Wikimedia Product/Contribution taxonomy

From February 2018, Abbey and James from the Wikimedia Foundation have been working to create a contribution taxonomy of the different ways that people contribute to Wikimedia wikis. Your input is welcome; updates will be made to this page.

Objective
The Contribution Taxonomy project will create a taxonomy/inventory of different forms of activity and workflow for editing and other contributions across a group of selected Wikipedias, assessed and scored in terms of where there are problem areas, especially for new editors or those on mobile, and (at a high level) what the Foundation's product teams might be able to do to support them, by 1 June 2018.

For scope, we have selected to study the English, Hindi, Czech, Korean, and French Wikipedias. The audience for this work (who will use the work, rather than who is overseeing) is the product teams who are building features for new and existing contributors. Non-Wikipedias, community governance processes, and fiscal contribution workflows are out of scope.

Rationale
Our wikis are nothing without their communities, and retention of new and existing editors alike has been a perennial challenge. There are a very large number of contribution tasks across our wikis, and they vary considerably in their approachability, scalability, and how much they contribute to editors' retention or burn-out.

Almost all tasks and workflows involve the platform maintained by the Foundation (edits, diffs, templates, categories, …); some tasks are supported directly with native tools maintained by the Foundation (the citoid service, the OTRS e-mail ticket system, the page views tool); some use near-native tools created and maintained by community members (gadgets and user scripts), or more full "second party" tools (RTRC, AWB, Twinkle, etc.); finally, some use "third party" tools (browser spell checkers, browser extensions like Grammarly, and so on). Some tasks require a lot of experience, domain knowledge, social capital within the community, having the right tools, or other key items.

On-boarding to these tasks can thus require these needs to be met, but without proper support editors can fail to get "in". Similarly once using the tools, editors can be frustrated by lack of workflow support and eventually leave. Understanding what we have is key to building better editing experiences.

Project deliverables

 * Populated, scored master inventory of contribution tasks
 * Scoring criteria and assessment framework through which to select tasks
 * Iterated visual system to help consider and work with tasks, applied to selected ones

Planned process

 * Phase 0 (February–March 2018)
 * For the "zeroth" phase, we will build the initial "master inventory" of contribution workflows. This will be based on prior studies related to editing, especially the New Editors research, as well as informed by our experiences and input from community members and stakeholders in the Foundation. We will document what instrumentation is available and pull in relevant usage patterns and levels where known. We will determine an initial set of criteria by which to measure and compare different workflows, and share these with community members and other stakeholders.
 * Phase deliverables
 * Prototype of master inventory (framework)
 * Populated master inventory with most major workflows from the English Wikipedia
 * Initial criteria for assessing and scoring tasks


 * Gate (end March 2018)
 * At this point we will assess whether we have the right information to proceed with the work, and make any adjustments to the scope and timing of the following phase.


 * Phase 1 (April 2018)
 * For the next phase, we will combine the criteria with the inventory to assess the state of things, as well as the inputs to actions (like the tools and knowledge needed) for each step, the dependencies between them, and other relevant dimensions. It is likely we will adopt a visual system to document workflows, including primary and secondary workflows within task areas. We will score the items in the taxonomy, and iterate.
 * Phase deliverables
 * Stakeholder sign-off on the assessment criteria
 * Master inventory populated with most major workflows from the other candidate wikis
 * Populated, scored master inventory of contribution tasks
 * Initial visual system and consideration framework for selecting/scoring tasks
 * Prototype visualisations applied to a small number of tasks


 * Gate (end of April 2018)
 * At this point we will assess whether we have the right information to proceed with the work, and make any adjustments to the scope and timing of the following phase.


 * Phase 2 (May 2018)
 * For the final phase, we will seek to identify key common patterns of tasks & steps and some workflow clusters and how contributors interact with each other, and highlight potential areas for intervention from existing workstreams and research, and any gaps, issues, and areas of concern.
 * Phase and final deliverables
 * Scoring criteria and assessment framework through which to select tasks
 * Scoring criteria and assessment framework applied to the master inventory for selection
 * Iterated visual system to help consider and work with tasks, applied to scored ones
 * Clustering applied to key tasks and workflows

At this point, 1 June 2018, we will hand-off to product teams for action where they choose on the identified and prioritised gaps and issues.

Updates

 * 2018-02-07: Initial kick-off meeting.
 * 2018-03-02: Steering committee meeting - defining scope (updates made to above process accordingly).
 * 2018-03-29: Steering committee meeting - progress updates and iteration: all deliverables for phase 0 delivered and approved, expected deliverables for phase 1 approved.
 * 2018-04-30: Steering committee meeting - progress updates and iteration: all deliverables for phase 1 delivered and approved, and expected deliverables for phase 2 approved.