Structured Data Across Wikimedia/Newsletter/6/en
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- Consultation about Search improvements
From June 21 to July 10, we held a general consultation about a number of improvements to Special:Search, as part of the general initiative about Search Improvements.
Most of the proposed changes were graphical improvements, aimed at providing better context and better layout for casual readers who want to use the Wikipedia search page, as well as promote awareness for Wikipedia’s sister projects by rearranging the “sister projects” search section.
The consultation took place on 12 different Wikipedias and on Mediawiki.org, with a substantial participation from users. Based on the precious feedback collected, we decided to re-evaluate our proposal on namespace tags, and to tweak slightly article thumbnails in order to make it easier for users to hide them, if needed. We also decided not to proceed with collapsing the advanced search options.
All other improvements received a general positive feedback in the consultation, and we have started implementing them in the last days. We thank all users who took the time to participate and share their opinions, who have been taken into consideration.
We will now concentrate on collecting feedback on Search Result Preview. Our main focus will be initially with Portuguese, Russian and Indonesian Wikipedia communities, as well as Mediawiki.org. You can always share your feedback on the Search improvements talk page.
- Deployment of Image suggestions
On July 20, a first iteration of the Image suggestions tool was successfully deployed on Portuguese, Russian and Indonesian Wikipedia. The three Wikipedias have been identified in the last months as the first tester communities for this project.
The goal of the tool is to embed a number of image suggestions in the user’s existing Wikipedia activities through weekly notifications, thus increasing the likelihood they will review such suggestions and add selected images as part of their current editing workflow. Currently, editors with 500+ edits on the identified projects add an average of 8 to 11 medias. We expect these rates to improve, thanks to our tool.
We are currently collecting the first feedback from involved users, which will be used to identify potential bugs and improve the current experience. If you are interested in making your community involved in the following iterations of the tool, please let us know.
- About the newsletter
This newsletter will be released only when there are things to discuss or to be announced, and we plan on doing it in the least invasive way for your talk (i.e. through your notifications). If you want it delivered to your talk, let us know.
Let us also know your thoughts on the project's talk page. If you have direct inquiries, you can also refer to my talk page.
Hope to read and see you soon!
-- Sannita (WMF) (talk)