March 18, 2016 edit

Talked to Amanda about the Wikipedia Education Program/Dashboard.

The current WikiEd Outreach dashboard is made specifically for students in courses -- it's not really tuned for editathons or workshops. But some groups are using it (ex: Guggenheim Barnraising), so we can get some user feedback from real groups, when we want it.

The documentation has use cases and feature requirements; Amanda suggested that we look at it and give feedback. Also, that page includes writing contests, which she may want to take out.

Diffs between WikiEd's dashboard and ours: WikiEd's is for en.wp, ours works on any project and any language. (Although some of it still needs i18n. Some of it has been translated, some not.) Also, WikiEd has a passcode for every program, which participants need to get from the facilitators before they can join the program. Ours does too, although Amanda is not sure we need it.

Purpose of the dashboard: Facilitator creates a course/event, invites participants. Facilitator adds links to training materials in the description. (Training materials ex: best practices for biography articles.) Each participant signs in, signs up for an article they're working on. Dashboard helps to track what everyone's doing/done. Uploads tab keeps track of uploads to Commons.

WikiEd's dashboard also generates a wiki page for each course.

Also, a facilitator can clone a previous course/event to create a new copy -- for ex, you don't have to keep recreating an Art and Feminism class from scratch every time. Makes it easier to scale programs.

Big feature to work on: Improve the Articles tab to allow facilitators to list suggested articles that participants can sign up for. People should also be able to sign up as reviewer for a particular article.

Must-have for MVP:

  • i18n, including interface messages
  • some bugs in article selector, not parsing title correctly
  • metrics need to be tested
  • interface language selector
  • dashboard creates a user page for participant, but only on en.wp -- needs a way to set "home wiki"

June 14, 2016 edit

Meeting with Amanda, CT team

From Programs spreadsheet of wishes:

Programs & Events Dashboard edit

The current (alpha) dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/explore

Background document, with user feedback from alpha: Wikipedia Education Program/Dashboard

Program leaders are currently using the dashboard (but they've been warned that data may be lost during development).

Description: A program management tool. Tracks participants, assigned pages, what they're working on, what they've done. Compiles training materials, which can be copied from one even to another.

What still needs to be done?

  • The dashboard creates a user page for each participant. It needs a way for participants to set their own home wiki, rather than by event's home wiki.
  • Support for creating instances of "meta-events" (like Art and Feminism). The organizer should be able to easily clone the meta-event, and add their own information (dates, location, etc). Each instance should stay linked to the meta-event. (Should we roll up tracking metrics?)
  • Support for multi-language courses. The dashboard is able to do any language -- but we need to support a program that uses multiple languages at the same time. This is especially important for translation projects. (What needs to be done?)

Phab backlog: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/education-program-dashboard/

Notes on Phab columns:

  • Stabilize deployment: Dan was working on these, not likely to return. What needs to get done? Sage, Adam and Dan think this shouldn't live on Labs, needs another place to live, it would be more secure on production. Why? Ask Bryan about this. See "Investigate Tool Labs as an option for running the Program Dashboard" (T128792)
  • Microtasks: Needs to be evaluated. Only 8 at press time.
  • Make system usable for non-Wiki Ed programs: This is suggestions and user feedback. There's also some on the mediawiki page.

We need to go through this and identify tickets that we ought to work on.

Support for dashboard: Talk:Program Capacity and Learning#Tool: Program and Events Dashboard

X Factor: Sage is an active dev in the existing codebase. It would be good to have this done before the fall semester starts.

June 20, 2016 edit

Alpha dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/explore

Phab backlog: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/education-program-dashboard/

Epics edit

  • Add support for meta-events, such as Art + Fem. (epic) (T125552, also see T125932) <-- Use "Event" as parent and "Program" for child?
  • Additional multiwiki support for users and courses (epic) (T127615)
  • Hosting -- keep it on Tool Labs? (T128792)

Performance edit

  • How long does it take for edits to show up in the dashboard? To really make this work, it should be essentially instant -- you make an edit, and you expect to go back to the dashboard and see your "score" go up. Is this a job that only runs at a certain time?
  • When an editor is added to the course, number of editors in the course overview is not updated (T129803)
  • Adding an article: You can't click on the link until you've refreshed the page. Ditto for choosing an article -- it moves to Assigned Articles, but doesn't have my user name as the Assignee until I refresh. It should refresh as soon as I make the selection.

