Hello everyone,
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.
We managed to translate a brief introduction about the topic, please feel free to fully translate the document and/or further promote the discussion on your wiki. We are trying hard to avoid having an English centric discussion for a feature that could be available across all language projects, and while we don't have a clear solution for this, we are trying this method as an experiment, where at least our communities can leave comments in their preferred language if they aren't comfortable writing in English but they can understand it.
Please check the page, help with translation or promotion in your Wikipedia, and most importantly, comment on how you think it can evolve. :)
Lets see how this works!
All the best, M
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
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
This feature appears to be an automated edition of the "See also" section on English Wikipedia. Having both Related Articles and See also feels like a usability issue.
Has there been any discussions on the wikis about this overlap? On 24 Mar 2016 05:18, "Moushira Elamrawy" melamrawy@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello everyone,
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.
We managed to translate a brief introduction about the topic, please feel free to fully translate the document and/or further promote the discussion on your wiki. We are trying hard to avoid having an English centric discussion for a feature that could be available across all language projects, and while we don't have a clear solution for this, we are trying this method as an experiment, where at least our communities can leave comments in their preferred language if they aren't comfortable writing in English but they can understand it.
Please check the page, help with translation or promotion in your Wikipedia, and most importantly, comment on how you think it can evolve. :)
Lets see how this works!
All the best, M
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
I have nothing against "related pages", I've been testing it for a while but: *its graphics suddenly worsened not so much time after the first release *it often overlaps with pages already listed in "see also" section *some results aren't relevant at all
IMHO all these issues should be addressed: *graphics should become customizable/adaptable to skin. It would be even better to have a keyword to embed it in a template: for articles without the template the "related pages" section would be automatically placed at the bottom, while for articles with the template it would be placed where Wikipedians wanted it to be. *it should be able to parse see also section in order to avoid duplicates, this could also be solved with the following issue though *users should be able to mark a result as "non relevant" (or duplicate, per above): let's say if 10 people mark the result as non relevant it won't longer be shown/it won't be shown for six months
Finally I'm wondering: does it embeds informations from our internal, extra precious, source of knowledge named Wikidata?
Vito
Il 04/04/2016 08:53, John Mark Vandenberg ha scritto:
This feature appears to be an automated edition of the "See also" section on English Wikipedia. Having both Related Articles and See also feels like a usability issue.
Has there been any discussions on the wikis about this overlap? On 24 Mar 2016 05:18, "Moushira Elamrawy" melamrawy@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello everyone,
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.
We managed to translate a brief introduction about the topic, please feel free to fully translate the document and/or further promote the discussion on your wiki. We are trying hard to avoid having an English centric discussion for a feature that could be available across all language projects, and while we don't have a clear solution for this, we are trying this method as an experiment, where at least our communities can leave comments in their preferred language if they aren't comfortable writing in English but they can understand it.
Please check the page, help with translation or promotion in your Wikipedia, and most importantly, comment on how you think it can evolve. :)
Lets see how this works!
All the best, M
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Thank you for testing it Vituzzu. If I recall correctly the images got worse because of a change to the PageImages extension so that copyrighted images wouldn't be used outside of the main article page (which are usually the good representative images in a lot of articles in english wikipedia (fair use images)). It would be great to talk more about fair use images and their use inside the wiki on other places than the main article (summaries like hovercards, things like related pages, or thumbnails on search results, to give a few examples).
On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 10:56 AM, Vituzzu vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
I have nothing against "related pages", I've been testing it for a while but: *its graphics suddenly worsened not so much time after the first release *it often overlaps with pages already listed in "see also" section *some results aren't relevant at all
IMHO all these issues should be addressed: *graphics should become customizable/adaptable to skin. It would be even better to have a keyword to embed it in a template: for articles without the template the "related pages" section would be automatically placed at the bottom, while for articles with the template it would be placed where Wikipedians wanted it to be. *it should be able to parse see also section in order to avoid duplicates, this could also be solved with the following issue though *users should be able to mark a result as "non relevant" (or duplicate, per above): let's say if 10 people mark the result as non relevant it won't longer be shown/it won't be shown for six months
Finally I'm wondering: does it embeds informations from our internal, extra precious, source of knowledge named Wikidata?
