Wikimedia Discovery/Checkin meeting minutes/2015-08-24

Topics from last week

Survey outcomes
- They were already presented
  - Common complaint was from people entering query sentences rather than keywords
  - Should we look more into throwing away filler words in searches (e.g. “the”)?
- Moiz would like to do more mobile surveys
- Wes proposes putting a survey for the portal
Update on Q2 Goals
- Not much email conversation happened while Dan was out
- We should increase publicity about search (discovery) mailing list
We are officially becoming the “Discovery” department

How did Stas’s presentation go?
- Went well. People asked questions, both on WD and WDQS
- Didn’t widely distribute “production” URL since it is not yet ready for full public use
- Will work on getting slides up (linked from the Discovery team page)
Posted our ops job req on Friday. If you know someone, let them know.
Initial results from slop test
- Going from 0 to 1 increases zero results, and going to 2 increases even more
- This is a “Theoretically impossible result”
Russia is starting to block wikipedia
Yuri implemented static maps, which can easily be embedded in wiki articles
“Social” event this afternoon in SF.
- Intended to encourage cross-team communication.

(How are we doing; any current or imminent work to improve them)

“Phrase slop” test status
- Initial results above
Are we ready for the next test?
- No. We don’t expect to have a test Thursday that is likely to greatly improve the ZRR
With just over a month left in the quarter, how are we looking for
- Reducing Zero results
  - “Yellow” status, indicating we might not hit this quarterly goal
  - We will continue our tests; keep trying to hit the goal
  - We should start having conversations about shifting or framing the goal (what we learned)
- Defining Satisfaction metric
  - First version didn’t work out. New version is in the works.
- Measuring API usage
  - Completed.

Are we blocked?
- No
Are we blocking? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/
- VE Bug caused by search results. (was: Patch pending, waiting for Brad’s return)
Anything from SoS that we should be aware of?