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Community Wishlist Survey 2015

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The 2015 Community Wishlist Survey is over, and now the Community Tech team's work begins on the top 10 features and fixes.

In November and December 2015, we invited contributors from all Wikimedia projects to submit proposals for what they would like the Community Tech team to work on for the purpose of improving or producing curation and moderation tools for active contributors.

634 people participated in the survey, where they proposed, discussed and voted on 107 ideas. There was a two-week period in November to submit and endorse proposals, followed by two weeks of voting. The top 10 proposals with the most support votes now become the Community Tech team's backlog of projects to evaluate and address.

The top 10 wishes

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  1. Migrate dead external links to archives (111 support votes) -- notes
  2. Improved diff compare screen (104) -- notes
  3. Central global repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules (87) -- notes
  4. Cross-wiki watchlist (84) -- notes
  5. Numerical sorting in categories (84) -- notes
  6. Allow categories in Commons in all languages (78) -- notes
  7. Pageview Stats tool (70) -- notes
  8. Global cross-wiki user talk page (66) -- notes
  9. Improve the plagiarism detection bot (63) -- notes
  10. Add a user watchlist (62) -- notes

You can see the whole list with links to all the proposals and Phabricator tickets on this page: Community Wishlist Survey 2015/Results.

So what happens now?

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The next step is for the team to do a preliminary assessment on the top 10, and start figuring out what's involved. We need to have a clear definition of the problem and proposed solution, and begin to understand the technical, design and community challenges for each one. We'll be talking about the preliminary assessment at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in the first week of January, and then publish a progress report after the summit.

Some wishes in the top 10 seem relatively straightforward, and we'll be able to dig in and start working on them in the new year. Some wishes are going to need a lot of investigation and discussion with other developers, product teams, designers and community members. There may be some that are just too big or too hard to do at all.

Our analysis will look at the following factors:

  • Support: Overall support for the proposal, including the discussions on the survey page. This will take the neutral and oppose votes into account. Some of these ideas also have a rich history of discussions on-wiki and in bug tickets. For some wishes, we'll need more community discussion to help define the problem and agree on proposed solutions.
  • Feasibility: How much work is involved, including existing blockers and dependencies.
  • Impact: Evaluating how many projects and contributors will benefit, whether it's a long-lasting solution or a temporary fix, and the improvement in contributors' overall productivity and happiness.
  • Risk: Potential drawbacks, conflicts with other developers' work, and negative effects on any group of contributors.

Our plan for 2016 is to complete as many of the top 10 wishes as we can. For the wishes in the top 10 that we can't complete, we're responsible for investigating them fully and reporting back on the analysis.

So there's going to be a series of checkpoints through the year, where we'll present the current status of the top 10 wishes. The first will be at the Wikimedia Developer Summit in the first week of January. We're planning to talk about the preliminary assessment there, and then share it more widely.

If you're eager to follow the whole process as we go along, we'll be documenting and keeping notes in two places:

What about the other 97 proposals?

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There were a lot of good and important proposals that didn't happen to get quite as many support votes, and I'm sure everybody has at least one that they were rooting for. Again, the whole list is here: Community Wishlist Survey 2015/Results.

We're going to talk with the other Wikimedia product teams, to see if they can take on some of the ideas the the community has expressed interest in. We're also going to work with the Developer Relations team to see if some of these could be taken on by volunteer developers.

It's also possible that Community Tech could take on a small-scale, well-defined proposal below the top 10, if it doesn't interfere with our commitments to the top 10 wishes.

So there's lots of work to be done, and hooray, we have a whole year to do it. If this process turns out to be a success, then we plan to do another survey at the end of 2016, to give more people a chance to participate, and bring more great ideas.

For everybody who proposed, endorsed, discussed, debated and voted in the survey, as well as everyone who said nice things to us recently: thank you very much for coming out and supporting live feature development. We're excited about the work ahead of us.

We'd also like to thank Wikimedia Deutschland's Technischer Communitybedarf team -- they came up with this whole survey process, and they've been working successfully on lots of community wishes since their first survey in 2013.

You can watch Community Tech/News for further Community Tech announcements!

Archives

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You can see all of the survey proposals and discussions on the following pages:

Closed proposals

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Closed proposals have been moved to the Community Wishlist Survey 2015/Archive page.

See also

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