Talk:Learning and Evaluation/Archive/Boiler room

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Ask questions and discuss program evaluation

The main forum for discussing the evaluation portal itself. General discussions of Program Evaluation can be had at the main portal talk page. You can also ask questions at the Q&A board.

Questions n'stuff

Hi guys. Some questions and ideas.

General

1. When I can start clearing content and redirecting our old pages to the new pages? (i.e. the news page to the printing press) or how should I/we proceed?

#I'd like the "Ask a question" To be more prominent. Not sure how to do that without making the blue bigger and more loud or... I'm not sure yet. Just something to think about in the future.

1. I think we should a link to the "Entryway" or whatever (main portal page of entry) in the menu in the header

there is a link (it's behind the left-hand gear!). It might be useful to make that link more visible, since wikipedians aren't used to clicking on images for navigation. Once we have breadcrumbs, this will be less of an issue though... thoughts Heather? Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Parlor

1. Can new profiles in the parlor be automatically moved to the top? Or should we just manually maintain it for now? (Manually for now)
2. We have a new profile created over at the soon to be dead portal, I was going to copy him over then realized our template is different. Should I manually do it or is there another process? (i can easily do it manually, I just don't want to mess anything up). See Charles.
3. Can we put an "ask a question" button on the main parlor page? Right now it's only profiles and the most important factor is the ask a question/question hub.

News

#Will the printing press news get added to the front page by the bot? - later!

1. I'm very open minded to developing another event template. I just used the news template, as I couldn't figure out a way to hack with the WikiWomen's Collaborative event templates because the translation templates were giving me a headache. - later
2. Is there a preferred blog or information link related to news about Learning & Evaluation for the bottom of this page? - TBD

Library

#Learning patterns don't have the header on them, and for now they direct back to the "original" learning patterns Grants:Learning patterns. Are you OK with me fixing that? Moving the learning patterns to the actual portal space?

About

1. How should we organize the team section? Name/Title/Role (explanation about what you do)/email/username, however photo too? Should we use the profile template? See this section

SarahStierch (talk) 18:40, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Archive template/box/links thing is needed on the Q&A page

It's getting quite long and I think we need to install it. I stink at installing those archives boxes. I have tagged it with MiszaBot, but, the archive box is something I have a hard time formatting for some stupid reason. Can anyone help with installing it? Here is the Q&A page: Grants:Evaluation/Parlor/Questions. Something like this thing [1] but with a better image perhaps. I'd just like to see some of the content there get filed away, since the page is looking really long now. Thank you. SarahStierch (talk) 18:23, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Learning modules ---> training modules?

Hi guys. User:Frank Schulenburg and I were touring around the portal today - it's so awesome  :) - anyway, we were discussing the idea about the term "Learning Modules" - what do you think of renaming them as "Training modules"? To me that's even more clear cut - it trains you on how to do something. Whatcha think? SarahStierch (talk) 23:11, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

linkify URL @ wikimedia-ped listinfo page

Hi, please linkfiy the meta URL mentioned at mail:wikimedia-ped. Thanks --Jeremyb (talk) 17:16, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Jeremy! We'll get to it shortly. SarahStierch (talk) 17:23, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Done SarahStierch (talk) 19:35, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

"confirmations"

I don't quite know how to explain this idea, but I'm going to give it a shot. You know when you are editing on Wikipeida and you receive a confirmation when your edit has been saved/completed? I have seen the different experiments where it was either at the top of the page, or little pop-ups on the side. I recently was posting on a different community website, where I posted some question for the broader community. It gave me a little pop-up after I submitted that said, "Good question! something something something." It was really nice! I wonder if we could use our existing technology on Wikipedia to do something similar - like, "Interesting Learning! Thanks for sharing your pattern." Probably other ways this could go, too. Jwild (talk) 18:52, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Jessie. The post edit notification is part of the core MediaWiki software (it used to be an extension), so we can't easily customize it. It is probably possible to make a gadget that does this, but it may not be worth the substantial time investment. One thing that we could do more easily would be to have GrantsBot send a talkpage message to users who create a new pattern. The message could include a "thank you" as well as a call to action to complete the pattern (similar to what GrantsBot has done for IEG proposals in the past), or contain other suggestions. In fact, now that Notifications are live on Meta, the bot could actually just post the message to the Pattern talk page and mention the creator. This might help bring the creator back to the pattern, and (since the message would be in a more public space) also contain information for other editors about how to contribute to the pattern. I'm happy to discuss that option! Cheers, Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Choice of qualtrics

I don't know what costings are on qualtrics (whether those are being passed on to chapters, programs, etc.) nor how invested things already are in it, but there is an open source platform called LimeSurvey http://manual.limesurvey.org/ which might be worth exploring given its alignment with our own open community Sjgknight (talk) 10:23, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, the Editor Survey used to be run on a LimeSurvey instance, which the Foundation hosted ourselves at survey.wikimedia.org. But its use was discontinued in 2011 because security flaws were discovered in the software that would have been prohibitively expensive in time and money to fix (User:Tbayer (WMF) may know more details). Since some G&P surveys may ask for personally identifiable information, we need a secure solution. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 01:35, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Ah that's a pity, thanks for the extra info though Sjgknight (talk) 08:02, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, it is a pity. Qualtrics is the best of the best, and until a secure, safe, reliable and expansive platform that can be utilized in a way Qualtrics can, that is open source, we'll be Qualtric-sing it up for a while :) SarahStierch (talk) 17:01, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

That's correct, although I should add that I wasn't around either when that security review took place in 2011 (I think Arthur was one of the software engineers involved with that installation, and might know more), and that LimeSurvey appears to have undergone a complete rewrite in 2012 for its 2.0 version. But another point to consider is that Qualtrics appears to offer better multilingual support than other solutions - they even added extra languages for us in 2011. No platform is perfect of course (with the 2012 editor survey, we encountered multiple technical problems especially with Qualtrics' reporting function), but Qualtrics is currently regarded as the most solid solution. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Making references a part of the template?

Hi - I may have done this wrong, but when I added references to the bottom of one of the Library pages, it shows up strangely outside of the template background: Tracking and Reporting Toolkit. User:Heatherawalls, do you have any thoughts? Jwild (talk) 17:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

The "references" tag is simply outside the box template... verdy_p (talk) 10:28, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

This is fixed, and the page is now fully translatable too. verdy_p (talk) 11:05, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I also just added the translatability of the last missing item of the portal : News (may be some improved layout would be useful, possibly with enhanced templates; so most presentation features are hidden in the proposed translation to allow these presentation enhancements). verdy_p (talk) 15:37, 1 March 2014 (UTC)