Talk pages consultation 2019/Structure and updates

Consultation structure

This consultation will have a "hub-and-spoke" structure, with a central hub located here on mediawiki.org ("Talk Page Consultation central"). Over the course of the consultation, multiple participant groups will have discussions on other wikis and in off-wiki settings, and then contribute notes and findings back to TPC central. Some participant groups will participate through the whole process, others may participate for a limited time (especially if they're in real life/meet-ups). Everyone can follow along and participate at TPC central (language permitting).

Phase 0: Planning

This is a planning phase, starting now! During this phase, we will:

• Publicly announce the project (banner info here), and invite questions and ideas from the Wikimedia community
• Set up TPC central documentation structure; current notes are featured on the main TPC page, while historical staff notes can be found here and here
• Create list of wikis and user groups for initial outreach and invite groups to sign up
• Establish code of conduct guidelines
• Begin retrospective process for StructuredDiscussions/Flow, Liquid Threads and wikitext workflows, collect important documentation
• Begin outreach to participant groups
• Invite volunteers to facilitate discussions, and participate in other ways
• Create schedule for phase 1

Phase 1: Collect information (started)

Source: TPC Discussion, volunteer participant groups

When: Mid-February - March; Community summaries posted by April 6, 2019

During this phase we will solicit open feedback from a wide range of individuals and groups about their experiences with talk pages or alternative tools. Questions will include:

• When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
• What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
• What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
• What do you wish you could do, but can't due to the technical limitations?
• What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?

The information collection has started when the first messages have been sent. Check if a group exists for your language.

Wrapping up the conversations

Community summaries are due by April 6, 2019. We advice communities, especially the ones that would have had collected a lot of replies, to end the conversation by March 31. That way, volunteers making the wrapping-up have time to make it.

Since that consultation is based on a different consultation process than how consultations are defined by local rules, those rules regarding how to close conversations may not be applied.

Phase 2: Trade-offs and prioritization

Source: TPC Discussion, volunteer participant groups

When: Late March-April 2019 (tentative)

Some ideas generated during phase 1 may be mutually exclusive. Some ideas might work better for some purposes or some kinds of users. We'll have to talk about which problems are more urgent, which projects are most closely aligned with the overall needs and goals of the movement, and which ideas we should focus on first.

Discussions about these trade-offs will be moderated by the Wikimedia Foundation, guided by our decision criteria, listed below.

Space for unexpected discoveries

Within the scope of this project, all the options are on the table. There are no hidden agendas. We don't know all the things, and we don't know what we might learn. We need to accept these "unknown unknowns".

The schedule of this consultation may change because of these unexpected discoveries.

Phase 3: Review potential direction

Source: TPC Discussion, volunteer participant groups

When: May 2019 (tentative)

We invite everyone back to the central page on MediaWiki.org to review the emerging direction for this project.

Status updates

Feb 27, 2019

Date for communities to turn in their summaries has been set to April 6, 2019.

In light of ongoing community discussions, it seems some editors are simply stating whether they like or dislike a feature. While their opinions certainly matter, the TPC group has to also obtain the reasons behind opinions in order for them to become an actionable item ("use case") for the designers. To that end, an effort needs to be made to reach out to communities hosting those discussions to ensure that reason are also included. Since the team would be reaching out anyway, it might also be good to do intermittent check-ins just to see how conversations are going and provide any other feedback as it becomes necessary.

Some current discussions have pointed out that a purposeful barrier to entry for talk page participation might not be altogether a bad thing, as it can help to filter out undesirable editors. There are arguments from both points of view, so having further discussion on this matter is warranted and may be included as part of the above check-in/guidance.

Users for various reasons may not want to use the current talk page discussions to provide feedback. Some capable editors across sites simply do not use them as a regular means of communication, while others may not feel comfortable doing so due to skill level or just sharing their opinions publicly. Multiple other avenues will be pursued to reach out to those folks as well, via an email address to leave feedback and Wikipedia's Facebook page. This further fleshes out the pool of respondents to include as many diverse populations as possible. Further, consideration should be made to reach out to those adding their communities to the tools in use page.

