Hello, everyone!
My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech team.
We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist Survey
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020>. This will
be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve
decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people to
write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and the
Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most support
votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content
projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource,
Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're
only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big
departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll
probably return to the traditional structure.
So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years — and,
generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful
improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the
nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia).
This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes
never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to
support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on
non-Wikipedia projects.
Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken on
larger wishes (like Global Preferences
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences> or Who
Wrote That
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Who_Wrote_That_tool>),
which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy
endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we
looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes.
Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this reason,
we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many wishes
(new and remaining 2019 wishes
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results>)
as possible.
Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of
folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we
could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and
open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020>* related
to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines for
this new process, so *we want your feedback
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020>* (on
what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and
we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
Thanks,
Ilana Fried
Product Manager, Community Tech
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech>