[Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes of 2016!

[Danny Horn]

Hi everyone,

The Community Tech team is happy to announce the top 10 wishes from the
2016 Community Wishlist Survey!

More than 1,100 people participated in the survey this year -- proposing,
discussing and voting on 265 ideas. There was a two-week period in November
to submit and discuss proposals, followed by two weeks of support voting.
The top 10 proposals with the most support votes now become Community
Tech's backlog of projects to evaluate and address.

And here's the top 10:

#1. Global gadgets (91 support votes)
#2. Edit summary length for non-Latin languages (90)
#3. Section heading URLs for non-Latin languages (88)
#4. Global settings (84)
#5. Rewrite Xtools (84)
#6. Wikitext editor syntax highlighting (82)
#7. Warning on unsuccessful login attempts (73)
#8. Automatic archive for new external links (72)
#9. Fix Mr. Z-bot's popular pages report (72)
#10. User rights expiration (70)

You can see the whole list here, with links to proposals and Phabricator
tickets:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

So -- who's going to work on all these wishes?

The Community Tech team is responsible for investigating and addressing the
top 10 wishes. If there's a wish in the top 10 that we can't work on,
because it's unfeasible or because another group is working on it, then
we'll explain what's happened.

Community Tech will also pick up some wishes below the top 10 that support
smaller user groups who are doing important work, but don't have the
numbers to vote a proposal all the way up to the top 10. This will apply to
some combination of: campaign and program organizers, GLAM participants,
stewards and CheckUsers, and people working on smaller projects or smaller
languages. We haven't determined which wishes we'll pick up yet; we'll be
talking about these as we get into 2017.

Also, some of these wishes will be granted by volunteer developers; the
Technical Collaboration team will help to connect volunteers with important
wishes that they can work on.

Some of these wishes are or will be on the roadmap for our colleagues on
the WMDE Technical Wishes team, and other Wikimedia Foundation product
teams.

To get updates on our progress:

There are project pages for each of the top 10 wishes, which you can put on
your watchlist. We'll update them as the project progresses. (At time of
writing, these are just skeletons; actual information on each project is
still to come.) Feel free to post questions and suggestions on the project
talk pages:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Community_Tech_-_Current_projects

If you're familiar with the Phabricator ticketing system, the main Phab
task for each wish is noted on the Results page. You can subscribe to those
tickets for updates.

We also publish several status reports through the year, to keep people
updated. You can watch the main Community Tech page for updates:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech

There are more questions and answers on the Wishlist Survey FAQ:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/FAQ

Thanks to everybody who proposed, discussed, debated and voted on ideas in
this year's Wishlist Survey, to everyone who's said nice things to us
recently, and to all people everywhere in time and space, on general
principles.
Danny Horn
Sr Product Manager, Community Tech
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Bill Morrisson]

Thanks a lot for your input, my doubts are clear now :)

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 10:53 PM, Andre Klapper 
wrote:

> On Sat, 2016-01-09 at 12:13 -0800, Brian Wolff wrote:
> > On Saturday, January 9, 2016, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > > As Danny said, this is a wonderful thing to point out, and his
> > > answer
> > > way more authoritative than mine.  Thinking back to my early MediaWiki
> > > contribution experience, I would have loved to have had a ranked list
> > > of "these are things that are really important" so that I knew my
> > > contribution would ultimately be appreciated and important to the
> > > project.
> > >
> >
> > RIP bugzilla votes...
>
> I consider votes within a separate developer-focused tool (Bugzilla,
> which required a separate account) less representative than on-wiki.
> The latter allows a broader variety of community members to participate
> and raise their voices in an environment they are familiar with.
>
> andre
> --
> Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
> http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
>
>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Bill Morrisson]

@Rob Lanphier I was asking on behalf of myself

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Bill Morrisson 
wrote:

> Thanks a lot for your input, my doubts are clear now :)
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 10:53 PM, Andre Klapper 
> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 2016-01-09 at 12:13 -0800, Brian Wolff wrote:
>> > On Saturday, January 9, 2016, Rob Lanphier wrote:
>> > > As Danny said, this is a wonderful thing to point out, and his
>> > > answer
>> > > way more authoritative than mine.  Thinking back to my early MediaWiki
>> > > contribution experience, I would have loved to have had a ranked list
>> > > of "these are things that are really important" so that I knew my
>> > > contribution would ultimately be appreciated and important to the
>> > > project.
>> > >
>> >
>> > RIP bugzilla votes...
>>
>> I consider votes within a separate developer-focused tool (Bugzilla,
>> which required a separate account) less representative than on-wiki.
>> The latter allows a broader variety of community members to participate
>> and raise their voices in an environment they are familiar with.
>>
>> andre
>> --
>> Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
>> http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
>>
>>
>>
>> ___
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>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>
>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Andre Klapper]

On Sat, 2016-01-09 at 12:13 -0800, Brian Wolff wrote:
> On Saturday, January 9, 2016, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > As Danny said, this is a wonderful thing to point out, and his
> > answer
> > way more authoritative than mine.  Thinking back to my early MediaWiki
> > contribution experience, I would have loved to have had a ranked list
> > of "these are things that are really important" so that I knew my
> > contribution would ultimately be appreciated and important to the
> > project.
> > 
> 
> RIP bugzilla votes...

I consider votes within a separate developer-focused tool (Bugzilla,
which required a separate account) less representative than on-wiki.
The latter allows a broader variety of community members to participate
and raise their voices in an environment they are familiar with.

andre
-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Brian Wolff]

On Saturday, January 9, 2016, Rob Lanphier  wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 11:07 AM, Bill Morrisson
>  wrote:
>> I wish to ask if volunteer developers can participate in one of the top
10
>> wishes of the community wishlist or can only start working on those
wishes
>> that are at the rest of the list or if volunteer developers need a
>> particular permission for that.
>
> As Danny said, this is a wonderful thing to point out, and his answer
> way more authoritative than mine.  Thinking back to my early MediaWiki
> contribution experience, I would have loved to have had a ranked list
> of "these are things that are really important" so that I knew my
> contribution would ultimately be appreciated and important to the
> project.
>

RIP bugzilla votes...

--
bawolff
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Brian Wolff]

I dont speak for the comunity tech team - but im pretty sure they would
love any and all help (as would pretty much any foundation team). It is
probably a good idea to check in with the team and tell them what you are
planning to work on in order to make sure you arent duplicating any work

--bawolff

On Friday, January 8, 2016, Bill Morrisson 
wrote:
> Hello
>
> I wish to ask if volunteer developers can participate in one of the top 10
> wishes of the community wishlist or can only start working on those wishes
> that are at the rest of the list or if volunteer developers need a
> particular permission for that.
>
> Thanks
>
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 3:26 AM, Danny Horn  wrote:
>
>> Henning,
>>
>> If we're going to solve the problem of dead links, it needs to involve
>> automation, at least for the heavy lifting. Obviously, if a human
>> contributor can add a better source, that's great. But there are more
dead
>> links than people willing to replace them.
>>
>> On English Wikipedia, there's Category:All articles with dead external
>> links, and it contains more than 134,000 articles[1] -- and those are
just
>> the pages where somebody's added the Dead link template. There are a lot
of
>> missing references -- not just on English WP, but on all the projects --
>> and connecting those links to a live archive makes them useful again.
>>
>> For links that were moved, we may be able to collect and use that
>> information -- I know that we're looking into what kind of metadata we
can
>> collect when a new link is added to the page. But I think finding
>> alternative sources has to come from human contributors, and that's hard
to
>> scale.
>>
>> Danny
>> PM, Community Tech
>>
>> [1]:
>>
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_dead_external_links
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Henning Schlottmann <
>> h.schlottm...@gmx.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > On 16.12.2015 21:12, Danny Horn wrote:
>> >
>> > > #1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine  (111 support votes)
>> >
>> > I really hope, you don't follow that wish, as it is detrimental to the
>> > quality of Wikipedia.
>> >
>> > Switching dead links to the archive is a move to a dead end, instead of
>> > looking for
>> >
>> > a) the new correct URL, as many links were just moved.
>> > b) alternative sources for the same fact.
>> >
>> > Ciao Henning
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > ___
>> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
>> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
>> > New messages to: wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org
>> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> > 
>> >
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Danny Horn]

