Hi Folks, Thank you for your feedback around the collections project*. One of the strongest pieces of feedback was that the project name was easily confused with the collections:extension. Yes.
As a result, the collections project is now named "project gather". This is effective immediately. The name of the product itself is yet to be settled-on, but the lists themselves are still referred to as collections in mocks etc.
There is now a project page up on media wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gather
Comments welcome!
Best,
J
* for context, see thread with subject: "New feature in development: collections" or first email from that thread repasted here:
Hi, For those of you I haven't yet met, I am a new product manager in SF, working with the mobile web team (I look forward to meeting you)!
I just wanted to let you all know about a new project we are starting for Wikipedia's mobile website. The project has been dubbed "Collections", and our pilot will let users create and share collections of articles. Here are some ways that this project is exploring new ways to move our mission forward:
- *New ways to contribute: * through curation, wikipedia readers who are not interested in traditional editing can have meaningful, creative interactions with our content - *Personal:* gives users a way to make content more relevant for them "Peter's list of most important Philosophers" is not subject to consensus or editing by others. For the time being, a list will only be accessible via shared url. - *Shareable: *this project will experiment with the ability to use Wikipedia to share ones' perspective with others and, in doing so, encourage new users to engage - *[Future] Browseable:* because each list is not exhaustive, there is a possibility of using popular lists to promote meaningful content. It's nice to know the full list of statisticians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statisticians is there, but I might want to find a subset that have been picked out by a human for one reason or another.
Though the pilot is targeting and supporting readers, we think there are also potential use cases for editors that we could explore in the future. One can easily imagine lists for editors to track or share their contributions, such as: "Articles that I want to write/expand during 2015" or "Articles I created in 2013".
A fair amount of thought has gone into why we are launching this particular project and how we might approach it, but we have just started exploratory development work last week. Here is the team:
Jon Robson
Rob Moen
Joaquin Hernandez
Moiz Syed
[me]
*Ask:* [I know that this project overlaps with several existing features in terms of raw functionality, so if you have any relevant experience with either the editing or technical support of lists, collections extension (books) or watchlist and are interested in sharing your experience, please feel reach out to me directly. We very much want to learn from previous efforts]
Also, please reach out to me or anyone else on the team if you have any questions or concerns about the feature, team, etc.
Best,
Jon