[Foundation-l] Report to the Board, September 2008

[Erik Moeller]

2008/10/21 Mike.lifeguard <mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm>:

> This is a really exciting project that I've been following on
> wikiquality-l
> (https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiquality-l). If we can
> get it integrated satisfactorily with MediaWiki, it will be a great tool
> to use beside FlaggedRevs (speaking of which, where are all the
> sysadmins, cough, cough?!).

It could be very useful. I feel the most interesting aspect of any
history analysis tool is the addition of blamemap features to make it
super-easy to find out who edited a particular piece of text. Luca's
toolkit does include that. It's not something we can currently put a
lot of resources towards, but Brion did send detailed feedback to Luca
that would help if he wants to get it ready for integration.

>>We have developed one primary grant proposal related to usability and
>>public outreach.

> Can we get more details on this? Usability and public outreach are hot
> topics right now, for myself especially.

It's still in the back and forth stage of the grant process. On the
technical side, what we're looking at right now is a set of
improvements targeting people without prior wiki editing experience to
help them contribute. Some of that work will be informed by active
user testing (giving people a few typical wiki tasks and observing
where they fail), and some we already know (let's try to create an
editor that finds intelligent ways to hide/collapse the scariest
syntax). On the outreach side, since that report was written, we've
decided to remove and postpone the outreach part of the grant for a
potential follow-up proposal.

So it's all still very much in discussion, and as those processes
always are, you only know that things are going ahead when they do.
;-)

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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