Oh, what a good question. I hadn't really thought about it before, and I
should have; thanks for bringing it up.

We've got a wishlist survey Phabricator board, with all of the core
tracking tickets:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/community-wishlist-survey/

The tickets from the top 10 all have related investigation tickets, and it
would be great to have people participate on those threads. Right now,
we're still in the investigation phase for pretty much everything, so it's
more talking than coding at the moment. That'll change soon, as we move
towards getting to work on some of the projects.

We're going to publish a first report on the preliminary assessments,
including all the discussions we had with people at the Developer Summit
earlier this week. I'm going to work on that next week, hopefully
publishing on-wiki by the end of the week (or not long after). So there'll
be more info coming soon, once I've had time to transfer all the knowledge
from my notebook to Phabricator and wiki pages. :)

Danny Horn
Product Manager, Community Tech



On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 11:19 AM, Brian Wolff  wrote:

> I dont speak for the comunity tech team - but im pretty sure they would
> love any and all help (as would pretty much any foundation team). It is
> probably a good idea to check in with the team and tell them what you are
> planning to work on in order to make sure you arent duplicating any work
>
> --bawolff
>
> On Friday, January 8, 2016, Bill Morrisson 
> wrote:
> > Hello
> >
> > I wish to ask if volunteer developers can participate in one of the top
> 10
> > wishes of the community wishlist or can only start working on those
> wishes
> > that are at the rest of the list or if volunteer developers need a
> > particular permission for that.
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 3:26 AM, Danny Horn  wrote:
> >
> >> Henning,
> >>
> >> If we're going to solve the problem of dead links, it needs to involve
> >> automation, at least for the heavy lifting. Obviously, if a human
> >> contributor can add a better source, that's great. But there are more
> dead
> >> links than people willing to replace them.
> >>
> >> On English Wikipedia, there's Category:All articles with dead external
> >> links, and it contains more than 134,000 articles[1] -- and those are
> just
> >> the pages where somebody's added the Dead link template. There are a lot
> of
> >> missing references -- not just on English WP, but on all the projects --
> >> and connecting those links to a live archive makes them useful again.
> >>
> >> For links that were moved, we may be able to collect and use that
> >> information -- I know that we're looking into what kind of metadata we
> can
> >> collect when a new link is added to the page. But I think finding
> >> alternative sources has to come from human contributors, and that's hard
> to
> >> scale.
> >>
> >> Danny
> >> PM, Community Tech
> >>
> >> [1]:
> >>
> >>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_dead_external_links
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 9:51 AM, Henning Schlottmann <
> >> h.schlottm...@gmx.net>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> > On 16.12.2015 21:12, Danny Horn wrote:
> >> >
> >> > > #1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine  (111 support votes)
> >> >
> >> > I really hope, you don't follow that wish, as it is detrimental to the
> >> > quality of Wikipedia.
> >> >
> >> > Switching dead links to the archive is a move to a dead end, instead
> of
> >> > looking for
> >> >
> >> > a) the new correct URL, as many links were just moved.
> >> > b) alternative sources for the same fact.
> >> >
> >> > Ciao Henning
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > ___
> >> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> >> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> >> > New messages to: wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org
> >> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> ,
> >> > 
> >> >
> >> ___
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[Wikitech-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Danny Horn]

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to announce that the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist
Survey has concluded, and we're able to announce the top 10 wishes!

