On 21/08/14 13:13, Quim Gil wrote:
On Wednesday, August 20, 2014, Legoktm
<legoktm.wikipedia(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
At Wikimania, we had a good conversation and a
proposal (that was
basically agreed upon by everyone in the room IIRC!) about creating a
"gold standard" for extensions, judging them based on their code
quality, compatibility with MediaWiki versions, tests, etc.
I was in that room and I agree that defining and implementing this "gold
standard" is a good idea. For what I recall, factors considered included
objective facts like compatibility tested with Jenkins, support for LTS,
etc. Still, I don't see this as a substitution of user feedack, with its
potential drawbacks but also with the uniqueness that such human feedback
provides.
Whenever we have this type of discussion, Wordpress is mentioned as a good
example of a catalog of plugins with information useful for Wordpress
users
(meaning Wordpress admins, just like in the case of MediaWiki). Look for
instance
http://wordpress.org/plugins/feedweb/
Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.9.2
Last Updated: 2014-8-21
Downloads: 90,268
Something to consider about user ratings. Ratings with stars/whatever are
most useful when you're looking at a condensed list of multiple similar
<item>s because they add a metric that can be compared and sorted. Suppose
you're looking at laptops - you've got a bunch of otherwise similar
machines all within the same general hardware specs - so then you look at
the higher-rated ones first. More stars? Go check the comments to see why
they rated it higher.
But that only applies when you have many, similar items that do the same
thing and you need to choose between them, and that just isn't generally
the case with extensions. In many cases there is only a single extension
for a single purpose, and if you are looking for an extension, you are
looking for one that does specifically what you want. So you go find that
one, and once you are there, the actual question at this point is 'does it
work?', not if it's better than anything else.
So a better model here may be endorsements. Look at game mods as an
example - Skyrim has an insane amount of mods you can install, with often
surprisingly little overlap of funtionality (yes, there are different
lighting mods, but they all do it a little differently, so it comes down to
which kind of lighting you prefer more than anything else). Suppose you
find a mod on nexusmods that does what you're after, you see it has 100ish
endorsements, that means it probably actually works and does what it says
on the tin. That's good. You look at the comments, nobody's complaining
about it being broken or causing other problems, well, there you go. Good
to go.
Just thinking aloud, there are a few alternative mechanisms for helping
users find extensions that are right for them:
We could badge-ify installations based on some major re-users – "This
extension is used by Wikia", "This extension is used by …" to help people
get a feel for common big-wiki items, though that probably doesn't work for
the majority of users who may have less specialised (or differently
specialised) needs.
We could have curated lists ("Good for internal corporate wikis"; "Good
for
managing multi-lingual user communities") that would guide users based on
what they want to do, maybe with some basic roles pre-defined.
We could have the "new", "new version released" and
"popular" sections, of
course, which are *de rigeur* in app stores and the like. This might be a
bit too frothy for most users, though?
Lots of possibilities!
(BTW, some basic structured data about each extension would be great to
expose for users for this purpose; maybe
could be a potential
future Wikibase target?)
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester