On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 5:42 PM, Romaine Wiki <romaine.wiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Abouth the sections of Phase 1 & 2 I am concerned.
The way it is suggested
to be set up now is that the proposals with the most votes win. First of
all, large wikis & communities have more people to submit proposals and
more people to vote. So it seems that this is becoming a popularity
contest, which is the wrong direction.
I actually suspect that the proposals that will get the most votes will be
ideas that benefit the most projects. If an idea would only benefit French
Wikipedia, for example, I doubt it would get as many votes as a tool that
is usable by every Wikipedia. That said, I do agree that some projects are
probably going to be at a disadvantage. For example, I'm not expecting
WikiSpecies to make a strong showing. To some degree, this makes sense, as
we want to focus our limited resources where they will have the largest
impact. We also want to make sure, however, that we are not ignoring vital
sectors of the community. We haven't fleshed out plans for it yet, but we
have some very tentative plans to do focused technical workshops with
specialized community groups next year. For example, we might hold a
workshop for GLAM volunteers or Wiktionary volunteers or Recent Change
Patrollers to find out what their specific needs are and how/if we can
address them. This idea is dependent on what kind of resources our team has
next year and is very tentative, so don't hold me to it just yet. Right
now, it's just an idea :)
In the Dutch community it happens a lot that users are
against certain
software, until they tried, and the other way round happens as well. Basing
a voting on what people like can easily become unbalanced because of
various factors. Also what matters to one person, does not have to matter
to another person (like because he doesn't do anything with it), while it
can be essential to another.
These points are all true and this is the reason we will be offering
feedback on as many of the proposals as we can before voting begins.
Specifically, we will try to assess them for feasibility, impact, and risk,
so that voters can make well-informed choices rather than just voting for
their favorite gadget. Also, keep in mind that voting isn't the final step
for prioritization. After voting is finished, we will be taking the top X
requests (probably 10 or 20) and then doing our own analysis of them to
determine priority. It's possible some of those requests will be referred
to other teams or even rejected if they don't make sense for us to work on.
The process for this survey is still a draft, however, and we are open to
significantly revising it. If you have suggestions for a system that might
work better than voting and you can show community support for the idea, we
can switch to a different process. The current draft is based largely on
consultations with the German TCB team (which has done similar wishlist
surveys), the WMF Community Engagement team, and a few random community
members that we've talked to. I'm sure it isn't perfect, but I doubt any
process will be.
Ryan Kaldari
Engineering Manager, Community Tech