Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 1 community discussion summaries

On this page are the summaries from the different communities that have participated to the talk pages consultation. Please don't edit other participants' summaries (except to fix typos).

Some comments? Please use the talk page.

FAQ
What is a community summary?

The goal of a community summary is to wrap up the discussions and provide a summary of what your participants said. That way, other communities can learn about your community's needs, concerns, and ideas. We have seen very different feedback on different wikis, and it is time to discover what everyone thinks!

Please include in that summary:


 * every perspective or idea your community had, and
 * how frequent each idea was; for example,
 * how many users shared a given opinion
 * whether an idea was more common among different types of contributors (newcomers, beginners, experienced editors...)

You can add as much detail as you want in that summary.

Can't the Wikimedia Foundation read all the feedback?

We are trying, but we really need your help. For most conversations, we have to use machine translation, which has limitations. This can help us find the most common needs or global ideas. Machine translation is useful, but it does not tell us how people are feeling or what makes your community unique.

Your community summary should be built from your community's perspective, experience and culture. You might also know of relevant discussions in other places, which we did not find (for example, perhaps someone left a note on your user talk page – it is okay to include that!). Your summary is extremely important to us.

What are the next steps?

Phase 2 will happen in April. We will analyze the individual feedback, your community summary, and some user testing. We hope to have a clear view of everyone's ideas and needs at the end of April.

Some ideas generated during phase 1 may be mutually exclusive. Some ideas might work better for some purposes or some kinds of users. During Phase 2, we'll all 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 ideas may be shaped and be moderated by the Wikimedia Foundation, guided by our decision criteria, listed on the project page.

Wikimedia Commons
I (Jc86035) was the only participant, although I did advertise the discussion on the village pump and on the centralized discussions template. I don't think it's necessary to summarize my own views, since I also commented extensively in the English Wikipedia and Wikidata discussions.

Although I was asked to inform new users of the discussion, I was unable to do so. I don't know whether this had any significant effect on the amount and variety of participants. Jc86035 (talk) 10:13, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata
I (Jc86035) will be summarizing the discussion section-by-section. It is difficult to summarize some sections due to the small number of participants; in many cases I have only stated what individual users have said.

A total of 15 registered users (including myself) and two unregistered users (including one vandal) participated. By almost all measures, this is less than 1% of active Wikidata editors; there are about 1,800 editors who make more than 100 edits per month. Most participants appear to be experienced editors.

Although I was asked to inform new users of the discussion, I was unable to do so. I don't know whether this had any significant effect on the amount and variety of participants.

When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
Several editors like Flow and think it works fine but could be improved, and several editors say the same about the wikitext discussion system. (Whether one system objectively works better is out of scope; however, considering the comments made in the English Wikipedia discussion, restarting the implementation of Flow would be controversial at best.) Almost all community processes on Wikidata are conducted without Flow, with the only(?) major exception being the French-language project chat, and most participants say that those processes function satisfactorily (although the unregistered user complains that WikiProjects are typically abandoned; I think this issue is valid but out of the scope of the consultation).

One editor (Jmabel) suggests section watchlisting as an improvement to wikitext discussions. Two editors (PKM and Sabas88) indicate that they prefer real-time discussion fora such as Telegram groups; both mention mobile notifications as a factor, and Sabas88 also mentions "[a] usable mobile interface" and threading as factors.

The criticisms of Flow are a subset of those mentioned in the English Wikipedia discussion.
 * "Bugs need to be fixed" (VIGNERON)
 * Lack of diffs (Ymblanter)
 * Infinite scrolling (Ymblanter)
 * Unnecessary notifications when watchlisting a Talk-namespace page, as opposed to a Topic-namespace page (Ymblanter)

VIGNERON also notes that "Flow is quite a good tool (no need to know the painfully unuseful wikisyntax, automatic signing and pinging, etc.)". ChristianKl suggests that the use of Flow in the French-language project chat could have increased participation, although he notes that "causation is always difficult to establish".

A possible issue with the feedback in this section is that later commenters may have tried (intentionally or not) to avoid duplicating what has already been said. This would probably make it more difficult to prioritize fixing particular issues.

What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
Only three participants commented in this section. Jmabel is a software developer, and (as he implies) this experience probably made it easier for him to use wikitext and signatures. Masumrezarock100's comment is unrelated to the software/interface (it's about user conduct), so it's out of scope. The unregistered user criticizes indentation and advocates for Flow.

What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
Only two participants (including myself) commented in this section. The other person (ChristianKl) complained that Flow doesn't have rollback, which caused issues with his talk page (I think he might have been referring specifically to handling vandalism in the form of new topics). I didn't say anything concrete, only noting that Wikidata might have an unusually high number of users who don't know how to use wikitext discussions (since most of Wikidata is Wikibase and a lot of user talk pages use Flow).

What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
Only three participants commented in this section. phab:T106687 was specifically mentioned by VIGNERON, although only as an example of many unresolved Flow issues (I think this is only tangentially related, though). I don't totally understand the exact meaning of ChristianKl's comments, but I haven't asked for clarification.
 * Automatic notifications from comments in a particular section (Jmabel)
 * The same discussion appearing on multiple talk pages (ChristianKl)
 * Some sort of WhatLinksHere visibility/function improvement to show links and/or template values used on talk pages? (ChristianKl)
 * Improved links between comments and page history (ChristianKl)

What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
Only three participants commented in this section. I have omitted most of Ymblanter's Flow complaints since their comment is duplicated in a previous section.
 * Allowing for varied types of discussions, including both goal-oriented and "purely social" (PKM)
 * Suggestion that talk pages should be more helpful to newcomers by improving navigation and giving explicit instructions (Donald Trung)
 * [User-oriented] structuring "to see who replies whom" (Ymblanter)

Orphaned talk pages
Only Donald Trung made a comment in this section, suggesting that the talk pages of deleted pages be moved to a centralized archive instead of being deleted at the same time.

A discussion about talk pages, on a talk page, advertised on talk pages
Only three participants (including myself) commented in this section. The discussion concerns the effects of holding the discussion as a normal Wikidata RFC, and alternate ways of collecting feedback. As noted in the status updates, Whatamidoing (Sherry) did continue discussion of a Qualtrics survey with other staff members, so the relevant WMF staff are presumably already aware of relevant information mentioned in this section.

Conclusion
As noted above, few conclusions can be drawn due to the small sample size. In general, this phase of the consultation may have suffered from being organized primarily around wikitext discussion pages; this may have resulted in only dedicated experienced users (with some level of interest in WMF internal affairs) having any inclination to participate.

None of the participants who mentioned Wikidata's community processes suggested that they were not functioning satisfactorily, although this may have been due to the inherent survivorship bias stemming from most of the participants being experienced editors to begin with. (Another factor may be that genuine new users are rarer due to many contributors coming from other Wikimedia projects; 82.3% of the last 10,000 new Wikidata user accounts were created automatically, compared to 32.8% for the English Wikipedia. In many ways, Wikidata is unique among WMF wikis.)

I think the results of the larger discussions, such as that of the English Wikipedia, would be more useful for identifying issues, since only a few specific issues were mentioned in this discussion. Jc86035 (talk) 10:13, 4 April 2019 (UTC)