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July 1, 2024: The Community Wishlist is re-opening Jul 15, 2024. Here’s what to expect, and how to prepare.

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The Community Wishlist helps communities surface technical and user experience problems and opportunities, so that the Wikimedia Foundation and communities can prioritize and solve these issues together.

Like in years past, contributors can surface problems and opportunities by submitting “Wishes” year-round. The Foundation will identify patterns between wishes and propose “Focus Areas” of wishes that share a collective problem, and contributors are encouraged to comment and vote on Focus Areas to highlight the areas in need of prioritization. Then, the Foundation, affiliates, and volunteer developers can adopt Focus Areas and collaborate with contributors to solve these problems. Read more.

April 24, 2024: Edit Recovery updates

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Edit Recovery is now available as an opt-in feature on all wikis. Earlier in February, we deployed the feature to French, English and Arabic Wikipedia for testing and bug fixes. Read more from the linked project page.

April 4, 2024: Potential modifications coming to the Community Wishlist Survey

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In January, Community Tech shared some early decisions about changes coming to the Community Wishlist Survey, and soon after, we invited you to participate in ongoing conversations (please join if you haven't yet) about what a new Wishlist survey should look like. Our latest update covers potential modifications coming to the Wishlist. Please read about these changes.

March 1, 2024: Multiblocks design updates

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Over the last few weeks we’ve been designing the user experience and user interface while talking to some admins about Multiblocks. We have some design decisions we want to implement which we have shared with screenshots.

January 4, 2024: Shaping the Future of the Community Wishlist Survey

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Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey.

In summary, we would like to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resourcing, and communication around wishes. Until the new system is established, the Community Tech team will prioritize work from the recently audited backlog of wishes rather than run the survey in February 2024. We are also looking to involve more volunteer developers in the wishlist process, beginning with the first-ever community Wishathon in March 2024.

Please read the announcement in detail either on the Diff blog or MetaWiki, and give your feedback.

October 26, 2023: Edit-Recovery is now available for testing in Beta

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Hello community, we have some updates. Edit-Recovery wish (formerly known as Auto-save feature) is now available on Beta Cluster, and you are invited to test it.

Start editing any page on any Beta site, for example simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org, but don't publish your change. Wait 5 seconds and close the tab. Reopen the tab. Your edit should be recovered!

We are working to make the feature more visible with an element like a toast notification when restoring edit data, with the option of discarding the recovered data.

Questions and feedback are welcome.

October 17, 2023: An Update on Multiblocks Wish

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We have selected Multiblocks the #14 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023. The objective of the wish was to introduce layering blocks (a.k.a multiblocks). We have created a project page to share information about our approach. Please visit and give feedback.

September 25, 2023: It's Time for Wishathon!

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The quarterly online hackathon known as Wishathon, organized by Community Tech to help fulfil more wishes from The Community Wishlist Survey, starts from Monday, 25 September 2023, to Friday, 29 September 2023.

Wishathon engages other Wikimedia Foundation staff to help fulfill more wishes, and also foster cross-team and cross-departmental collaboration.

August 8, 2023: Wish Updates

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Hello everyone, there have been a few changes since our last major update in April 2023.

Displaying categories on mobile

We hoped to implement Display the categories on the mobile site for everyone – after completing the Better Diffs wish. Unfortunately, our key partner, the Web team, will not tackle this wish now. The importance of categories to readers must be researched further to prioritize this wish instead of other pending wishes. But wish fulfilment is often on a rolling basis, so your feedback is welcome. In the meantime, we are working on the Auto-save feature, the #8 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023, which has been renamed to the Edit-Recovery Feature to reflect more accurately what the feature is.

Who Wrote That

Secondly, we have responded to the “Extend ‘Who Wrote That?’ tool to more wikis” and currently, Who Wrote That? (WWT) is now available on 8 more Wikipedias – French, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Indonesian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Polish. This brings the total number of wikis with WWT up from five to 13.

