Gather

This page is the project hub for 'gather', a new curation experiment for Wikipedia and MediaWiki mobile sites. The first experiment in this project is a pilot feature for providing users with an opportunity to create and share lists of articles. The project is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's mobile web team.

Resources

 * Extension:Gather
 * Trello boards:
 * Active sprint (as of Jan 28, 15)
 * Backlog
 * Phabricator project
 * Git source && Gerrit project

Experimentation
In addition to launching a new feature that we hope will delight our users and other stakeholders, this project is a vehicle to further explore areas of great potential:
 * Collections mock.pngNew ways to contribute:  through curation, wikipedia readers who are not interested in traditional editing can have meaningful, creative interactions with our content
 * Personal: gives users a way to make content more relevant for them  "Peter's list of most important Philosophers" is not subject to consensus or editing by others.  For the time being, a list will only be accessible via shared url.
 * Shareable:  this project will experiment with the ability to use Wikipedia to share ones' perspective with others and, in doing so, encourage new users to engage
 * [Future] Browseable: because each list is not exhaustive, there is a possibility of using popular lists to promote meaningful content.  It's nice to know the full list of statisticians is there, but I might want to find a subset that have been picked out by a human for one reason or another.

More specifically, we want to know if any of these levers drive:
 * knowledge acquisition (+ users, + pageviews, + visits)
 * engagement (+creation of lists, + accounts)

User Problems and Solutions

 * Article list Consumer
 * I would like to see interesting articles without always having a specific one in mind
 * I would like to see what my friends recommend on wikipedia
 * Creator (primarily readers)
 * I would like to share/recommend my tastes with friends/world (here are my favorite movies)
 * I would like to share my expertise with the world (here is what you need to know about the CIA)
 * I would like to share interesting “meta” wikipedia quirks: weird articles, funny articles, bad grammer
 * Editor
 * I would like to know that my article is valued or being read.
 * I would like to keep track of articles I am working on/creating, etc.

User groups
Project Gather is targeting and supporting the use cases of readers:
 * new users (after registration)
 * current users

We are interested in seeing how the features are adopted by editors, and imagine it could be used to augment the current watchlist feature.

Scope
Here is our project scope for the first release of Gather on the English Wikipedia.

In-scope for first release: Out-of-scope for first release:
 * Functions
 * Add list
 * View list
 * Edit list
 * Support
 * Mechanism for dealing with inappropriate content
 * EventLogging
 * Sharing
 * API