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