Talk pages consultation 2019/Structure and updates

Consultation structure
This consultation will have a "hub-and-spoke" structure, with a central hub located here on mediawiki.org ("Talk Page Consultation central"). Over the course of the consultation, multiple participant groups will have discussions on other wikis and in off-wiki settings, and then contribute notes and findings back to TPC central. Some participant groups will participate through the whole process, others may participate for a limited time (especially if they're in real life/meet-ups). Everyone can follow along and participate at TPC central (language permitting).

Phase 0: Planning
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This was the planning phase. During this phase, we:


 * Publicly announced the project (banner info here), and invite questions and ideas from the Wikimedia community
 * Set up TPC central documentation structure; current notes are featured on the main TPC page, while historical staff notes can be found here and here
 * Created a list of wikis and user groups for initial outreach and invite groups to sign up
 * Established code of conduct guidelines
 * Began retrospective process for StructuredDiscussions/Flow, Liquid Threads and wikitext workflows, collect important documentation
 * Began outreach to participant groups
 * Invited volunteers to facilitate discussions, and participate in other ways
 * Created the schedule for phase 1

Phase 1: Collect information (started)
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

When: Mid-March - April; Community summaries posted by April 6, 2019

During this phase we will solicit open feedback from a wide range of individuals and groups about their experiences with talk pages or alternative tools. Questions are:


 * 1) When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you? Why?
 * 2) How do newcomers use talk pages, and what blocks them from using it?
 * 3) What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
 * 4) What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?

The information collection has started when the first messages have been sent. Check if a group exists for your language.

Wrapping up the conversations
Community summaries are due by April 6, 2019. We advise communities, especially the ones that would have had collected a lot of replies, to end the conversation by March 31. That way, volunteers making the wrapping-up have time to make it.

Since this consultation is based on a different consultation process than how consultations are defined by local rules, those rules regarding how to close conversations may not be applied.


 * Post and read the summaries

Phase 2: Trade-offs and prioritization
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

When: Starts in early May

Some ideas generated during phase 1 may be mutually exclusive. Some ideas might work better for some purposes or some kinds of users. We'll have to 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 trade-offs will be moderated by the Wikimedia Foundation, guided by our decision criteria, listed below.

Space for unexpected discoveries
Within the scope of this project, all the options are on the table. There are no hidden agendas. We don't know all the things, and we don't know what we might learn. We need to accept these "unknown unknowns".

The schedule of this consultation may change because of these unexpected discoveries.

Phase 3: Review potential direction
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

When: June 2019 (tentative)

We invite everyone back to the central page on MediaWiki.org to review the emerging direction for this project.

Status report: Wrapping up Phase 1
Thanks to everyone who's participated in the Talk Pages Consultation so far! We're wrapping up the discussions for Phase 1 and compiling all the results, which will lead into the start of Phase 2 in May.

The purpose of Phase 1 has been to collect as much information as we can about how people use talk pages, documenting the advantages and challenges, and generating ideas for making improvements. We've also collected information about communication tools that people are using now, both on-wiki and off-wiki. People have hosted group discussions on more than 15 wikis and at events, and we've also received individual feedback from many people. You can see the summaries of the wiki discussions here, which has links to the original discussions.

In addition, as part of Phase 1, we're currently running some user tests with people who are active Wikipedia readers and would like to become editors, in order to document what it's like for them to communicate on-wiki. The tests are just starting now; we'll post results over the next couple of weeks.

For the rest of April, the team is working on bringing together all the information and ideas that you've provided. We're reading all of the discussions, summaries and feedback, and putting it together into a big report that we'll publish at the beginning of May. The report will reflect all of the major themes from the discussions, so we all have a shared understanding of the issues that have been raised. It will also include a list of all the things that people want to accomplish on talk pages. (People in software development call these "user stories"; you can see the current draft list here).

Once we publish that report and people have had a chance to look at it and respond, we'll start Phase 2 in May. This is the "tradeoffs" phase, where we'll ask more specific questions about how to balance different user stories. The discussions we have in Phase 2 will help us to put together ideas to propose for a product direction in Phase 3. (You can see some early notes on the tradeoffs phase here.)

We'll post more updates on the Talk pages consultation 2019 page, as we work on the Phase 1 report together, with links to the current work. We're excited and inspired by all of the ideas that people have posted so far; thank you for being a part of this project! -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

April 24, 2019
Transition is ongoing. As trade-offs will be the next phase, a good deal of time was spent last Friday (April 19) further narrowing down the classification of user input and formulating what will be a public-facing report.

In order for the report to be finalized, there are still tasks that need to be completed. The user stories will be grouped by Marshall (MMiller) for an easier read. Sherry (Whatamidoing) is working to incorporate a variety of user quotes across languages that reflect popular opinions and themes, and there are some formatting issues to address, such as placing quotes in their original language first, followed by translation. Sherry is also going to reach out to Hằng, WMF graphic designer, to see about adding illustrations for the sake of clarity; talking with her can also serve as a litmus test (as she is new) of not only what reaction might be to the report (clarity, etc.), but also whether she can understand what the team is attempting to say.

Also included in the report will be a brief overview of what the team has learned thus far. Highlights include the indication that most users see talk systems as imperfect, and so some improvements are likely to be welcome, so long as they are based on the feedback. Related: though there are a wide variety of opinions and proposed solutions across communities and languages, there is also a core batch of improvements that virtually everyone seems to agree on, such as automatic signatures, even across new and veteran users. The feedback thus far seems to be leaning towards improving existing systems rather than making something new, but nothing has been taken off the table as of yet.

