This is great discussion and I would like others to benefit from it by moving future conversation to the discussion page of the RFC. For this reason, I have double posted the below response there: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages#over...
------- Thanks, Vituzzu! This is all great feedback and exactly what we are looking to get from the RFC. To be clearer to others who may have missed it, the RFC is a request for comments about this test feature, not a proposal to roll-out the feature.
I appreciate your concern around redundancy. I think that is one of the biggest, most legitimate concerns about the feature (the other being how to deal with bad results) and, honestly, one of the most obvious outcomes we might have avoided had we started with a consultation rather than by building. As Jon R mentioned, there is some active discussion around how we can improve on this and many of your comments fit well within that scope. As to better images, this is also something we are working on, primarily here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91683
Despite not being perfect, we felt that related pages add unique value on top of the "see also section" because it offers the reader a limited selection compared to see also and sits at the bottom of the page, where it does not distract from the article, because a user reaching the bottom of the page has finished reading the article and is theoretically looking for more content. Notably, we see that mobile users reach the bottom of the article less frequently, but when they DO and they see related pages, they are much happier to see it (as indicated by click-through). It might be that this feature is better suited to mobile.
As I wrote on the project page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Related_pages#Initial_Community_Feedback, I'd like to identify if the overlap with "See also" mean's you would rather not have the feature or if we feel that there is still positive value. We are trying to identify the order of value here for our readers:
- no related pages < related pages with no new features < related pages more customizable < related pages features better synchronized with/eaten by "see also"
(is the above order correct? I imagine that community members might want to swap at least the first 2 with each other...but I don't know for sure)
Thoughts?
-J