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
✅

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 Discussion, volunteer participant groups

When: Mid-February - March; 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 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?
 * 5) What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?

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.

Phase 2: Trade-offs and prioritization
Source: TPC Discussion, volunteer participant groups

When: Late March-April 2019 (tentative)

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 Discussion, volunteer participant groups

When: May 2019 (tentative)

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

March 20, 2019
Due to Trevor's departure, Marshall was brought onto the team, especially due to his experience in survey construction. More discussion was had as to the best approach for the trade-offs phase and its associated survey, with Danny and Marshall working on a more focused approach this coming Friday. Values-based and hard trade-off questions may be incorporated into the updated version. Values-based questions could help in defining and supporting any future decisions to show how those decisions match with the community's feedback.

In order to remain transparent, future thought is to show how enabling certain most-desired features might affect the current iteration of communication tools. For instance, enabling VE, seeing how it functions merely by turning it on, and then examining publicly what would need to be done in order to get it to function correctly. Could it be done with how things function now with only a few tweaks? Or is the task so large that it would require a new system altogether?

Spanish and Arabic WP are joining in the TPC discussion. There remains concern about newcomers and how best to rest then in order to elicit responses. To that end, Benoît will be querying the system to determine what users have not only attempted to use Talk pages, but who have less than 500 edits, to invite them to share their experience on this main discussion page. Education programs have already been invited with no result, so Marshall is going to reach out directly to Sage Ross for assistance in touching bases with beginners about talk pages. Sherry will also be sending out individual emails for similar groups since on-wiki outreach has done little; while creating fully fleshed out responses might not be of interest to those contacted, perhaps some sort of short survey could help in getting some data. Likert scale satisfaction-type survey via Qualtrics perhaps. This could also be expanded to include just about everyone who might be interested in providing feedback. Due to the internal weakness of such a survey, however, that idea is shelved for now.

Because the project has now moved into the feedback stage, the main TPC page should not only be updated to reflect that, but also provide clear direction for how and where interested parties can now leave their thoughts. Beginning to host conversations at this juncture means communities won't have time to complete that before the deadline of April 6th, so that should also be removed. Trevor had an email set up for feedback, so Danny will take over that aspect.

March 13, 2019
The team has noticed that there are a number of wikis that, though they have an initial invitation to participate in consultation, have remained silent thus far. For some wikis, it may be a matter of lack of advertising to their user base. A concerted effort should be made to draw them into the discussion; to that end, the team will reach out to individual users on those wikis that could help start the discussion. As well, those communities may benefit from a survey in order to generate some sort of feedback. Different wiki and individual voices are still very much an important part of the consultation. Due to the number of wikis and the need for translations, however, the team may focus on the 10 largest wikis (in terms of active editors).

For groups involved in emerging communities, the message should be tailored somewhat to their community, in the sense that the team is seeking their input as it relates to their particular needs and context, i.e. conflict resolution, specialized needs, tech support. These lists need to be either cleaned or created, which should be done by the end of the week.

The number of wikis in these lists will be quite large, so an effort will be made to pull in as much help as possible in posting to them, including finding existing contacts on those wikis and pulling in other WMF people.

When the trade-offs survey is created, it needs to be translated into multiple languages. Tentative launch date: April 15, so needs to go to translators at least a week in advance. Discussion is ongoing about specific questions (values, features, etc.) and format of the survey itself. On concern is that answers may be skewed, especially depending on ranking values.

March 6, 2019
While the action items are moving along at a great pace, there is some concern that the majority of feedback gathered so far has come from more experienced users. Certainly that feedback is invaluable, but solely relying on one perspective defeats the intention of casting as wide a net as possible to gain a variety of feedback and perspectives. Some of this is mitigated with an upcoming in-person questionnaire provided by Benoît for this Friday's summit in France. It will further be mitigated by reaching out via social media; a plan is still in the stages of formulation. There is some archival feedback to go through related to Flow, and Danny will reach out to see if there is user test data anywhere else.

A point that resurfaced was with users providing very ephemeral feedback (i.e. I hate this) rather than points that could be brought to the designers that are both actionable and have support. Continued efforts will be made to reach out to communities to both clarify that we need this sort of explanation (whether pro or con x tool) and potentially reach out to individuals to ask for such clarification.

Regarding edit-a-thon organizers, Trevor performed outreach via email and most team members will be receiving those replies.

The team has noted there are some user-created tools and scripts that have addressed some issues with communication tools, such as on the Russian wiki. When they're found, the team should investigate how many people use those tools and potentially reach out to their authors.

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