Topic on Talk:User Interaction Consultation

A significant fraction of the proposals is either unintelligible or out of scope (not about reader-facing features, or not about proposing features at all). These proposals do not serve a purpose here, as the Reading team is not going to work on them; they are cluttering up the list, taking mindshare from more useful ones, and waste the time of the reader and the conscientious proposal-writer (who wants to read through existing proposals first).

I propose creating an "archived proposals" subpage, linking to that from the main page, and linking to out-of-scope proposals from there. (Proposals could be of course moved back if the author finishes them/rewrites them/explains them better.)

By my reckoning, such proposals are:

• User Interaction Consultation/Extended and resumed information (incomplete)
• User Interaction Consultation/Interactive pages (needs more detail, not actionable)
• User_Interaction_Consultation/Searching (not in scope for Reading)
• User Interaction Consultation/Translated versions of pages on other idioms (incomplete)
• User Interaction Consultation/Wikidialog (not in scope for Reading).
• User Interaction Consultation/Wikidocumentaries (incomplete)
• User Interaction Consultation/get back to the exact match search method (not in scope for Reading)
• User Interaction Consultation/start proper maintenance of the really good existing stuff. (mostly not in scope for Reading; the part that is does not propose anything)

Any objections?

This is me being bold. I'm not in charge of the consultation or anything.

@Tgr (WMF), major part of the problem is that readers aren't yet aware of this page. I am working with comms in order to publicize the page outside our wikis, the problem is 75% of our social media channels are reachable via mobile, while adding a new proposal or discussing existing ones, isn't functional/friendly from mobile. So I am putting together a blogpost, with screenshots on how to figure things out for someone who isn't wiki friendly, and would get even more lost trying to find their way from their phone.

Initially the plan was to do that after two weeks from running the consultancy, we narrow down the ideas to those that fit in the scope, now that we are late with talking to the right audience, I believe we are likely to extend this. Makes sense?

Why wait two weeks, though? Out-of-scope ideas incur an extra cost on navigating the proposals without giving any benefit; and if the author is willing to work on improving the proposal, the sooner they are told they have to do so, the more time do they have.

(I'm a bit skeptical that people will research and type great proposals on their mobile phone; I fear that this consultation won't bring in much value because it focuses too much on breadth instead of depth. Of course criticising a collaborative process is always easier than running one...)

Waiting two weeks is a normal "call for action" invitation kind of approach. I am skeptical to the depth of ideas as a mobile contribution, but I did try to add a brief suggestion from my mobile as anonymous (the suggestion about rethink recent changes was me!), and it wasn't the best experience ever in terms of unfixed bugs, but at the end it was quite possible to briefly elaborate on what I suggested. I agree, this is breadth rather than depth, one lesson to move on with in the next experiment ;) thans Tgr (WMF)

Yep, I have objections.

Why do I again have the Feeling, that stuff should be swept under some carpet because it's not what the WMF wanted to hear? Start to listen to what the user say, not only if it is well aligned with your preoccupation.

And this is about user interaction, if you just want some very narrow Feedback, please create the pages in a meaningful way, not change the questioning afterwards. Whether this was initiated by any subdivision of the WMF or another is quite uninteresting, it's about user interaction, not only reader interaction. Organize it in a way that the users (ultimately those, who pay your income) a convenient with, you get paid, so you are expected to get it a bit uncomfortable.

You see the logic, I guess, right? This is about narrowing down the ideas, in order to focus, and get some proposals in action. "Cleaning up", here, doesn't mean getting rid of ideas, it is for pure organizational matter. Please Sänger, stop assuming that we are keen on hiding what people say :). This is not the point.

We could indeed have mentioned reader interaction, but we didn't want to ignore the part t about editor to reader interaction, and so we used the broad term user.

"you get paid, so you are expected to get it a bit uncomfortable." I am not sure what does that mean? In general people get paid because they do a job, and it has nothing to do with discomfort. Lets keep the conversation healthy, please please ;)

There are tons of recommendations by users the WMF and its paid staff ignored for years and years, why should we expect a sudden change?

The WMF and its staff even used ruthless power against the community just to let one piece of buggy beta-software (MV) run as opt-out instead of the recommended opt-in, and only started to listen to the community after the shit had hit the fan. And it looks like the next accident in waiting is already in the pipeline: Flow.

No, as long as I can't see prove of some real change in the behaviour of the WMF and its paid staff towards the legitimate higher authority Community I won't believe it. It was the pattern with the consultation about the MV: archive asap, to let it rot. It was the pattern with Lilas talk page: archive asap, to let it rot. Now here some stuff should as well be archived to let it rot.

I hear you, but I don't fully agree. In addition to what you said, we also have a recent pattern of disabling beta tools after a community RFC (Gather!). We have a pattern of asking communities how to move next with a beta feature and we have a pattern of keeping an open space here for editors and readers or anyone who wants to add suggestions. Don't you think this deserves some ..some good faith? :)

Archiving here, in any case, isn't about hiding. It could simply mean adding sections one for ideas that have high chances of getting implemented soon, and other ideas that need more discussion, as simple, as that.

An "archived proposals" subpage, as mentioned in the opening post, sounds like just business as usual.

If you first create a meaningful page with not only reader related interactions in the same (but better described) manner as this one, and move this threads over there, I could agree. This here I can't take serious, sorry, it's just hiding away unwanted stuff.

It's nothing about you as a person, I trust you, but about the WMF as an institution. Too many disappointments recently to take any propagated community input serious (MV/Superputsch, Flow, ditching of DJ, appointing Arnnon, hypersecrecy about KE to name a few). Besides Gather you as well ditched the useless UserProfiles after just a year discussion and two years implementation before as a pet project without any community input, as usual).

I agree "user interaction" is a bit misleading (the FAQ makes the scope clear, but I guess not everyone reads it). If this consultation is sort of unpublished at this point, maybe it can still be renamed to Reader Interaction Consultation? Mostly to help future mediawikipedians who look for content via the search box or categories, and have to rely on the page name.

Also, I would put more of the FAQ content on the main page. And the big gray "How can we make Wikipedia more interactive for readers?" is quite clear but somehow avoids the eye (I at least managed to miss it when I first read the page); maybe that color scheme is not optimal. (Or maybe I should just pay more attention.)

Anyhow this has no bearing on whether non-actionable proposals should be moved to a different space. The goal of this consultation (I would hope) is not to provide a space where participants can vent about whatever they dislike, but to make sure the features worked on by the Reading team are impactful and well-aligned with the mission and acceptable to the community. Discussing editing tools here only diverts energies from that.

@Tgr (WMF) I agree with you that we should make it clearer. We shrunk the background and moved it off the main page to keep it simple, but we do lose a lot of context that way. It is a hard balancing act between overwhelming and providing enough context to be helpful. As a longtime community member, valued member of the reading team, and 'user of the page' I trust you to add/move additional context.

With regard to breadth v. depth: It seems to me that greater specificity is only possible at a later stage in the software development process. In other words, if we specify a very specific problem or very specific solution, we can ask "what color should the button be". The feedback we were responding to in trying this consultation was that we should try and hear from community members earlier in the dev process, at the point where we are asking "What problems should we solve and what kinds of features should we solve them with". This seems, by nature, to be broad... Do you have any thoughts on getting more specific without presuming too much?

re: removing clutter--rather than remove ideas, I think that at some point we should remove the sub-page template and replace it with manual categories (i.e. reading features, editor features, ....) and visually promote the ones that are most pertinent.