Something that may be of particular use, especially in the trade-offs/prioritization phase, is to use a polling engine like Qualtrics to gauge user interest in proposed features. Any questions would ideally be translated well ahead of time.

For edit-a-thon organizers, an email will be drafted and sent that invites them to participate in the conversation. Should also ask what the best way is for them to participate. In order to avoid potentially sharing email addresses between groups, will make sure the recipients are bcc. Recipients would also be able to respond directly to the team if they wanted to provide feedback in that way. If needed, that feedback would be anonymized and posted. A subpage of the TPC project will also be created for them to post in.

Though a message was sent to the EN teahouse page, individual teahouse hosts will now be contacted. Further clarification will be included to indicate that conversations may happen across platforms/sites. Mailing Lists need to be looked into and a list generated for those contacted. Chapters and Affiliates need invitations sent.

Feb 20, 2019

The Announcement message has been rewritten to be more of a call to action, which helps communities know what steps they need to take to be involved with this discussion. Ambassadors are being asked to review the announcement and provide translations, which have already been done in almost a dozen languages. If there are no issues, the plan is for mass distribution of the announcement tomorrow (2/21).

Due to multiple global initiatives already utilizing the banner feature, that will not launch this week. After Benoît's talk with Seddon, it seems the earliest the banner will launch would be March 4th.

Benoît and Sherry both have outlets for posting the announcement, though social media will be more complicated and take a greater amount of time. The Communication page will list all such avenues, preferably with when outreach will be done and by whom, as well as keeping track of when outreach has been performed. The page is in the earliest stage of development and needs to be revamped. In terms of social media accounts, we need to reach out to see who has the official WMF Facebook and Twitter accounts and get them to post.

A post-mortem page has been constructed trying to tie together all the feedback and suggestions for Talk pages, Flow, and LiquidThreads. This will be added to as more information comes in; for now, each bullet point should link to the appropriate reference from where it was lifted. Sherry will also be posting a subpage about the history of Discussions Systems, which should be live by tomorrow.

In terms of the TPC discussion itself, Danny will be heading up responses for now, focusing on those comments that need direct replies while using the "thank" system to acknowledge others. If the conversation becomes too long and complex, others may step into this role as well. There is also consideration of having users make their own sections on the page to leave feedback, but this would happen if/or once the page becomes too long.

Due to the growing amount of subpages, some sort of navigation will be placed on this page by the end of the day to insure people have access to all information.

Feb 14, 2019

The scope of this week's meetings was primarily around how to announce the TPC project and to whom. A wide net is the most desirable that reflects a varied array of user experience levels and wikis. As such, there isn't one method of communication about the TPC project that will work across the board. The following was proposed:

• Potential "soft" launch this week of the announcement, reaching out to teahouses, newcomer groups, and niche communities. This is partly due to launching late in the week, as the preference is to be on-hand to respond to comments as much as possible. This is also because the more wide-spread banner will not launch until next week at the earliest.
  • Ambassadors from niche communities may be asked to disseminate the announcement to their communities.
  • Sherry will handle outreach to some, such as GLAM/edu.
  • For third-party MW sites, may have yo reach out for a mailing list
• The banner, as mentioned, will hopefully launch at the beginning of next week and last for a week, as is the typical lifespan of banners.
  • Benoît may have to schedule a meeting with Seddon in order to get this posted earlier rather than later.
• A more aggressive communications push will happen in the coming week focusing more on Village Pumps.
• Tracking of outreach will be kept on the communications subpage.
• A live "office hours" event might be of some use, so will give it a try at some point (TBD). If it goes well, will keep doing it, but if not, will shelve. This would likely take the form of a YouTube stream paired with an IRC channel for chat.

Feb 5, 2019

We're excited to overhaul this page and present more information about how this talk page consultation will work over the next several months! Have a read of this project page, which includes information the structure, timeline, and decision-making criteria. To shape this documentation we've discussed this consultation with Wikimedia Foundation staff: both executive leadership as well as an open staff working group. We want this process to be aware of the past while pragmatically working toward the future, allowing for all voices to be heard equally.

See the § Participate section above to get started and help us make this a successful endeavor. Thank you! 🚀

Previous

See updates from before February 5, 2019 at Talk pages consultation 2019/Status updates.