Cross-posting, as an FYI.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org Date: Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 4:08 PM Subject: Editor engagement experiments deploy: a new extension and updates To: WMF Editor Engagement Team ee@lists.wikimedia.org
[For new folks to this list: we regularly make announcements about the weekly software deployments by features teams, especially the editor engagement group.]
First up, Matt Flaschen deployed a new extension which I'm very excited about: Guided Tour. There will be a blog post tomorrow, but for an idea of what it's all about, see the project page at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tours or visit https://en.wikipedia.org?tour=test to see a meta-tour. (There are some redlinks we're still filling in there).
Next updates for Guided Tour are to deploy outside of English Wikipedia - likely French, German, and Dutch first - and enable an automatic tour for all users who accept tasks at Special:GettingStarted. You can see it by visiting one of those articles while logged in, and appending ?tour=gettingstarted.
Associated with this change, we updated several other extensions. In particular, we removed the orange tooltip which points new editors to the MoodBar feature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_editor_feedback MoodBar is a great feature, but the tooltip first appeared when you viewed the edit window. We do want to make sure newbies know they can leave feedback via that feature, but we don't want to interrupt people who've clicked edit, especially for the first time.
Last but not least: congrats to Matt for deploying a ton of work. Adding a new extension and updating four others is no small feat.