Moushira Elamrawy wrote:
Related pages feature has been in beta for over two
months now, the
future of the feature depends on our discussions. While we currently
don't have a clear process for deciding collaboratively on an all
languages product, Alsee and the reading team have put together this
document on meta [0], as a request for comment, seeking comments and
ideas on modifications required, and how to further test the feature. In
fact, we are not sure if an rfc is the best strategy to move forward with
product decisions, but lets see how the discussion evolves, and we might
explore the need for a different process, as we move on with this one.
I have pretty grave concerns about the deployment of the RelatedArticles
extension to Wikimedia wikis.
It's my sense that RelatedArticles is similar to UserProfile and Gather:
there's a kernel of a good idea, but the implementation is so problematic
that pressing ahead with it will result in doing more harm than good.
Already German Wikipedians are planning a Meinungsbilder, which is
reminiscent of the MediaViewer debacle. On Meta-Wiki, there's an
acknowledgement that this extension was deployed without any Wikimedia
community asking for it. At its worse, the "related articles" feature
reminds the viewer of the pseudo-content spam that's curerntly infesting
parts of the Web (e.g., "Do These 7 Things or You'll Get Alzheimer's";
screenshot: <https://i.imgur.com/tYcdrLk.png>).
In short, there's a lot of bad juju here.
My recommendation is to disable this extension. There are two related
functionalities that editors would like to have:
* the ability to retrieve the page image of article "White House" from the
article "Barack Obama", probably using a parser function; and
* the ability to specify the page image of the article "White House" if
the heuristic is wrong and an override is needed.
I'm not sure where we stand on these two features currently. Having the
ability to retrieve an arbitrary page image and specify an arbitrary page
image will empower editors. This is preferable to indiscriminately
slapping three sometimes irrelevant photos and article links on every
page. Part of what makes Wikimedia wikis great is that we exercise
editorial control. We're not serving up unprocessed machine output, we're
curating content, which for now results in a much better product.
MZMcBride