Foundation's Product team has
thoughts about this, but even if it is not currently on any team's roadmap,
it can be useful to work out a proposal with broad community support for
how it could be done. The actual implementation would be technically
simple, and mostly a question of the skin design: location, spacing,
mobile, etc.
A.
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