June 22, 2023: Next-steps for Auto-save feature

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The CommTech team is reviewing any investigations, discussions, patches that have happened around the Auto-save feature wish to determine what is next.

Please read about the project, and help answer some questions including how long we need to save the data for the auto-save functionality and what we should store in the database to be able to make autosave functionality work.

June 22, 2023: IPA transition to Language Team

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Community Tech will hand over the IPA project to the Language Team this June. This decision is due to the Language team's expertise in localization, and their focus to create a suite of open language-supporting services such as the MinT machine translation service among other things.

April 27, 2023: Continuing on 2022 and starting the 2023 Wishlist

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Dear Community Wishlist Survey Participants,

We would like to thank you for your participation in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. The survey is a crucial element in helping us prioritize the development of new features and improvements to make Wikimedia projects better for everyone.

Starting work on 2023

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We are pleased to announce that the Community Tech team has identified the "Display the categories on the mobile site for everyone" wish as the priority for the team to work on in the coming months after we complete the work on Better Diffs for paragraph splits. This was also Wish #18 on the 2022 Wishlist. This decision was based on the wish's technical and design feasibility, as well as its potential impact in improving the user experience of the mobile site for all users.

We understand the importance of this feature for the community, and we are excited to work on it. We will keep you updated on the progress we make and will provide more information on the timeline for implementation as soon as possible. In addition, we’ve begun investigating how to Extend “Who Wrote That?” tool to more wikis, the seventh #7 most popular wish from 2023 and hope to make great progress on that work in the coming months. We anticipate launching Who Wrote That? tool to French Wikipedia in the coming days, with several other languages to follow in the coming weeks.

Dark Mode

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We want to provide an update on the "Dark Mode" wish that was voted for in the survey. We are excited to inform you that the Web team has taken on this wish and plans to work diligently on its development. However, due to technical constraints and design feasibility, the Web team will be releasing the first version of the "Dark Mode" feature in Beta. We understand the importance of accessibility and inclusivity, and we are committed to ensuring that this feature meets the needs of all users. Additionally, there are many templates that need to be adjusted, and volunteers need to be alerted to modify before the "Dark Mode" feature can be fully released. The Web team will work on documenting these issues, and we appreciate your patience in this process. We encourage you to subscribe to the Web team's newsletter to follow the updates about this project.

I would also like to take a moment to thank the volunteers who took the time to collaborate with me in good faith during my tenure here and share that I am departing the Wikimedia Foundation and this team. Thank you to those of you who took the time to participate in proposals, problem solving with us, and to those of you who volunteered and tackled technical pieces of granting wishes – I will carry that inspiration with me for the rest of my career.

In my absence, a Product Trio will absorb my responsibilities so you can expect to reach out to the Engineering Manager KSiebert (WMF), Tech Lead DMaza (WMF), and Principal designer JSengupta-WMF as a united Product Trio after my departure in early May. You can expect to communicate with the team in the same way as before, the Talk pages for Projects, Updates, and the Team are the best way to reach the team. We collectively would also like to thank you once again for your participation in the Community Wishlist Survey. Your input helps us prioritize and improve Wikimedia projects, and we look forward to your continued engagement in the future.

Sincerely,

NRodriguez (WMF) and the rest of The Community Tech Team

March 13, 2023: Better diff handling of paragraph splits update

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The team has continued work on this wish on both the engineering and design side and we wanted to share the updates with you.

 
 
 
 

Thank you to all of you who took the time to engage with us and provide feedback on the talk page. We read through all of the feedback and did an aggregate analysis on the points made. We then combined your feedback on those proposed designs, as well as unmoderated user research, and we've finalized the proposed designs to go into engineering for the improvements regarding the wish changes.

Please see the designs in this update which include:

  • Switching between diff modes via dropdown
  • Improving the accessibility of inline diffs with legends and tooltips for desktop
  • Improving the display of a change that introduced a new line or paragraph
  • Improving the display of a change that deleted an existing line or paragraph

In addition, a demo of the changes for the underlying comparison engine has been created.

