Community configuration 2.0/en

Summary
The Growth team developed Community configuration to help communities customize and scale Growth features. With the success of this feature (that we consider as the 1.0), it has become apparent that other WMF teams, external developers, and other users of MediaWiki could benefit from this tool, so the Growth team is exploring the possibility of moving this feature from the GrowthExperiments extension to a separate extension or possibly to MediaWiki Core.

This project will include a community consultation, discussion with technical stakeholders, scalable design improvements, and engineering work to move the Community configuration feature from the GrowthExperiments extension to MediaWiki core. Short-term this project supports the Editing and Moderator Tools team projects (Edit check and Automoderator), and long-term this work will help evolve how WMF product and technology teams develop and deploy features.

Prioritizing work on Community configuration 2.0 acknowledges that each community has unique needs, and invested community members should be empowered to configure features to meet those needs. This approach removes the barrier for non-technical moderators to customize project settings for their communities and fosters a more inclusive and collaborative product development process, thus enabling WMF to better serve the Wikimedia movement.

Current status

 * 2021-02-11: Work started on Growth's Community configuration
 * 2021-06-29: Growth's community configuration is available on all Growth wikis
 * 2023-04-20: Hackathon session: Community configuration – letting communities take control by JSON configuration (Hackathon session slides, Google Slides)
 * Next: Community consultation and collaboratively setting key performance indicators

Hypothesis
If editors with extended rights can transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality for all users, communities will have control over how features function on their wikis, and WMF teams will be able to ship new functionality quickly.

The Growth team is guided by the Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Product & Technology department's Objectives and Key Results. This hypothesis and associated project is one of several WMF team projects under the WikiExperiences 1.2 Key Result, which focuses on enhancing the user experience for editors with extended rights.

We want to

 * Create a tool that is easily understood by any experienced editor.
 * Empower communities to customize wiki features to best suit the local needs of their wiki.
 * Create a tool that helps increase the speed in which WMF Product and Technology teams can scale features to all wikis.
 * Create a tool that helps volunteer developers, gadget creators, and any software developer interested in creating community configurable tools for MediaWiki.

We don't want to

 * Create a tool that creates bias or only benefits a certain user group.
 * Create a tool that works only with certain features.
 * Create a tool that is difficult to find or understand.

Key Results
The goals and key results for this project will be established collaboratively with editors with extended rights. A few potential key results could be:
 * By the end of the fiscal year (June 2024), at least one other WMF team in Product and Technology has either launched or is in the active development stage for a project that is using Community configuration 2.0.
 * By the end of the fiscal year, at least one community engineer has launched or is in the active development stage for a project that will use Community configuration 2.0.
 * By the end of the fiscal year, Community configuration 2.0 has been used to customize at least `X` wikis (AKA editors with extended rights are aware and utilize Community configuration).
 * By the end of the fiscal year, initial guidelines for the types of functionality that should and should not be in Community configuration, and types of user rights, will be agreed in consultation and collaboration with volunteers and interested product teams.

Community discussion
As part of this project, there are three main groups of stakeholders we will consult with:


 * 1) Wiki communities: Including Wikipedia admins and users with extended rights that have used Growth's Community configuration previously or might utilize Community configuration 2.0 in the future. We will also consult with developers of user scripts and gadgets.
 * 2) Technical community: A wider discussion with the technical community as a whole (wikitech-l, MediaWiki core developers.
 * 3) WMF teams: Wikimedia Foundation Product and Technology teams interested in utilizing Community configuration 2.0 in upcoming projects.

Open questions:

 * How do you feel about the prospect of more WMF teams developing features that can be enabled, disabled, and configured by your local wiki Administrators? Do you have any reservations or concerns about this project?
 * What can we do to ensure that all Administrators are well-informed about these tools?
 * Are Administrators confident in making alterations to Community configuration? Which parts of the procedure are unclear or ambiguous?
 * While Community configuration 2.0 should be visible to all, it should only be modifiable by a select group of experienced Wikimedians? Should all configuration options be exclusively editable by Administrators and interface administrators? Should we consider different user access levels for certain Community configuration 2.0 options?
 * Do you have any thoughts or suggestions about how we can best define and measure the success of this project?
 * Scope of Community configuration 2.0: will it support user scripts, gadgets, external apps (like the Android/iOS Wikipedia app).
 * How should we handle config changes that need to apply on all/most Wikimedia projects?

Wiki communities: discussion summary
The Growth team's Community Relations Specialist contacted admins who had recently edited Growth's Community Configuration (T336608). The main ideas admins communicated are as follows:


 * The usual roles and processes to monitor and edit the configuration are preferred:
 * All configuration pages should be readable by anyone.
 * Admins (or Interface Admins) should be able to edit because they have enough knowledge.
 * Admins can apply requests made after a community discussion.
 * The need for a history of requests and tracking of changes is necessary.
 * This configuration page may impact a lot of users, and should be handled with care. Several ways to prevent issues were suggested:
 * The creation of a new role, for trusted admins who understand Community configuration.
 * The creation of a reviewing process to validate a change made by one admin.
 * A clear and centralized history page is needed to spot any changes made on the different configurations.

Research
The Growth team's designer completed a short comparative review of Admin tools in use on other platforms (T338386). The full report is available here: Comparative review: Configuration / Admin tools. The following is a summary of the relevant insights that relate to the Growth team's Community configuration 2.0 project:


 * Most tools make use of a ‘Dashboard’ as the first thing you see when you enter the panel – you can access things like recent activity, quick links, actionable insights.
 * In terms of organization/layout, most tools make use of modules while having a sidebar on the left, with menu items on it being expandable in some of the tools.
 * Some platforms let users/communities customize modules and how they’re presented - for example, modules being draggable to different parts of the screen, or being able to hide modules that you or your community don’t use.
 * Settings UI: for most of these, tools use components like toggle switches (turn on/off), text inputs, and dropdown menus.
 * Typology of settings:
 * Display settings: being able to change the color/layout/etc. of a feature
 * Feature access: being able to activate/deactivate (turn on/off) certain features
 * Thresholds/Limits: e.g., a certain activity can be done no more than X times per day.
 * User access/permissions: only certain user groups having access to a feature
 * Audience-specific or other conditional customisation: e.g. links to resources being different from community to community.