Talk:User Interaction Consultation/Flow

Please share your thoughts, questions, or comments around this users interaction consultation in this page. We are using Flow, because it is more mobile friendly for our readers.

Note: This page is an experimental space created by the reading team to discuss issues on how to improve the experience of reading Wikipedia. We plan to run this experiment for 4 weeks and encourage volunteer editors, staff members, and readers to discuss their ideas. Please note that this is NOT a wishlist.

You write that "One way to help readers learn is to enable them to interact with content and each other on Wikipedia". Is there evidence-based research that suggests that this is so? In other words,before you ask ''How'', should you not make clear ''Why''?

I also note with concern that interaction with content is packaged into the same sentence as interaction with other readers. There seems to be a trend to try to turn Wikipedia into a social networking site. This did not go down well when the Gather project was launched, as the community of content contributors pointed out that their current policy is that Wikipedia is not a social networking site. Would it not be a good idea to resolve this contradiction first?

"There seems to be a trend to try to turn Wikipedia into a social networking site."

I also note the broader trend to make our communities a completely hostile and anti-social world. Just saying.

Hi - thanks for your questions.

1. The "Why?". I think it is broadly understood that lectures and reading alone are not the ideal way for most human beings to learn. Some level of output from the student helps them learn. That is why students are assigned problem sets, homework, essays, exams, special projects, and group projects. I personally do not think that we need to provide research to show that an encyclopedia sitting on the digital shelf is not an ideal pedagogical tool (even if it came with a reading guide). I am pretty sure you are not making that argument (let me know if I'm wrong). However, whether or not specific interventions to foster interaction will help learning is debatable on a case-by-case basis! One reason why we are asking you and others to make suggestions so that we can identify and dig into those further.
2. Interacting with others. Yes, this is a common concern among some volunteers and I think I understand its roots. I am confused by why this keeps coming up since interactivity does not equal 'social network' or 'wasting time'. Not all interaction between users is tawdry or unproductive. Interacting with other users was relegated to "social network" sites. Now it simply is part of the piping of the internet. I think there are important ways that interaction between users can incentivize learning and contribution without devolving into a social networking site. For instance, in accordane with WikipediaIsNot volunteers have pages where they talk about who they are and of the top 4 contributors of all time, the 3 of them who are still active have extensive profiles. Wikipedia used to be a pioneer in interactivity--which is important, since knowledge is not static and to suggest it is static/fixed is dangerous and goes against our principles. But now most users do not even know they can edit it and the forums are closed off from discussion of the topic. Looking at Gather's RFC, one also sees that while there were concerns that this bordered on social networking, most of the negative feedback were around the other issues summarized here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gather/Gather_Summary_paper_-_January_2016 So to your point of addressing the social network concern, I expect this concern to continually crop up, but I do not know how to solve it. In my opinion this concern does not keep coming up because we are ignoring the WikipediaIsnot principles, but because there seems to be a disagreement about their application.

In this forum, it seems pretty obvious why people would have concerns about the wikis being treated like social media --- since we're being obliged to carry on this conversation using a chat facility, instead of the wiki-markup talk pages used for serious discussions.

You sure you understand what Social media is ?

Seriously, I de facto denounce anyone who starts discussions like this, that compare development by WMF as 'social media'. It is total and utter bull and shows that people have no serious interest in participating, or business in being part of, designing the software. It shows a lack of understanding of the diversity and complexity of the Internet that is unhealthy and immature for a website. The comparison to one specific company is even less mature and shows how completely obsessed these people are with making an oversimplification of software, just to push their own opinion.

It is appalling (as much as how badly WMF listens and learns from it's mistakes is appalling).

Thank you for sharing your views on the participants in this discussion. Perhaps when you have a moment you would share your healthy and mature views on the subject of the discussion, which is, how to best improve the reader experience, the extent to which increasing social interaction would promote that improvement, and whether such an increase aligns with currently accepted policies.

This seems to be a case of isolated demands for rigor; currently, most WMF initiatives are not based on external empirical research. (Nor are Wikipedia policies / content organization decisions, for that matter.) Whether that's something to be fixed or it simply reflects the lack or reliability of such research could be an interesting discussion; I suggest bringing that up at Talk:WMF product development process.