Before you try out the demo to give us feedback, please note:

  • It's a work in progress, our QA engineers are currently using a list of comprehensive diffs to make sure the changes are consistent with the current version of the two-column diff experience or an improvement on the UI.
  • The demo page does NOT include all final UI changes but can give testers a good sense of how the completed two-column diff experience will end up looking.
  • To use the demo, paste the same text into the two boxes and modify the text in the right box. The diff under it will show what changed.

We'd love to hear your feedback on our talk page!

Next Steps

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  • Accessibility of Design Colors: Our designer is working closely with our Design Systems team to determine the accessibility of the designs. We anticipate having to change the shade of them to a slight degree to make it more accessible but the colors will remain similar to the blue and yellow currently displayed on two-column and inline diffs.
  • Release plan: We are working out a release plan and a timeline of next steps and will be including this in our next project updates! Releasing changes to the underlying engine on the diff follows a different process than traditional releases in Mediawiki software so we will be sure to update you with steps and details next time.

We also want to include big thank you in this update to a non-Community Tech staff member, Tim Starling, who graciously stepped up to help us with the underlying changes in the C++ engine of wikidiff2. We are always happy to receive support fulfilling wishes from other members at the Foundation that have the expertise necessary to fulfill a wish even if they are not in the Community Tech team.

We're looking forward to hearing from all of you!

Open Questions from first update: We want to hear from you!

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  • Are you interested in conducing user research on the new proposed interface to diff paragraph splits? If so, will you please post that you're interested in the Talk Page?
  • What other pain points manifest themselves when you view the diff?
  • How might we address the root pain points that address the confusion around paragraph splits?
  • How does the use of color indicate which content is added, removed, or stayed the same?

March 7, 2023: Community Wishlist Survey 2023 results published

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The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. We have published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.

December 20, 2022: Wishathon Update

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This year, the Community Tech started a tradition of hosting an internal WMF Wishathon. During this Wishathon, our team cancels meetings for an entire week and spends the entirety of our time working on "smaller" wishes outside of our regular "larger" wish workload. For example, the Better diff for paragraph split wish is a complex large wish that requires heavy planning with regards to design research, technical architecture as well as plans for quality assurance and dependencies with the Performance team. These wishes usually take months for us to grant. The Wishathon inspires us to grant wishes that are more straight forward and require less cross-team dependencies and planning. While these may not be the most popular wishes, we still believe they are impactful and heavily desired by the participants who voted on them.

This past December, we extended an invite of participation to other engineers, designers, and managers in different teams to join us for a week long Wishathon and help us make progress on the work required to grant these smaller wishes. Thanks to the additional participation from engineers on other teams, we were able to finish four wishes and refactor an important piece of code. Please note that in the spirit of moving quickly and building wishes people need, we did not conduct the full cycle of research and communication outreach that we usually complete on larger wishes. You can read about the wishes we completed last week, their impact, and their scheduled releases below.

Wish: Autosuggest linking Wikidata item after creating an article

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This wish received 92 support votes and ranked as the #12 most popular wish in the list of the 2022 wishes.

Problem: Someone creates an article in Language A Wikipedia, but they do not know there is already the same article in Language B Wikipedia (often a smaller language version), so no Wikidata linkage is made. Proposer has seen many cases between Chinese Wikipedia (zh) and Cantonese Wikipedia (yue).

Work was completed and will be available as a gadget the week of January 16, 2023.

Impact of wish

  • More Wikipedia (and other project) pages linked to corresponding Wikidata items
  • Greater awareness of Wikidata for wiki contributors
  • Better maintenance of links between Wikipedia languages, and other Wikidata benefits

Wish: Enable negation for tag filters

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This wish received 41 support votes and ranked as the #27 most popular wish in the list of the 2022 wishes.

Problem: When view feeds such as Special:Contributions or Special:RecentChanges we can currently filter by tags, but not by the negation of tags.

Work was completed and will be out in the set of deployments occurring the week of January 3, 2023.

  • Original Wish
  • Relevant Tickets and Patches
    • ✅ Closed T119,072: Allow Tag negation on Special:Contribution
    • ✅ Closed T174,349: Allow Tag negation on Recent Changes
    • ✅ Merged Patch 866,814: UX for Tag negation on Special:Contribution
    • ✅ Merged Patch 867,726: fixed testing for forms to work better with hide-if (to allow next)
    • ✅ Merged Patch 866,817: UX for Tag negation on Special:Log (out of scope, but easy)
    • ✅ Merged Patch 867,255: Expose Tag negation in API and feed (to allow next)
    • ✅ Merged patch 867,731: Prevent tagfilter param from being set to 'all' (to allow next)
    • ✅ Merged Patch 867,224: UX for Tag negation on Recent Changes / Watchlist
  • Status:
    • 866,814 already in prod (i.e. on Special:Contributions)
    • 6 patches merged, two tasks closed, one wish fulfilled
  • Next steps:
    • Deploy to prod for Recent Changes and Special:Log with next train
  • 🏆 Special thanks to Team Members: Roan Kattouw, Denny Vrandecic, James Forrester, Moriel Schottlender

Honorable mention to Matěj Suchánek, a volunteer who laid the groundwork for this by writing this patch in 2020.

Impact of wish

Users will be able to filter out edits based on a tag on Recent Changes, Watchlist, Special:Contributions, and Special:Log.

Wish: Enable Thanks Button by default in Watchlists and Recent Changes

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This wish received 62 support votes and ranked as the #33 most popular wish in the list of the 2022 wishes.

Problem: The Thanks button is only available on individual Page Histories, which very few people interact with on a regular basis -- especially more experienced editors. The number of newbies looking at individual history pages, is miniscule.

  • Original Wish
  • Relevant Tickets and Patches
  • 🏆 Special thanks to Team Members: Jon Robson
  • Status: The work has been merged and is available for testing in Beta, and will be deployed to users with the first train of 2023 which is scheduled for the week of Jan 3.

Impact of wish

Users will now be able to thank other users from inside Watchlists and Recent Changes pages.

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This wish received 18 support votes and ranked as the #162 most popular wish in the list of the 2022 wishes.

Problem: The tag on the change line currently looks like this: 

   14:33 John Callahan's Quads!‎ (diff | hist) .. (−12) .. Rng0286 (talk | contribs) (lorem ipsum) (Tags: Visual edit, Mobile web edit)

The tag name is either a link to a help page or just plain text. It is not easy to find edits with the same tag.

Impact of wish

Users will now be able to click on the tag name to find edits with the same tags within change lines.

Refactoring code from the Page Triage codebase for easier collaboration

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Impact of work

Modernizing the codebase to help make bug fixing and feature development easier

What's Next?

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In addition to the wishes granted above, we were able to make some progress on a handful of other wishes. Community Tech will be assessing which wishes we can finish based on the progress left on them. We are excited to continue this Wishathon tradition and welcome your feedback in the talk page of this update! Thank you for participating in the Wishlist, we hope to see you in the upcoming annual survey opening January 23, 2023.

December 16, 2022: Realtime Preview is coming out of beta

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The Realtime Preview for Wikitext is coming out of beta as an enabled feature for every user of the 2010 Wikitext editor in the week of January 9, 2023. It will be available to use via the toolbar in the 2010 Wikitext editor. The feature was the 4th most popular wish of the Community Wishlist Survey 2021.

December 5, 2022: The 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will happen in January

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Do you have an idea for a tool or platform improvement for Wikimedia projects? This announcement is for you!

The Community Wishlist Survey (CWS) 2023, which allows contributors to propose and vote for tools and improvements, starts next month on Monday, 23 January 2023, at 18:00 UTC and will continue annually.

We are inviting you to share your ideas for technical improvements to our tools and platforms. Long experience in editing or technical skills is not required. If you have ever used our software and thought of an idea to improve it, this is the place to come share those ideas!

