Hi everyone! Thank you all so much for participating in this discussion. We've learned a huge amount, and made some progress and decisions on this project that I'll summarize here. I hope some of you can review the materials I link to and react with any questions, concerns, or ideas in this thread.
- Summary of notes: we summarized the notes from the discussions on this page and on other local-language wikis. I hope this is an accurate summary and not overly optimistic. Please let me know if you think otherwise, and I will correct it.
- User tests: we completed 15 user tests with our prototype and put the notes and full results here.
- Statistics: we posted statistics on the coverage of the algorithm (how many images it can recommend) and statistics on non-English metadata. These help us understand the viability and value of this project.
Taking all of our learnings together, our team is optimistic that a good "add a link" feature can be built. But you have helped us see how many potential pitfalls there will be. Therefore, here's what we're doing: the Android team is going to build an MVP (minimum viable product) of this workflow just for the Wikipedia Android app. It won't save any edits -- it will only record the judgments of the user as the try to do image matches. Users will know that their effort will only be used for us to learn, to improve the algorithm, and to improve our design. This is a very low-risk way to generate important data, and will be something that we all (including community members) can play with as we continue to figure out this idea. The Growth team won't be building anything until we learn from this simple Android version over the next couple months.
I'll continue to post updates as this progresses.