Hi everyone, As recommended in our report (1), we now plan to remove the Article Feedback Tool entirely from both the English and French Wikipedia sites this Monday, March 3, at 19:00 UTC (11am PT).
So any editors who wish to transfer useful feedback to their article talk pages should do it this weekend, using the built-in ‘Discuss on talk page’ tool (2). We will also archive the feedback data in a public hub, so it may be accessed even after the tool has been disabled. We appreciate all the good insights we’ve received from team and community members about our Article Feedback report and recommendation to end this experiment. We appreciate their observations (3) (4), many of which match comments from our own team retrospective (5). And I’m particularly grateful for Ori's kind words below, which mean a lot to me. :) Many great feature ideas have been proposed in these discussions, which generally make good sense to me: I wish we had the resources to build them as part of this project, but my hope is that some of them will be useful for future projects. In my view, a key issue for this project is that we took on a very hard problem with insufficient resources to effectively solve it. Our small team engaged community members extensively throughout this experiment, and we were grateful for all the good recommendations we received; but we simply did not have the capacity to build all these features with a single contract engineer. This taught us an important lesson, and we are now staffing our teams more effectively for projects of this size, such as Flow. On the whole, I think we all gained from this project, despite its setbacks. A lot of the code and research tools we developed for Article Feedback are now being used by other projects, so this experiment is helping improve Wikipedia in more ways than one. In times like these, I am reminded of Thomas Edison's words about his own experiments: 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.’ We too have learned a lot together from this exploration -- and I am very grateful for everyone's willingness to experiment with us. I look forward to more collaborations with you all in the future. Onward! Fabrice (1) Article Feedback Report: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Report (2) ‘Discuss on talk page’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_Feedback/Help/Editors#How_can_I_discuss_feedback_posts_on_talk_pages.3F (3) AFT5 Report Discussion: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback/Version_5/Report (4) AFT Talk page on English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5#Article_Feedback:_Next_Steps (5) AFT5 Wikimedia Team Retrospective: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/document/d/1t0as8SIgDDCv_MJL3NxWtDSGrSMSxXxd1-GajFJoPMU/edit team (6) Gerrit ticket: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/112639/ (7) Bugzilla report: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61163 On Feb 13, 2014, at 12:22 PM, Ori Livneh <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Fabrice Florin <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > As many of you know, we have been testing an improved version of Article > Feedback v5 in two pilots on the English and French Wikipedias throughout > 2013. The main purpose of this experiment was to increase participation on > Wikipedia by inviting readers to leave comments on article pages. > > The French pilot just ended last month, providing informative results about > this experiment. In the final RfC we ran on the French site (1), about 45% of > respondents wanted AFT5 removed everywhere, while 38% wanted to keep it an > opt-in basis, and 10% on help pages only (2); nearly everyone agreed it > should not be on by default on all 40,000 pilot pages, let alone on the > entire French Wikipedia. Their concerns are is consistent to what we heard > from editors on the English and German pilots: overall, a majority of editors > do not find reader comments useful enough to warrant the extra moderation > work. > > Based on these pilot results, we recommend that Article Feedback be removed > from our two pilot sites at the end of the month, as outlined in this report > (3) — since the tool is not welcome by a majority of editors, despite its > benefits to readers. > > Fabrice, I commend you for authoring this report. It is honest, > straightforward, and thoughtful -- and, I imagine, not easy to write. I think > it demonstrates a high standard of professionalism with respect to feature > development. It makes me proud to be a WMFer when I see us act with such > self-awareness. It's an example I'll try to emulate. > _______________________________________________ > EE mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
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