The dates for the phases of the survey will be as follows:

  • Phase 1: Submit, discuss, and revise proposals: Monday, 23 January 2023, to Monday, 6 February 2023
  • Phase 2: WMF/Community Tech reviews and organises proposals: Monday, 30 January 2023 to Friday, 10 February 2023
  • Phase 3: Vote on proposals: Friday, 10 February 2023 to Friday, 24 February 2023
  • Phase 4: Results posted: Tuesday, 28 February 2023

If you want to start writing out your ideas ahead of the Survey, you can start thinking about your proposals and draft them in the CWS sandbox.

We are grateful to all who participated last year. See you in January 2023!

December 1, 2022: Better diffs usability testing

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We have been working on different design alternatives for Better diff handling for paragraph splits, the #1 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2022! We have invited the community to sign up for usability tests and give feedback.

May 3, 2022: Real Time Preview launching to partner projects

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We have launched a version of the Realtime preview feature to Polish Wikipedia. Its community has agreed to partner with us and give us feedback on how to improve it before we launch to the rest of the users. Please find our complete Release Plan. Read more

This feature touches one of the most used editors (Wikitext 2010) across wiki projects. We've thus decided to roll it out as a Beta Feature before we release the feature to everyone. This will allow us to collect feedback and make improvements before we release to everyone.

We are partnering with users early on to understand behavior on the new tool and make improvements. Depending on the user’s connection, we are aiming to observe and evaluate patterns regarding the automatic and manual reloads of the preview pane, as follows:

  • Automatic reload: Debounce time. When the preview pane is automatically reloading, is our debounce time sufficient to provide a fluid experience?
  • Automatic reload: Discoverability of the manual reload button. When the preview pane is automatically reloading, is the manual reload button that appears while hovering over the preview pane easy to find?

and/or

  • Manual reload: Discoverability/Display time of the manual reload status bar. When the preview pane is NOT reloading automatically, the user will see a status bar inviting them to manually reload. Is the discoverability of the bar sufficient? Is the status bar obstructive to the users’ workflows?

We will aim to observe both of these scenarios for users with stable high-speed internet connections. In both cases, we will be performing the test on two pages: one short article without images (for faster reload time) and another one with a large content and multimedia assets (for slower reload time).

Aside from our main investigation, we will also be observing the following during our screen-sharing sessions with users:

  • Discoverability of the overall feature: although users will be notified of the existence of the realtime preview feature, and the potential relationship between the latter and the "Show preview" feature.
  • User screen sizes- This data could be helpful to understand how useful the Realtime Preview is for folks with a smaller screen. Does this make their experience too crowded?
  • Usage of syntax highlighting/Code Mirror
  • Understanding that both panes do not have a synced scrolling behavior.

If you would like to give us any feedback on any of the open questions above, please reach out to us in the talk page as we are eager to hear about the usability of this new feature. Thanks for building with us!

February 15, 2022: CWS 2022 results

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The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is over! We would like to thank everyone who participated in this year's edition and express our special gratitude to those who made outstanding contributions to the survey below the results. We could not have done it without all of you!

Curious about what happens next? Learn about our prioritization process and check out the ranking of prioritized proposals for this year. Read more

November 8, 2021: Warn when linking to disambiguation pages

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We have an update about the wish. We have finished user tests. Read more

Hello everyone,

Many thanks for your great support and feedback on the proposed user experience and designs for this wish. This update is regarding the usability testing, which was conducted in parallel with community members on the talk page, as well as the first “Talk to Us hours” video call last September. Thanks again for your valuable inputs!

The goal of this round of usability tests was to determine if our proposed designs were successful in warning users about the potential risks of adding a link to disambiguated page in the 2010 wikitext editor without inhibiting users from continuing to edit. We conducted the test on usertesting.com with 5 editors total.