Concerns about fostering negative user-to-user interactions or changing the nature of Wikipedia or whatever can probably be more meaningfully discussed on the talk pages of the individual proposals.

The essay you link to suggests that selective requests for rigour constitutes a form of intellectual dishonesty. No doubt you did not intend that to apply to my question. I confine myself to noting that your argument appears to be that having failed in the past to base important decisions on empirical foundations somehow justifies a continuing failure to do so. That seems unsound -- I would merely ask whether you are satisfied that those decisions worked out well, or whether they might have gone better if there had been more investigation and critical enquiry beforehand.

I do hope that you are not attempting to advance the proposition that asking for clarity in communicating the reasons for action is anything other than welcome.

For info [https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk%3AMain_Page%2FWM_News&type=revision&diff=15482183&oldid=15474676 I ask to put a link on meta main page]

excellent. Thanks!

A significant fraction of the proposals is either unintelligible or out of scope (not about reader-facing features, or not about proposing features at all). These proposals do not serve a purpose here, as the Reading team is not going to work on them; they are cluttering up the list, taking mindshare from more useful ones, and waste the time of the reader and the conscientious proposal-writer (who wants to read through existing proposals first).

I propose creating an "archived proposals" subpage, linking to that from the main page, and linking to out-of-scope proposals from there. (Proposals could be of course moved back if the author finishes them/rewrites them/explains them better.)

By my reckoning, such proposals are:

• User Interaction Consultation/Extended and resumed information (incomplete)
• User Interaction Consultation/Interactive pages (needs more detail, not actionable)
• User_Interaction_Consultation/Searching (not in scope for Reading)
• User Interaction Consultation/Translated versions of pages on other idioms (incomplete)
• User Interaction Consultation/Wikidialog (not in scope for Reading).
• User Interaction Consultation/Wikidocumentaries (incomplete)
• User Interaction Consultation/get back to the exact match search method (not in scope for Reading)
• User Interaction Consultation/start proper maintenance of the really good existing stuff. (mostly not in scope for Reading; the part that is does not propose anything)

Any objections?

This is me being bold. I'm not in charge of the consultation or anything.

@Tgr (WMF), major part of the problem is that readers aren't yet aware of this page. I am working with comms in order to publicize the page outside our wikis, the problem is 75% of our social media channels are reachable via mobile, while adding a new proposal or discussing existing ones, isn't functional/friendly from mobile. So I am putting together a blogpost, with screenshots on how to figure things out for someone who isn't wiki friendly, and would get even more lost trying to find their way from their phone.

Initially the plan was to do that after two weeks from running the consultancy, we narrow down the ideas to those that fit in the scope, now that we are late with talking to the right audience, I believe we are likely to extend this. Makes sense?

Why wait two weeks, though? Out-of-scope ideas incur an extra cost on navigating the proposals without giving any benefit; and if the author is willing to work on improving the proposal, the sooner they are told they have to do so, the more time do they have.

(I'm a bit skeptical that people will research and type great proposals on their mobile phone; I fear that this consultation won't bring in much value because it focuses too much on breadth instead of depth. Of course criticising a collaborative process is always easier than running one...)

Waiting two weeks is a normal "call for action" invitation kind of approach. I am skeptical to the depth of ideas as a mobile contribution, but I did try to add a brief suggestion from my mobile as anonymous (the suggestion about rethink recent changes was me!), and it wasn't the best experience ever in terms of unfixed bugs, but at the end it was quite possible to briefly elaborate on what I suggested. I agree, this is breadth rather than depth, one lesson to move on with in the next experiment ;) thans Tgr (WMF)

Yep, I have objections.

Why do I again have the Feeling, that stuff should be swept under some carpet because it's not what the WMF wanted to hear? Start to listen to what the user say, not only if it is well aligned with your preoccupation.

And this is about user interaction, if you just want some very narrow Feedback, please create the pages in a meaningful way, not change the questioning afterwards. Whether this was initiated by any subdivision of the WMF or another is quite uninteresting, it's about user interaction, not only reader interaction. Organize it in a way that the users (ultimately those, who pay your income) a convenient with, you get paid, so you are expected to get it a bit uncomfortable.

