New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Status report #1

20 Jan 2016

Hi everyone,

We've posted the Community Tech team's first status report on our progress
with the Community Wishlist Survey, and you're invited to come and check it
out:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor…

In November and December, we invited active contributors to Wikimedia
projects to propose, discuss and vote on the features and fixes that they
most want to see. 634 people participated in the survey, voting on 107
proposals.

Our team has committed to investigating and responding to the top 10
wishes. In many cases, our team will be designing and building tools
ourselves, or collaborating with other teams and volunteers who are working
in that area. For the wishes that we can't build this year -- because it's
too big for our team, or there's a problem that we can't solve -- then we
can at least offer open discussion on the problem, and detailed
documentation explaining what we've learned, so the information can be used
by other developers in the future.

We've done a preliminary assessment of the top 10, which is described in
the status report. As of right now (mid-January), the two items that we're
actively working on  are #1) Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine, and
#7) Pageview Stats tool. Why are we working on those two and not the
others? Check out the status report for all the answers.

I'm going to post the quick overview of the top 10 wishes here. Each of
these wishes is discussed in detail on the status report page.

1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine: Currently in progress,
working with a community developer and the Internet Archive. This is one of
the two projects we're actively working on now (mid-January).

2. Improved diff compare screen: Needs investigation and community
discussion to define the problems that we want to solve.

3. Central repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules: Needs
underlying technical work that's currently under discussion by another team.

4. Cross-wiki watchlist: Needs technical investigation on the existing
Crosswatch tool, and the Collaboration team's cross-wiki notifications.

5. Numerical sorting in categories: Investigation is underway. There are a
couple potential solutions that we need to figure out.

6. Allow categories in Commons in all languages: Currently talking with
Wikidata about using structured metadata to solve the underlying problem.

7. Pageview Stats tool: Currently talking with the Analytics team about
their new pageview API. Needs some community discussion to define the
front-end spec. This is one of the two projects we're actively working on
now (mid-January), because the Analytics team is eager to use the new API
that they've developed.

8. Global cross-wiki talk page: Needs community discussion to define the
product.

9. Improve copy and paste detection bot: Need to work with volunteer
developers to define scope on improving the existing Plagiabot.

10. Add a user watchlist: We've heard significant pushback about the
vandal-fighting use case, because of the risk of enabling harassment.
Currently investigating an opt-in version that would be useful for mentors,
classes, editathons and WikiProjects.

Here's the status report link again, for lots more information:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Status_repor…

Our team is really excited about the work that we'll get to do this year,
and we're looking forward to talking and working with you as we go along.

Thanks,

Danny Horn
Product Manager
WMF - Community Tech
User:DannyH (WMF)