Here are the insights we gathered from the tests:

  • 2/3 of users successfully noticed the new notification warning them about the disambiguation link they added. Two users were not able to see the notifications due to complications with the testing interface and instructions.
  • All users who saw the notification found it helpful and easy to understand. When users noticed the disambiguation notification and understood its purpose, most of them stated that it was useful without being disruptive to their edit flow.

Acknowledgments: This test was conducted on beta-wiki with a limited content pages. Before we could push some recent user experience and engineering improvements for this wish, including the new link selector widget for the Wikitext editor. We are hoping that these changes will mitigate some of the difficulties encountered by the users during this usability test.

Not all of these editors from this panel are experienced users. Although this wish is intended to be helpful for every user – we assume that less experienced editors will tend to use the VisualEditor over the wikitext editor, thus making this new feature less relevant for them.

We are grateful for your feedback on this talk page and the Talk to Us for our team to get a better understanding of your needs as experienced contributors. Thanks so much for your feedback on the talk page!

November 2, 2021: Real Time Preview for Wikitext

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Thank you for your comments on the talk page, as well as the latest "Talk to Us" video call. Also, we have conducted usability testing. We are sharing the most important findings. Read more Hello everyone,

Many thanks for your support and great feedback on the proposed designs. Thank you for comments on the talk page, as well as the latest "Talk to Us" video call. We have learned more about how experienced users edit.

Also, we have conducted usability testing on the usertesting.com platform. 5 editors took part. Below you will find some of the findings and insights:

  • Half of the users found the new "Preview" button in the toolbar. One of the reasons for this could be behavioral patterns developed over the existing "Show preview" button in the footer of the editor box. We are designing a low-friction pulsating dot with a guide popup. We hope this will make it easier to notice the new feature.
  • All users found the existing "show preview" button.
  • All users understood the difference between both buttons. One could be used while editing (offering a quick glimpse at the output). The other could be more helpful for proofreading before publishing the changes.
  • One user reported that it might always be easy to understand the relationship between the Wikitext input and the preview output. To mitigate this, we are exploring ways to highlight the text in both panes and align the scrolling or editing behavior.

Acknowledgments:

  • Not all of these editors are experienced users. Although this wish is intended to be helpful for every user – we assume that less experienced editors will tend to use the Visual Editor over the wikitext editor. This will make the new feature less relevant for them.
  • We are also working on improving the scaling of both panes. We want to allow for optimal support to both small and ultra-wide displays alike.

Again, thanks so much for your feedback!

October 19, 2021: Declining the Bibliographic Bot Wish

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Wish Title: Bibliographic Bot

Phabricator Ticket for Investigation

Wish Rank: #14

Reason Summary: Scope of work too large, not enough votes.

We have decided to decline this project. We did this after careful consideration and multiple rounds of feedback within the team and conversations with other teams at WMF and affiliates.

Rationale: First, the engineers and designers investigated the scope of work defined in the problem statement of the wish (T243150). We have determined that the work alone far exceeds our initial estimation of it.

This wish scored very high in our prioritization process because at a glance, it seemed straightforward to duplicate the Citoid behavior inside of Wikidata. We assumed that it involved a low complexity from a technical and design perspective because we could reuse the code and designs. However, citations in Wikidata must be linked as references to other objects in the database. This significantly increases the complexity.

This wish did not score the top 10 most popular wishes. It came in at #14. We were wrong about the initial estimation. In fact the work for this wish was worked on by Wikidata/Wikimedia Deutschland for multiple months. The final solution was too complex to complete given the resources available at the time. This would take the Community Tech team multiple months to complete, and there are other wishes that were more popular that we will work on instead.

September 4, 2021: Real Time Preview for Wikitext

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We have made progress working on the Real Time Preview for Wikitext tool. We have two questions about its design. We invite you to answer on the project talk page. Read more

Thank you for your feedback

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Hello all, we are back with an update on the proposed designs for this wish. Thanks for all of your comments on the talk page. We heard what you said and synthesized the feedback as follows:

  • The button to preview the wikitext output should be more intuitive, the person clicking it should know what it does.
  • The button to preview the text should be in the toolbar.