634 people participated in the survey, where they proposed, discussed and
voted on 107 ideas. There was a two-week period in November to submit and
endorse proposals, followed by two weeks of voting. The top 10 proposals
with the most support votes now become the Community Tech team's backlog of
projects to evaluate and address.

And here's the top 10:

#1. Migrate dead links to the Wayback Machine  (111 support votes)
#2. Improved diff compare screen  (104)
#3. Central global repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules  (87)
#4. Cross-wiki watchlist  (84)
#4. Numerical sorting in categories  (84)
#6. Allow categories in Commons in all languages  (78)
#7. Pageview Stats tool  (70)
#8. Global cross-wiki user talk page  (66)
#9. Improve the "copy and paste detection" bot  (63)
#10. Add a user watchlist  (62)

You can see the whole list here, with links to all the proposals and
Phabricator tickets:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

So what happens now?

Over the next couple weeks, Community Tech will do a preliminary assessment
on the top 10, and start figuring out what's involved. We need to have a
clear definition of the problem and proposed solution, and begin to
understand the technical, design and community challenges for each one.

Some wishes in the top 10 seem relatively straightforward, and we'll be
able to dig in and start working on them in the new year. Some wishes are
going to need a lot of investigation and discussion with other developers,
product teams, designers and community members. There may be some that are
just too big or too hard to do at all.

Our analysis will look at the following factors:

* SUPPORT: Overall support for the proposal, including the discussions on
the survey page. This will take the neutral and oppose votes into account.
Some of these ideas also have a rich history of discussions on-wiki and in
bug tickets. For some wishes, we'll need more community discussion to help
define the problem and agree on proposed solutions.

* FEASIBILITY: How much work is involved, including existing blockers and
dependencies.

* IMPACT: Evaluating how many projects and contributors will benefit,
whether it's a long-lasting solution or a temporary fix, and the
improvement in contributors' overall productivity and happiness.

* RISK: Potential drawbacks, conflicts with other developers' work, and
negative effects on any group of contributors.

Our plan for 2016 is to complete as many of the top 10 wishes as we can.
For the wishes in the top 10 that we can't complete, we're responsible for
investigating them fully and reporting back on the analysis.

So there's going to be a series of checkpoints through the year, where
we'll present the current status of the top 10 wishes. The first will be at
the Wikimedia Developer Summit in the first week of January. We're planning
to talk about the preliminary assessment there, and then share it more
widely.

If you're eager to follow the whole process as we go along, we'll be
documenting and keeping notes in two places:

On Meta: 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Top 10:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Top_10

On Phabricator: Community Wishlist Survey board:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/community-wishlist-survey/

Finally: What about the other 97 proposals?

There were a lot of good and important proposals that didn't happen to get
quite as many support votes, and I'm sure everybody has at least one that
they were rooting for. Again, the whole list is here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results

We're going to talk with the other Wikimedia product teams, to see if they
can take on some of the ideas the the community has expressed interest in.
We're also going to work with the Developer Relations team to see if some
of these could be taken on by volunteer developers.

It's also possible that Community Tech could take on a small-scale,
well-defined proposal below the top 10, if it doesn't interfere with our
commitments to the top 10 wishes.

So there's lots of work to be done, and hooray, we have a whole year to do
it. If this process turns out to be a success, then we plan to do another
survey at the end of 2016, to give more people a chance to participate, and
bring more great ideas.

For everybody who proposed, endorsed, discussed, debated and voted in the
survey, as well as everyone who said nice things to us recently: thank you
very much for coming out and supporting live feature development. We're
excited about the work ahead of us.

We'd also like to thank Wikimedia Deutschland's Technischer Communitybedarf
team -- they came up with this whole survey process, and they've been
working successfully on lots of community wishes since their first survey
in 2013.

You can watch this