Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wwwyzzerdd user experience improvements and critical maintenance (ID: 22024892)/Final Report
Report Status: Under review
Due date: 2023-03-20T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Rapid Fund, Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Final
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- Title of Proposal: Wwwyzzerdd user experience improvements and critical maintenance
- Username of Applicant: BrokenSegue
- Name of Organization: N/A
- Amount awarded: 4825
- Amount spent: 4825 USD, 4825 USD
Part 1 Understanding your work edit
1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented
The main goal of the project was to ensure the long-term sustainability of the Wwwyzzerdd project by making sure that it will continue to be able to run on modern browsers. While I was not working in Jan/Feb I used this funding from the WMF and time available to rewrite the backend of Wwwyzzerdd to support Manifest v3. I also used this time to modernize the dependencies of the project, add general feature improvements requested by my users and fix miscellaneous bugs. In the meantime some users have approached me about adding even new features and I have used this time to begin planning/work of these previously unanticipated features (though those have not launched yet).
The actual implementation of the activities was straightforward as most of the work involved me writing code. I did pay an external service to do translation support for Wwwyzzerdd into several other languages.
With the long term viability of the project ensured I intend to continue developing Wwwyzzerdd in my free time though at a slower velocity in between my normal day-job responsibilities.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals? Please describe these strategies and approaches.
My normal approach to software development was pretty effective. I find using open source tools and packages makes development easier and ensures that the code will be usable even if I were to disappear. Using GitHub issues is helpful because it means that my users can directly ask about/discuss feature requests and bug reports. Though I also maintain a Wikidata page for users who do not have a github account to report issues / make feature requests.
3. Please use this space to upload media and other files that help tell your story and impact.
Field to type in URLs.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ergc5BSX9ZxB4fHtFOqs0okvg4AfVSJQNlJEtyM-ltI/edit?usp=sharing
4. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Neither agree nor disagree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | Agree |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Neither agree nor disagree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | Neither agree nor disagree |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Strongly agree |
5. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
The main work in this direction that I did was making the extension available in more languages.
Part 2: Your main learning edit
6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
While the work described in the proposal has all been completed it has only been a week or two since the changes were deployed to end users. There was a delay in the release of the browser due to some back and forth that happened with the Google chrome extension store (they wanted me to make changes to the permission model of the app before release to improve privacy). Because of this less has been learned to this point than initially hoped.
One piece of work that I worked on turned out to be much more successful than anticipated. Part of Wwwyzzerdd is a component that predicts the P31/P279 values of a Wikipedia page. During the grant period I converted this component into a standalone tool as part of Magnus’s distributed game. This tool had 83 distinct users who made a total of over 8000 edits using the tool. See https://wikidata-game.toolforge.org/distributed/#game=84 I learned from this that I should explore alternate ways to distribute the same core components of Wwwyzzerdd to new audiences.
7. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?This can include both positive and negative situations. What did you learn from those experiences?
The original development plan for Wwwyzzerdd involved upgrading both the Firefox and Chrome versions of the extension to manifest v3. This was planned because Chrome had already released support and Mozilla had announced an intention to release support around when this grant started. Unfortunately it turned out that the Chrome and Firefox versions of manifest v3 are not yet compatible with one another. I had not anticipated this and it created an unpleasant situation. I shouldn’t have trusted Mozilla’s announcement of support for manifest at face value and should have investigated exactly what parts they intended to support. Also, after the grant proposal was submitted Google announced a delay to their Manifest v3 rollout plan. This greatly reduced the urgency of the work being done in this grant. Google still intends to deprecate Manifest v2 so the work is still needed.
This was the first project where I had dealt with internationalization and it proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. In particular the translators I worked with had trouble using the inputs I gave them to produce valid translations. I had to manually vet all the translated strings using various automatic translation services to make sure they were using the correct senses of various words. Even still I’m worried that some of the translations are not correct. Hopefully my users will point this out to me.
8. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
I hope to split Wwwyzzerdd into smaller components that can be used by a wider audience. Not everyone is willing to install a browser extension but maybe they would just be willing to install a MediaWiki gadget. Other developers (e.g. Magnus) have had success distributing tiny single purpose tools like this.
Also, by improving the Wwwyzzerdd codebase it revealed that sometimes the Wikidata API silently errors which causes the Wwwyzzerdd user experience to degrade (and show error messages now that the app has proper error messages). So now I plan to add proper retrying functionality to all Wikidata requests (currently it is only done for certain kinds of critical requests). While doing that I may upgrade to the new REST API which came out for Wikidata while I was working on this grant.
While working on this project lots of new ideas for features to add to Wwwyzzerdd have come forward from myself and from users. In particular a user requested a feature from me where Wwwyzzerdd would alert users when a claim violates a constraint. This has been in the feature backlog for a while but a user requesting it makes me more likely to invest the time to work on it.
9. Documentation of resources: Use this space to upload any documents that would be useful to share with others (e.g. communications material, training material, presentations).
Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
N/A
Part 3: Metrics edit
10a. Open Metrics reporting
In your application, you defined some open metrics and targets (goals). You will see a table like the one below with your metric in the title and the target you set in your proposal automatically filled in. Use the tables to report the result. Use the comments column to describe any aspects of this result that you find relevant. If the results were different from the initial target (goals) then you can explain why and what you learned from this. You can also provide any qualitative analysis regarding these results. In the last column please describe the tools and methodology used to collect this data and any difficulties you might have had.
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| % Increase In Extension Usage | Change in number of active users and edits made using the extension before and after the changes | 10 | 15 | Work on the grant ended on Feb 15, 2023. In the month before there were 26 distinct users. In the month after there were 30 distinct users. That said there's only been a week or so since the announcement has gone out and I intend to do more announcements on different boards in the coming weeks. | Data from MySQL wikidatawiki_p database |
| Number of new feature edits / month | Number of edits made to wikidata using the newly implemented features per month | 500 | 288 | If we include edits made by the "Distributed Game" which was an offshoot of the work done in this grant then 8500 edits were made over 2 months (this data unfortunately was not timestamped properly so this is the most accurate data I can show).
32 edits made to descriptions. 14 edits made to labels 136 edits made to aliases. P576 edits: 10 P577 edits: 14 P570 edits: 8. P569 edits: 8 P571 edits: 28. P585 edits:38 |
Manual counting of edits and data from MySQL. There isn't a special tag for these kinds of edits so I had to check each property type of edit individually. I know I missed at least a few properties that represent dates. |
| User satisfaction survey | Conduct a survey of regular users and ask if they are satisfied with the recent changes, if they want more new features, etc.
Use a Likert scale to measure overall satisfaction. |
4 | 0 | After a private conversation with a user I decided that surveying my users in this manner would be annoying (they were already annoyed I had messages them all for feedback previously). I may wait for the next big change to come out later this year before doing another round of messaging. | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
10b. Core Metrics reporting
In your application, you defined targets for some core metrics and targets (goals). You will see a table like the one below with each core metric in the title and the target you set in your proposal automatically filled in. Use the tables to report the result. Use the comments column to describe any aspects of this result that you find relevant. If the results were different from the initial target (goals) then you can explain why and what you learned from this. You can also provide any qualitative analysis regarding these results. In the last column please describe the tools and methodology used to collect this data and any difficulties you might have had. Note: a table will appear for each Wikimedia project content contribution you defined in your proposal.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | While this extension does benefit non-editors this metric is very difficult to measure. Optimally we would look at number of usages of the statements added to Wikidata using the extension but that metric is very difficult to track. | 33 | There were 33 distinct users of the extension after the release.All participants are implicitly also editors because this is a tool that allows you to edit. | MySQL database queries | |
| Number of editors | This is the number of active users of the extension. I can track this number by looking at the "change_tag" table in the DB replica. In the most recent month we had 32 distinct users. I also hope to increase this number as has been the trend so far (in September the extension only had 25 distinct users). | 32 | 33 | The number of distinct users in the Feb/March launch window was 33. | Examining the MySQL database |
| Number of organizers | Not tracking | 1 | Just me. | Counted myself manually. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikidata | Number of edits per month to Wikidata. I hope to keep the number at its current levels or to increase it further. Currently it's hovering around 15,000. I think with more adoption we could hit 20,000 per month. Even just keeping the extension at current levels would be seen as a win. | 20000 | 19700 | Between the February and March launch window of the changes to the tool 19000 edits were made using Wwwyzzerdd. This is below the estimates I made but it seems that the spike in usage in December was a seasonal effect and not a permanent trend and so we overestimated the monthly edits we can expect from Wwwyzzerdd moving forwards. We saw 15179 edits in December before the work began and 12670 edits in February before the work was finished. So it appears total usage was down before the project completed. | Examining the MySQL database |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
12. Did you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results? This could include things like a lack of time or resources, or the expertise in your team to collect this data. It could also include difficulties with particular data collection tools.
No
12a. State what difficulties you had.
N/A
12b. How do you hope to overcome these challenges in the future? Do you have any recommendations for the Foundation to support you in addressing these challenges?
N/A
13. Use this space to upload any documents and provide links to any tools you have used that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, program and event dashboard link, project page on Meta).
Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
It was all done via MySQL queries and me manually counting edits in recent changes with the relevant tags.
14. Have you shared these results with other Wikimedian communities (either affiliates, user groups, volunteers, etc., different to yours)? This can include things such as data and direct outcomes, lessons you have learned, or information on how to run or recreate your programs.
No
14a. If yes or partially, please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how.
Part 4: Financial reporting and compliance edit
15. & 14a. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
4825 USD
16. Please state the total amount spent in USD.
4825 USD
17. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
17a. Upload a financial report file.
17b. Please provide a link to your financial reporting document.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6CXgUlgQrOXC_8Qk2Ryt4aocDyQBUUeIkNZU9CFJ2U/edit#gid=0
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
17c. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
I spent more hours than anticipated but I am fine with just taking a lower per-hour rate.
18. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
No
18a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
N/A
18b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
N/A
18c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
N/A
19. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
Yes
20. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
Yes
21. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
Yes
22. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.
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