We then took a second try at creating the following set of designs. We are proposing a new button appears in the toolbar:

 

We are proposing than when user previews the content, the preview button label remains "blue" to indicate that the preview state is on, and activated:

 

The preview button would turn back to black if users toggle it off and the preview would disappear.

Horizontal vs Vertical

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Please note that these proposed designs are illustrative. We only included a vertical version because we are currently investigating if the ability to have a wide screen will still be an option given the planned and upcoming work on Web desktop improvements which would limit the page to 960px in width, making it too cluttered to have a horizontal view.

Open Questions: We want to hear from you!

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  • Does the new button placement seem more intuitive to the workflows in the toolbar?
  • Does the current proposed layout feel like there is enough space to view both the wikitext and the output?

Thanks so much for your continued feedback on the talk page!

August 27, 2021: Real Time Preview for Wikitext

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We are making initial steps on the Real Time Preview for Wikitext tool. We have questions about its design. We invite you to answer on the project talk page. Read more

Proposed Designs

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Horizontal Desktop Layout
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A new button will appear. This gives editors the option to preview the text on the side in real-time:

 

Note: The pink box above is just to draw attention to the button, it will not actually appear to users.

Editors will be able to click on the button highlighted above. If they do that, the following layout would allow them to preview the output in a scrollable fixed container:

 

Vertical Desktop Layout
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The following new user interface element will appear when a user has a vertical desktop screen:

 

Note: The pink box above is just to draw attention to the button, it will not actually appear to users.

Editors will be able to click on the button highlighted above. If they do that, the following layout would allow them to preview the output in a scrollable fixed container:

 

The engineers have begun work on these changes. We are introducing the changes inside of MediaWiki core. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our proposed designs. We'd especially love feedback on:

  • Making the copy and button placements intuitive
  • The overall feel of the proposed designs

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our proposed designs and any other considerations!

Open Questions: We want to hear from you!

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The solutions above are proposed and in early stages. We'd love to hear your feedback on the talk page. Your insight can help us understand other approaches, risks, and solutions.

These are our questions to you:

  • How do you think this will influence the way you edit?
  • Does the icon on the expand button prepare the editors to understand what it does? Is it distrupting?

August 20, 2021: The 2022 Community Wishlist Survey will happen in January

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Hello everyone,

We hope all of you are as well and safe as possible during these trying times! We wanted to share some news about a change to the Community Wishlist Survey 2022. We would like to hear your opinions as well.

We will be running the Community Wishlist Survey 2022 in January 2022. We need more time to work on the 2021 wishes. We also need time to prepare some changes to the Wishlist 2022. In the meantime, you can use a dedicated sandbox to leave early ideas for the 2022 wishes.

Proposing and wish-fulfillment will happen during the same year

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In the past, the Community Tech team has run the Community Wishlist Survey for the following year in November of the prior year. For example, we ran the Wishlist for 2021 in November 2020. That worked well a few years ago. At that time, we used to start working on the Wishlist soon after the results of the voting were published.

However, in 2021, there was a delay between the voting and the time when we could start working on the new wishes. Until July 2021, we were working on wishes from the Wishlist for 2020.

We hope having the Wishlist 2022 in January 2022 will be more intuitive. This will also give us time to fulfill more wishes from the 2021 Wishlist.

Encouraging wider participation from historically excluded communities

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We are thinking how to make the Wishlist easier to participate in. We want to support more translations, and encourage under-resourced communities to be more active. We would like to have some time to make these changes.

A new space to talk to us about priorities and wishes not granted yet

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We will have gone 365 days without a Wishlist. We encourage you to approach us. We hope to hear from you in the talk page, but we also hope to see you at our bi-monthly Talk to Us meetings! These will be hosted at two different times friendly to time zones around the globe.

We will begin our first meeting September 15th at 23:00 UTC. More details about the agenda and format coming soon!

