Moushira Elamrawy wrote:
Related pages feature has been in beta for over two months now, the future of the feature depends on our discussions. While we currently don't have a clear process for deciding collaboratively on an all languages product, Alsee and the reading team have put together this document on meta [0], as a request for comment, seeking comments and ideas on modifications required, and how to further test the feature. In fact, we are not sure if an rfc is the best strategy to move forward with product decisions, but lets see how the discussion evolves, and we might explore the need for a different process, as we move on with this one.
I have pretty grave concerns about the deployment of the RelatedArticles extension to Wikimedia wikis.
It's my sense that RelatedArticles is similar to UserProfile and Gather: there's a kernel of a good idea, but the implementation is so problematic that pressing ahead with it will result in doing more harm than good.
Already German Wikipedians are planning a Meinungsbilder, which is reminiscent of the MediaViewer debacle. On Meta-Wiki, there's an acknowledgement that this extension was deployed without any Wikimedia community asking for it. At its worse, the "related articles" feature reminds the viewer of the pseudo-content spam that's curerntly infesting parts of the Web (e.g., "Do These 7 Things or You'll Get Alzheimer's"; screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/tYcdrLk.png).
In short, there's a lot of bad juju here.
My recommendation is to disable this extension. There are two related functionalities that editors would like to have:
* the ability to retrieve the page image of article "White House" from the article "Barack Obama", probably using a parser function; and
* the ability to specify the page image of the article "White House" if the heuristic is wrong and an override is needed.
I'm not sure where we stand on these two features currently. Having the ability to retrieve an arbitrary page image and specify an arbitrary page image will empower editors. This is preferable to indiscriminately slapping three sometimes irrelevant photos and article links on every page. Part of what makes Wikimedia wikis great is that we exercise editorial control. We're not serving up unprocessed machine output, we're curating content, which for now results in a much better product.
MZMcBride