On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
What was the publicising of the campaign prior to its launch?
It should be pretty apparent to people with experience within the movement that this would be both entirely novel and pretty controversial.
As mentioned on the Phabricator ticked, this is by no means the first banner campaign inviting installation of an app.
In June/July last year, there was a global campaign announcing the launch of the new Android app (like now, shown on mobile web for Android devices only): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpapp... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpapp... (also ran in a few other languages besides English) I don't recall it being controversial back then.
And in 2013, the late Commons app was promoted in a similar campaign on desktop and mobile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Commons... (on desktop Wikipedia) https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Co... (on Commons) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Andro... (mobile Wikipedia on Android devices)
I'd expect some amount of transparency around it (a phabricator ticket is not, in and of itself, transparency).
For those not familiar with the existing processes around banners, WMF staff and community members who use this indeed highly prominent space have been coordinating for years on this page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar Quite a lot of people who care about banner use are watching it for controversial or problematic uses (https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=CentralNotice/Calendar&acti... ), discussion happens on the talk page there or is escalated to other venues. I see that the current banners were indeed listed there last week before the launch.
To contrast, with search when we make /experimental/ modifications to the user experience of a tiny sample (through A/B testing) we not only list those changes in phabricator but also send explicit mailing list announcements - and those effect a smaller chunk of our user base on a platform.
Perhaps you could post some advice at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CentralNotice about how people running banners could learn from the WMF Discovery team in that respect?
On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org wrote:
We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving people to download the mobile app:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
The links don't work for me (maybe because I'm not in Finland right now); you can append "force=1" to make them show regardless of targeting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2&force=1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1&force=1