Marshall is also going to be processing the results of user testing that occurred on Friday. The first set of tests were completed, and the team always has the option of requesting more if needed. WMF has the rights to post those videos of users attempting to use talk pages, and they will be publicly presented along with analysis by Marshall on a separate page.

For steps past Phase 1, it seems many of the trade-off questions will have to do with desired features versus flexibility. While the specifics have yet to be hammered out, automatic archiving was one such discussion the team had. While having such a feature could feasibly be possible, what would that mean in terms of how it affects current archiving flexibility that users have? Those are the sorts of questions that would be raised in Phase Two and put forth to communities, though not necessarily on a feaure-by-feature basis.

To that end, Danny (DannyH) will be working on a set of short, simple questions over the weekend for trade-offs that focus on prioritization. These questions will be included in the Phase 1 report, and communities will have a brief period of time to comment on them if they so desire. Once the questions have been decided, Benoît (Trizek) will reach out to communities about hosting their own trade-offs page, similar to how they hosted their own TPC page. Banners will be run announcing Phase 2. Potentially in addition to those pages, a qualtrics survey will also be set up, but attention has to be given to translations, as they can be a bit of a chore importing into qualtrics.

April 17, 2019
The team is in the process of transitioning from Phase 1 to Phase 2. Already Danny (DannyH) has posted a preliminary report about Phase 1 in the above section. This will be posted and/or linked to on the community discussion pages, potentially Tech News, and disseminated to users such as ambassadors. Though the majority of summaries have been provided by participating communities, there are three still outstanding. Benoît (Trizek) reached out to those communities yesterday; if they do not respond, the decision is to move forward without those summaries - the team has already incorporated the feedback into the documents they are working with, so those users' needs will not go unrecognized.

Danny and Benoît will be meeting this Friday in order to go over user stories and trade-off notes (potential conflicts and determining what desires are actionable), as well as what the next steps are going into Phase 2. Marshall (MMiller) may also be at the meeting.

Speaking of Marshall, user testing has been slightly delayed due to license expiration. This should be resolved as early as this afternoon so that targeted user testing can commence. Once the results are in, which may take a bit of time, Marshall will then be tasked with analyzing the data.

Sherry (Whatamidoing) is working on converting many of the tagged issues into workable and easily-digested summaries, as well as taking note of the frequency of each stated issue. The descriptions are matched to the tags the team is working with, and the results will be posted publicly on mediawiki. TMeadows continues to assist with additional tagging of notes, and will be merging the tags of those that are nearly identical.

April 10, 2019
Overall, the direction the consultation is heading and the amount of information via summaries that communities and individuals have provided is going very well. There seems to be a very good variety of sources, and the upcoming user testing - hopefully available as early as today - will only add to that pool. In preparation for the next phase, TMeadows will be parsing out a series of internal documents that relate to each issue brought up by the community, with linking throughout so that Sherry (Whatamidoing) and Danny (DannyH) can prepare a succinct report and a thank-you for those interested here as to what the overarching themes are across communities. This will also help prepare for the upcoming trade-offs phase. Values will also be included - such as an emphasis on not allowing a singular community to determine the outcome of the project for all other communities. The goal is to have the report available by the end of this week at the earliest.

Most communities have submitted their feedback, but there are some, such as Arabic, Hindi, and German that are still missing. Benoît (Trizek) will reach out to those communities and provide a reminder and/or track down interested users. There were some short notes from the Berkeley edit-a-thon meeting, so those will be incorporated by TMeadows into the pool of feedback the team has received.

April 3, 2019
In talking about the use of Qualtrics, the determination was made that a survey would not be used for this particular phase, though Sherry (Whatamidoing) did reach out to see what requirements the team had to meet from Legal. Any survey will come after all input has been gathered and sorted from the current phase, and the exact nature of the survey has yet to be determined. For the initial part of this phase, feedback will be gathered from groups and users and incorporated into the existing internal (for now) document. While most discussion groups will provide a summary of their discussions, the team will reference the actual discussions as well for clarity and context.

As far as asking for assisting via the Berlin conference, that did not garner any feedback.

For the idea concerned a 24-hour banner, the determination was made that the focus of the banner would not necessarily be to gather information - though such feedback would be useful - but to see if banners really do much at all in notifying the general wiki populace. The go-ahead was given for such a banner, which will be released to all users who have chosen EN as their language. It will not show 100% of the time, however - the banner only has a 10% chance of showing. This is partly to avoid "banner fatigue" and also because the team would like to reserve a more robust banner for the most important announcements.

Marshall (MMiller) and Danny (DannyH) continue to formulate an idea for user-testing and are working through what screening questions to use. Though user testing has been performed in the past, it was done six years ago, and things have changed. Also, this user-testing will allow for the aforementioned screening, so the results should be more applicable to the stated goal of the project.

Conversation also centered on direction to give those that are providing community discussion summaries. While more information from those groups is certainly the preference, the team recognizes that some volunteers may not be able or want to write an exhaustive summary. The direction will be worded in such a way as to allow that flexibility. The team would ideally like all opinions to be represented in these summaries.

Previous
See updates from before April, 2019 at Talk pages consultation 2019/Status updates.