You see the logic, I guess, right? This is about narrowing down the ideas, in order to focus, and get some proposals in action. "Cleaning up", here, doesn't mean getting rid of ideas, it is for pure organizational matter. Please Sänger, stop assuming that we are keen on hiding what people say :). This is not the point.

We could indeed have mentioned reader interaction, but we didn't want to ignore the part t about editor to reader interaction, and so we used the broad term user.

"you get paid, so you are expected to get it a bit uncomfortable." I am not sure what does that mean? In general people get paid because they do a job, and it has nothing to do with discomfort. Lets keep the conversation healthy, please please ;)

There are tons of recommendations by users the WMF and its paid staff ignored for years and years, why should we expect a sudden change?

The WMF and its staff even used ruthless power against the community just to let one piece of buggy beta-software (MV) run as opt-out instead of the recommended opt-in, and only started to listen to the community after the shit had hit the fan. And it looks like the next accident in waiting is already in the pipeline: Flow.

No, as long as I can't see prove of some real change in the behaviour of the WMF and its paid staff towards the legitimate higher authority Community I won't believe it. It was the pattern with the consultation about the MV: archive asap, to let it rot. It was the pattern with Lilas talk page: archive asap, to let it rot. Now here some stuff should as well be archived to let it rot.

I hear you, but I don't fully agree. In addition to what you said, we also have a recent pattern of disabling beta tools after a community RFC (Gather!). We have a pattern of asking communities how to move next with a beta feature and we have a pattern of keeping an open space here for editors and readers or anyone who wants to add suggestions. Don't you think this deserves some ..some good faith? :)

Archiving here, in any case, isn't about hiding. It could simply mean adding sections one for ideas that have high chances of getting implemented soon, and other ideas that need more discussion, as simple, as that.

An "archived proposals" subpage, as mentioned in the opening post, sounds like just business as usual.

If you first create a meaningful page with not only reader related interactions in the same (but better described) manner as this one, and move this threads over there, I could agree. This here I can't take serious, sorry, it's just hiding away unwanted stuff.

It's nothing about you as a person, I trust you, but about the WMF as an institution. Too many disappointments recently to take any propagated community input serious (MV/Superputsch, Flow, ditching of DJ, appointing Arnnon, hypersecrecy about KE to name a few). Besides Gather you as well ditched the useless UserProfiles after just a year discussion and two years implementation before as a pet project without any community input, as usual).

I agree "user interaction" is a bit misleading (the FAQ makes the scope clear, but I guess not everyone reads it). If this consultation is sort of unpublished at this point, maybe it can still be renamed to Reader Interaction Consultation? Mostly to help future mediawikipedians who look for content via the search box or categories, and have to rely on the page name.

Also, I would put more of the FAQ content on the main page. And the big gray "How can we make Wikipedia more interactive for readers?" is quite clear but somehow avoids the eye (I at least managed to miss it when I first read the page); maybe that color scheme is not optimal. (Or maybe I should just pay more attention.)

Anyhow this has no bearing on whether non-actionable proposals should be moved to a different space. The goal of this consultation (I would hope) is not to provide a space where participants can vent about whatever they dislike, but to make sure the features worked on by the Reading team are impactful and well-aligned with the mission and acceptable to the community. Discussing editing tools here only diverts energies from that.

@Tgr (WMF) I agree with you that we should make it clearer. We shrunk the background and moved it off the main page to keep it simple, but we do lose a lot of context that way. It is a hard balancing act between overwhelming and providing enough context to be helpful. As a longtime community member, valued member of the reading team, and 'user of the page' I trust you to add/move additional context.

With regard to breadth v. depth: It seems to me that greater specificity is only possible at a later stage in the software development process. In other words, if we specify a very specific problem or very specific solution, we can ask "what color should the button be". The feedback we were responding to in trying this consultation was that we should try and hear from community members earlier in the dev process, at the point where we are asking "What problems should we solve and what kinds of features should we solve them with". This seems, by nature, to be broad... Do you have any thoughts on getting more specific without presuming too much?

re: removing clutter--rather than remove ideas, I think that at some point we should remove the sub-page template and replace it with manual categories (i.e. reading features, editor features, ....) and visually promote the ones that are most pertinent.

I was already collecting some personal ideas here: Wikimedia User Interface/Concepts

Those are very interesting ideas! Do you plan to copy them over?