Topic on Talk:Talk pages consultation 2019/Individual feedback

@Nicereddy,

Since you said that you were interested in StructuredDiscussions, I thought I'd move this here. No need to sign, and there's a handy box for adding your reply to this post. ;-)

We did notify everyone with a big banner. After my experience with VisualEditor in 2013, I am not sure that "a big banner" actually works well (and I'd love to know what other people think about that). Back then, I personally posted messages to more than 100 pages, plus banners ran for weeks, and it was discussed on every Village pump and every other central page – and I still had people tell me that they'd never heard anything about it. Some of that may be individual prefs settings (like setting your language to en-GB), but I think a bigger problem is what we call "banner blindness". After a while, you just ignore all those banners. Or maybe you read them, but there's so much going on that you forget afterwards.

If you're curious, the first banner for this consultation ran for a week in multiple languages. The CentralNotice banner brought people to the main announcement, which had links to the list of local pages and links to the main page.

I decided that this might have been too complicated, so on Tuesday, they set up a second banner for me, which brought people directly to this page and ran for 24 hours and only in English (or perhaps there was a French version as well, although that should have pointed to the French Wikipedia's local page, because this page wasn't translated; I didn't set it up).

The consultation has also been announced at in-person events such as EMWCon Spring 2019, and I believe that every m:Affiliate group received at least one notice, so they could invite their members and talk about their group's needs. I've personally e-mailed a handful of user groups that deal with edit-a-thons, and it was posted to nearly all of the Village pumps and multiple mailing lists. I've been told that it's been mentioned on Facebook repeatedly, and on Twitter, for those who follow their communities there. But a way to actually reach everyone – that's hard. I'm always taking notes on how to improve that aspect, so if you've got ideas (today, next week, next year – seriously), please let me know.

@Whatamidoing (WMF) This is a much nicer format for discussion :D Unfortunately it seems like you've made pretty every effort to get the word out, so I don't have much of an idea here. Maybe get every participant of past discussions around this topic and then post a message on their talk page? Though that'd bias toward people who are already involved in the discussions.

I wish I had better suggestions than that, thank you for reaching out and for all your work on this project!

It eliminates nearly all edit conflicts as well. It's by no means perfect in its current state, but there are some advantages. One of them is that if this page (or even just this one thread) is on your watchlist, you'll get an Echo notification about my reply, no matter which wiki you're on.

The next phase of this consultation is to bring people back to talk about tradeoffs (e.g., do you want auto-signing enough to put up with it sometimes signing the wrong thing?), so I'll have another opportunity to try out contact methods. Maybe I'll try pinging lots of people.

Running a banner for week on the high-traffic Wikipedias would reach a lot of eyeballs, but it's still only a subset (I didn't see the first one, but my attendance on WP is very patchy). I understand you have timelines and perhaps can't promote something for a full month, plus there's the rule of diminishing returns for extended times.

Yes, there is "banner blindness", but for me the phase 2 banner was more a case of "maybe interesting, I should look into that sometime". Even after a click-though, the reader needs to be motivated to take action. It's a challenge to find time in an often-busy life, especially when there's sooo much material to read through (not just the primary info but the talk).

Work's underway on the report from Phase 2, so I get to think about this all over again. This time, I want people to come back to read the Phase 2 report, and also to put the (soon-to-be-created) project pages on their watchlists. Ideas for how to accomplish that goal will be gratefully received.