Creating a Program edit

  • Allow program to be only 1 day long and include start/end times (T125546)
  • Make course passcode optional (T128255)
  • Description doesn't allow links, does support full URLs.

Participants edit

  • New users should be able to register themselves using their home wiki (T126288)
  • Logged in as a participant with my private account. It didn't make any of the changes that it said it would -- create a user page for me, etc. That may be because I already had a user page, so that cancels the changes?
  • Logged in as a participant. A button says "Assign myself an article" but it doesn't give me any options -- it just gives me an open text field. I can't see the list of articles from here. Ditto "Review an article", same on the Students page. It should be possible to add my own article, but I should be able to see the available articles for this step.

i18n edit

  • Add gender support for users (T137344)

Design tweaks edit

  • Call to action: Explore page should have Create a New Program. Program overview page should have Add editor and Add available article.
  • Tables (Explore, Editors, Articles): Don't need the sorting dropdown; you can just click on the columns. The dropdown doesn't work reliably. On Explore, change cohort dropdown should be next to the title, not the other side of the page.
  • Explore: What does the "34 Programs etc" stats line mean? 34 since when? Why do I care? If this is for Programs to feel good, put it somewhere else. I want to know about my programs and impact.
  • Navigation: between different pages, there's an unclear relationship between purple text, purple buttons, white buttons and hovering/clicking on entries. On Explore, hovering on line item turns gray, click on it and you go to that page. On My Dashboard, hovering on line item doesn't turn gray, but white button turns purple, click on it and you go to that page, button is unnecessary. On Editors, hovering on line item turns gray, click and it opens. On Articles, hovering on line item turns gray, click doesn't do anything.
  • Links: My user name links to the main page, shouldn't be a link. Name of the program should link to the program overview.
  • Messaging: On My Dashboard, change "Course" to "Program", "Instructor" to "Facilitator". (Also anywhere else those words are hiding)
  • Modals: Should close with an X or clicking outside the box. (T129818)

Nice-to-have edit

  • Add support for notifications into P&E Dashboard (T129816)

July 8 edit

An update to some of the topics listed below.

Meta-events: These are things like Art+feminism, CEE Spring, Black Life Matters, WikiWomen writing contests. We need to have parent events and child events.

  • The parent leader creates a parent event.
  • Facilitators should be able to create children from the parent page. This automatically uses templates and materials from the parent. It also lists the child in the parent's cohort.
  • Parent events are only open for a limited time. Closed events are archived. You can only create children from an open parent.
  • The report for the parent should sum up the children.
  • The front page of the dashboard should be a front page, offering both parents and others. It shouldn't act like it's the parent page for "Miscellanea", that gives you irrelevant stats at the top and no clear way to get to other parents. The Explore page should be a directory.
  • We need better words for all of these concepts. "Meta-event" and "event" are not optimal.

Multiwiki support: We're not actually sure what this even means. Scratch it.

Hosting: The dashboard is going to be on Tool Labs for the duration of Community Tech working on it and caring about it. Anybody who wants to move it to production can go ahead and do that, with our best wishes. We won't do anything in the architecture that would make it impossible to move to production later on.

Performance: Checking the participants' edit counts every 12-24 hours is not okay. We can optimize these queries by just checking the relevant editors, when the page is refreshed. It can't be that hard.

Time zone: This needs time zone support for creating programs, surface it on the overview page. Without time zone, programs could start and stop at unexpected times.

Course password: The problem that the passcode solves is keeping undesirables out of the program, who might edit incendiary topics or something else bad. We may be able to solve that problem by giving the leader/facilitator a way to boot problem participants and remove problem articles. Then review the password concept with WikiEd.

i18n: Gender support -- should it pull from on-wiki preferences, or the create an account flow? Getting it from on-wiki prefs is pref.

July 13, meeting with Sage edit

I talked to Sage about what we're planning, and how to coordinate with the work that he's planning to do.

In general: We should keep him in the loop. It's all the same codebase, and he knows it better than we do.

