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 invited questions and ideas from the Wikimedia community
 * Set up TPC central documentation structure; current notes were featured on the main TPC page, while historical staff notes could be found here and here
 * Created a list of wikis and user groups for initial outreach and invited groups to sign up
 * Established code of conduct guidelines
 * Carried out retrospective process for StructuredDiscussions/Flow, Liquid Threads and wikitext workflows, collect important documentation
 * Reached out to participant groups
 * Invited volunteers to facilitate discussions and participate in other ways
 * Created the schedule for the project

Phase 1: Collect information ✅
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

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

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


 * 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 started when the first message was sent. Interested users could check if a group existed for their language.

Wrapping up the conversations ✅
Community summaries were due by April 6, 2019. We advised 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 had time to make it.

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


 * Read the summaries

Phase 2: Trade-offs and prioritization
Source: Phase 1 report, built from from the feedback received from volunteer participant groups and individuals.

When: Starts in mid 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. We advise that they happen on wiki, like for Phase 1. As such, communities can sign-up on the group sign-up page under the new Phase 2 section, similarly to how they did for Phase 1.

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.

Wrapping up the conversations
Community summaries are due by June 24, 2019 (formerly June 15). We advise communities, especially the ones that have to collect a lot of replies, to end the conversation by June 10. 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 are not applied.

Phase 3: Review trade-offs
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)

June 19, 2019
About half of all community discussions have been officially closed by their respective communities. Some remain open, though most communication has ceased. Iberocoop discussion remains officially open, as that community has been granted an additional week before their summary is due. Community summaries are also starting to come in.

TMeadows has been working to gather all the feedback together in a set of documents. The first set consists of documents for each community, with all responses machine-translated, requesting additional help when those translations make little sense. The second set consists of documents for each question, with feedback copied from the first set. An ongoing task at the moment is to use a master tagging sheet to tag responses in the second set so the team can properly organize feedback and distill what communities are relaying.

Danny (DannyH) is meeting with Peter from the editing team to go over all the nuances of the project. Peter has already been in several meetings getting a handle on the process as it currently stands. Together they will also be trying to figure out how to best use the information from the documents in preparation for readying a report on the current phase and potential product directions moving forward.

For the upcoming Phase 2 report, there is an understanding that a fully realized product might not result from the gathered information. While some aspects may be fairly solid, others might require more research and questions. The hope is to have the report out to users no later than the beginning of Wikimania, August 14th. Danny is looking into translators for the report (and to fully translate the P1 report as well). He has a line on translators used by the Fundraising team, but will likely need additional people to double-check anything before it is posted.

June 12, 2019
After reviewing the amount of feedback given between Phase 1 and Phase 2, using English Wikipedia as a litmus test, it looks like the majority of communities are participating at expected levels, given what they are being asked. English Wikipedia was the litmus test because that community has the lowest bar to participation when it comes to being able to read the Phase 1 report (since it is in EN) and responding. The only community of concern is Iberocoop (22 pages of feedback in P1, none so far for P2), so the decision was made to create a feedback page for them on their community and advertise locally. Their due date has been pushed back an additional week.

The Qualtrics survey has been scrapped due to internal feedback and how late it is during this phase. The page will be updated to reflect this, and people will be sent to the Individual Feedback page or the P1 Report Talk Page.

As it pertains to some of the feedback the team has received, it has become clear that there is a need to possibly pay to have the Phase 1 report translated and, by extension, the upcoming Phase 2 report. Some participants have expressed confusion over how come a topic is deemed important or the process by which a particular point was reached, both of which are detailed in the report. It is especially important that this confusion is diminished as the team moves into Phase 3.

In preparation for P3, the internal feedback documents will be examined and their points sorted similarly to how was done in P1. Each proposed question will receive a page of its own with every community's responses listed, and then those responses will be tagged according to their specific points. Also, the Editing team will be meeting with Jack who built the house to pick his brain about what he has done on the Russian Wikipedia.

Moving into Phase 3, the team is keenly aware of past mistakes of the Foundation - such as the Article Feedback tool - and the troubles those mistakes caused. They want to remain attentive to the concerns brought up about those tools to insure those mistakes do not happen again. Before even starting to build anything, they want to have set what success and failure of a product will look like and how to measure that; this isn't going to merely be "it's successful if more people are using those pages" but rather along the lines of quality of participation and whether more (needless) work is being created for admins.

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