Brainstorm and draft proposals before the proposal phase

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If you have early ideas for wishes, you can use the new Community Wishlist Survey sandbox. This way, you will not forget about these before January 2022. You will be able to come back and refine your ideas. Remember, edits in the sandbox don't count as wishes!

Feedback

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  • What should we do to improve the Wishlist pages?
  • How would you like to use our new sandbox?
  • What, if any, risks do you foresee in our decision to change the date of the Wishlist 2022?
  • What will help more people participate in the Wishlist 2022?

Answer on the talk page (in any language you prefer) or at our Talk to Us meetings.

August 18, 2021: Warn when linking to disambiguation pages

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We have moved forward with the design. We would like you to answer our questions. Read more

Progress with the design

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Hello everyone, and thanks to those of you who have been active on our talk page and tested the proof of concept script for displaying a warning. We have moved forward with designing for the last two requirements in our proposed solutions and wanted to share them with you so that we could hear your input!

As an Editor using the link toolbar to search for knowledge to reference in my article, I can:

  • See a warning before publishing if I have introduced a disambiguation link in my article
  • Visibly differentiate disambiguation links as a different type of content than articles that come up on my suggestions

For the first solution above, we are proposing displaying this yellow box warning when wikitext users add a link:

 

For the second solution above, we are proposing changing the copy to better describe what a disambiguation page means in the wikitext link button and in the visual editor link pop-up:

 

 

Open questions

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We'd love to hear your thoughts on our proposed designs. We'd especially love feedback on:

  • Making the copy accessible and making it easier to glean what a disambiguation page is
  • Making sure the warning for wikitext editors feels preventative without coming off as discouraging-- editors should still be able to publish even if they have introduced faulty links

We're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our proposed designs!

August 5, 2021: (Un)delete associated talk page

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We have completed our first investigation. You can track this inside this ticket on Phabricator. The bulk of the work here will be around security and performance considerations. We estimate tackling this work within the coming months. Read more

August 2, 2021: Warn when linking to disambiguation pages

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We have completed our first part of the wish. As a result, we will release a new change in a few days. Thank you for all the comments you have given. Read more

The first part is about the following improvement:

As an Editor using the link toolbar to search for knowledge to reference in my article, I can see specific articles as the first search results.

This effects the link search function in VisualEditor and the 2017 wikitext editor.

The change should go live this week. In the meantime, if you would like to preview the changes, you can try it out on the beta cluster. For instance, when adding a link and you type out the term "New York", New York City and New York (state) appear above the disambiguation page New York in the search results.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback!

After this change is released, we will be monitoring the numbers inside The Daily Disambig to see if it has any impact on the number of unwanted dab links being added (thanks for pointing us in the direction of this page).

July 23, 2021: Warn when linking to disambiguation pages

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We have begun design planning on this wish. Our designer, NAyoub is working on setting up some user tests where we ask new editors to link from the Jupiter article to the Mars article and see if they fall for the disambiguated page since it's the first result. We will take notes and write up next steps based on the results. Our engineers are also investigating the feasibility of moving search results for disambiguated terms to the bottom of the results. Read more

July 16, 2021: Copy paste diffs

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We are making initial steps on the Copy paste diffs tool. We have questions about its design. We invite you to answer on the project talk page. Read more

Engineering investigation

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We have begun the engineering investigation for this work inside this Phabricator ticket. We are optimistic in the solutions we've found to fix this problem.

Video demonstrating copy and paste interactions for diff selection

Open questions

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  • In which contexts do users usually copy and paste from diffs?
  • What syntax manifests itself as intrusive? Is there any syntax that would be desirable to keep in the clipboard?
  • What feedback do you have on our proposed solution?

July 15, 2021: Status report

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There have been and will be changes to our team. We have made decisions what will be the sequence of wishes we will be working on. We would like you to learn more about our methodology. There are reasons why the voting is not the only criterion. Please tell us what you think about it. Read more

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