Meta-events: Many of the parts we'll need for this already exist. The cohort system does the parent-child relationship and rolls up the stats. The cloning feature allows a facilitator to create a "child" program with the same materials. We just need to build a page where an admin can create a campaign. Possible terminology: "Campaign" is the meta-event/parent, "Program" is the event/child.

Passcode: If we don't have the passcode, we may need to up the moderation system. There's already a way to kick a user out (a minus sign under the Participation button), and remove an available article -- although I'm not sure if there's a way to remove an article that's already been assigned.

Performance: The performance is slow because of an Article Finder feature that Sage is working on. This feature will check categories and cross-reference pageviews with ORES quality ratings to find relevant articles that are highly viewed and underdeveloped. This isn't complete, and it's not important enough to justify the performance hit. Sage says we can take it out, and that should make the lag go down to about two hours. We can make improvements from there.

Backups and reliability: There's currently no automated backups; we need to make sure that data will be saved in case of a crash. See T140322.

Nice-to-haves: Better ways of analyzing edits, a nice diff viewer. Showing the difference that the group made in an article by identifying surviving text. Whocolor is a neat example.

July 15 edit

Notes for stakeholder verification.

Language:

  • Campaign is the meta-event, planned and run by campaign organizers. Program is the single event, planned and run by program leaders. Facilitators help to run the program while it's happening. Participants take part in the program.

Goals:

  • Campaign organizers are able to create a campaign. Program organizers can create a program, which is either cloned from a campaign or created independently. Campaign organizers and program organizers can easily access statistics from a single event, and from the campaign as a whole.
  • Facilitators and participants can add new editors, assign articles and make edits, and see the results in a reasonable amount of time.
  • Facilitators can effectively keep troublemakers and ne'er-do-wells out of their programs.
  • Programs can last for a day or more, with appropriate time zone support.
  • Participants can choose their home wiki, even if it's not the same as the home wiki for the program.
  • The main explore page has clearer navigation and calls to action, so that organizers and participants can find the info they're looking for, or accomplish their task. Overall UI improvements to clarify navigation and action.
  • Dashboard data is backed up in case of a crash.
  • Data is retained in accordance with the appropriate data retention policy.

July 19 edit

 

Meeting with Amanda for verification.

Decision on vocabulary: "Meta-event" is now Campaign, "event" is now Program. Campaign organizers, program organizers, facilitators, participants. Program organizers and facilitators should have the same rights.

My Dashboard is the front page.

The Explore/Miscellanea page will be revamped -- take out the stats, change the "cohorts" idea into Campaigns and Programs. The basic structure in the attached wireframe is going in the right direction.

On the Explore page: lists of Active Campaigns and Active Programs. "Active" means that they haven't finished yet. Campaigns and Programs that haven't started yet are still included in Active. Both lists are default ordered by Recent edits, and then alphabetical by Program. You can click on the columns to sort them differently. There are links to Archived Campaigns and Archived Programs.

Archived Campaigns page and Archived Programs page: Lists of all the Cs and Ps past their expiration. Default ordered by Recent edits, and then alphabetical by Program, as with the Actives.

You can also find your own old Cs/Ps on the My Dashboard page.

Need to redo:

  • Create a New Campaign/Program modals with updated C/P process.
  • Campaign page (revamp of cohort page). From this page, you can create a new Program, attach an existing Program, or detach an existing Program. Ability to add organizers.
  • Program page. Lists the Campaign if any, offers the ability to attach/detach a Program to a Campaign. Update the Details panel. Ability to add organizers and facilitators.
  • Articles. Assign an article to an editor (without having to go to the Editors tab).

July 21, buttons and highlighting edit

  • White bar/modal with purple buttons - White bar does not change color. Button turns light purple on hover. You can click bar to navigate.
  • White bars with one clear button - big white bars with clear buttons. Buttons turn purple when you hover on the bar. You can click bar to navigate.
  • White bars with two clear buttons - white bars that turn light purple on hover. Clicking on bar opens a panel below. Clear buttons turn purple on hover.
  • Purple background, one white button and one clear - clear turns white on hover, white doesn't change on hover

New sheriff in town edit

  • White bars that you can click on turn light purple when you hover.
  • White bars that you can't click on don't have a hover state.
  • Buttons are purple, and turn light purple on hover.