Moushira Elamrawy wrote: 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

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:

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 &lt;vituzzu.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

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#ove… ------- 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