[Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent

[Erik Moeller]

2011/4/5 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> What I see is grants supplying money to get initiatives that have been
> long-wanted happening. The near-impossibility of getting even quite
> simple things through a bureaucratic kudzu-choked community process
> has been noted on this list *many* times.

To clarify, the Article Feedback Tool isn't funded by grant money.
Measuring Public Policy Initiative article improvement was one of the
timeline constraints for the project, but it had been in our list of
wants and needs before that, it is being funded out of the core
budget, and it's being tested on non-PPI articles. We'll wrap up this
iteration of the tooling soon, and after that, will likely post an RfP
for next-generation work so the core team can focus on
rich-text-editing and new user interventions.

Guillaume is working on some draft specs for next-generation work
here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Extended_review
if you want to jump in with thoughts, but note that it's still being
iterated quite heavily.

It's very easy to expand these kinds of tools into all different
directions -- ratings/comments/tagging/sharing etc. -- and we're
focusing on quality measurement as the main objective, but you'll see
in the extended proposal that we're thinking about ways that readers
can add extended feedback, going into a review database from where it
could be promoted to the talk page if it's considered especially
useful.

In the current iteration we're also testing whether ratings can be a
form of user engagement, by running a few post-rating invitations
(create an account / edit the article / take a survey) -- if those
invitations work, the tool could also play a significant role in our
new user work.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate