User:Neil Shah-Quinn (WMF)/notes

An ongoing braindump of ideas and thoughts about Wikimedia technology.

General product thoughts

 * Divergence between desktop and mobile: how to think about? Burden of proof on diverging, or converging?
 * Standard meanings for “dismiss”, “cancel”, “discard” throughout the interface

Ideas

 * Mine the existing corpus of link texts used to link to a particular page to produce better search results
 * Gamified microcontributions! The Wikidata game is really addicting though it could use some design love. Apparently, WikiGrok has been put on hold because the team couldn't find a good way to pipe the contributions into Wikidata; the Wikidata game suggests that obstacle can be overcome.
 * Better populate, structure, and use Babel-style language information. Wikimedia is heavily multi-lingual, so there's a lot we can do if we ask users once which languages they speak (and maybe how well) and store it globally. For example:
 * Automatically promote those languages in interlanguage links, language selectors, and multi-language inputs (like Commons and Wikidata descriptions).
 * Automatically suggest translation work between those languages.
 * Expose that information to connected applications so, for example, the Wikidata game can show me Portuguese (which closely resembles Spanish, which I speak) and so on but not Korean or Russian. We could provide language similarity scores (prioritizing written language because that's what we use) and let apps use them.
 * Allow other users to contact them (if they've opted-in) for cross-language help.

Unsatisfied VisualEditor uses cases

 * I want to cite a book several times in one article, but specify different page numbers each time.
 * : Page number attribute for tags
 * I want to take an existing free-form reference which is used multiple times in an article, and replace it with a particular citation template.
 * I want to use the find and replace gadget to find instances of a particular reference by searching, for example, for "[2]"
 * Works using Firefox's own search tool
 * Reuse a reference from author X which I added during this editing session, when another reference by author X already existed.