Vito
Il 04/04/2016 08:53, John Mark Vandenberg ha scritto:
This feature appears to be an automated edition of the "See also" section on English Wikipedia. Having both Related Articles and See also feels like a usability issue.
Has there been any discussions on the wikis about this overlap? On 24 Mar 2016 05:18, "Moushira Elamrawy" melamrawy@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello everyone,
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.
We managed to translate a brief introduction about the topic, please feel free to fully translate the document and/or further promote the discussion on your wiki. We are trying hard to avoid having an English centric discussion for a feature that could be available across all language projects, and while we don't have a clear solution for this, we are trying this method as an experiment, where at least our communities can leave comments in their preferred language if they aren't comfortable writing in English but they can understand it.
Please check the page, help with translation or promotion in your Wikipedia, and most importantly, comment on how you think it can evolve. :)
Lets see how this works!
All the best, M
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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
1) The related articles are editable via the {{RelatedArticles}} magic word. They have been since day one of launch.
2) There is a great conversation around how this feature could serve as a see also replacement here:https://www.mediawiki.org/w/ https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Syte4nkfr13nlfw4&action=history index.php https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Syte4nkfr13nlfw4&action=history ?title=Topic: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Syte4nkfr13nlfw4&action=history Syte4nkfr13nlfw4 https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Syte4nkfr13nlfw4&action=history &action=history https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Syte4nkfr13nlfw4&action=history
3) it's a beta feature and as far as I'm aware there are no plans to push this to all users without community buy in.
4) in general I think beta features are a great way to have conversations about how we can make the wiki better. I think this is generating good conversations - especially around the PageImages extension and the usefulness of see also and the exposure of the more like API. On 4 Apr 2016 9:53 a.m., "John Mark Vandenberg" jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
This feature appears to be an automated edition of the "See also" section on English Wikipedia. Having both Related Articles and See also feels like a usability issue.
Has there been any discussions on the wikis about this overlap? On 24 Mar 2016 05:18, "Moushira Elamrawy" melamrawy@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello everyone,
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.
We managed to translate a brief introduction about the topic, please feel free to fully translate the document and/or further promote the discussion on your wiki. We are trying hard to avoid having an English centric discussion for a feature that could be available across all language projects, and while we don't have a clear solution for this, we are trying this method as an experiment, where at least our communities can leave comments in their preferred language if they aren't comfortable writing in English but they can understand it.
Please check the page, help with translation or promotion in your Wikipedia, and most importantly, comment on how you think it can evolve. :)
Lets see how this works!
All the best, M
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Moushira Elamrawy melamrawy@wikimedia.org wrote:
...
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 don't think an RFC on its own is *ever* the best way to move forward with product decisions. From what I've seen, that approach inevitably leads to the conflation of design issues ("does this work as designed, for whom, why or why not?") with implement issues ("do the people who participate in this discussion want this feature to exist on some wiki in some form, why or why not?"). Too often this simply pits the WMF product team, who obviously want feature to be liked and used, against a cohort of community members who *dislike* the feature enough that they're willing to spend their private time slugging it out. Things escalate, mug is thrown, new epithets are coined, and the product--often as not--just continues to hang in limbo.
In future, I would suggest we always conduct some user research first—with editors and readers, to understand what value, if any, different stakeholders find in the product, as well as what's working and what's not in the current design. Then bring the findings of that research into the RFC, to provide an additional set of criteria with which to view the product's general worthiness, and to anchor discussions of the various benefits and drawbacks of implementing it (in some form, at some point, on some wiki) in direct evidence from a more diverse set of stakeholders.
Jonathan
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
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