Community Wishlist Survey
The Community Wishlist is now open
The new Community Wishlist (formerly Community Wishlist Survey) is now open for new wish submissions. We have an update on what to expect, and how to submit a wish. Read more. |
The Community Wishlist Survey was an annual survey run by the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team, a team focused on meeting the needs of active Wikimedia editors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools.
In November, 2015, Community Tech conducted the first cross-project Community Wishlist Survey, to help identify the features and fixes that are most important to Wikimedia editors. We invited contributors from all Wikimedia projects to submit proposals for the Community Tech team. After two weeks of collecting proposals, we asked them to vote on the proposals they were most interested in. The process was been repeated every year until 2024.
In July 2024, following a community consultation, the Community Tech team launched a new, continuous Community Wishlist.
List of yearly editions
- Community Wishlist Survey 2015
- Community Wishlist Survey 2016
- Community Wishlist Survey 2017
- Community Wishlist Survey 2019 (see also #What happened to the 2018 wishlist survey?)
- Community Wishlist Survey 2020
- Community Wishlist Survey 2021
- Community Wishlist Survey 2022
- Community Wishlist Survey 2023
Current selected projects
To complete as many wishes as possible, Community Tech attends to the voted wishes with a prioritisation framework in mind. The framework guides how we come about the current selected projects.
| Projects | Project status |
|---|---|
| Multiblocks |
 In development |
| Generate Audio for IPA | Handed over
|
| Edit-Recovery Feature |
In development |
| Better diff handling of paragraph splits |
 Done |
| Sharing QR codes |
Done |
| Autosuggest linking Wikidata item after creating an article |
In development |
| Audio links that play on click |
Done |
| Enable live preview by default |
Done |
| Extend "Who Wrote That?" tool to more wikis |
Done |
Updates
This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum. |
July 1, 2024: The Community Wishlist is re-opening Jul 15, 2024. Here’s what to expect, and how to prepare.
The Community Wishlist helps communities surface technical and user experience problems and opportunities, so that the Wikimedia Foundation and communities can prioritize and solve these issues together.
Like in years past, contributors can surface problems and opportunities by submitting “Wishes” year-round. The Foundation will identify patterns between wishes and propose “Focus Areas” of wishes that share a collective problem, and contributors are encouraged to comment and vote on Focus Areas to highlight the areas in need of prioritization. Then, the Foundation, affiliates, and volunteer developers can adopt Focus Areas and collaborate with contributors to solve these problems. Read more.
April 24, 2024: Edit Recovery updates
Edit Recovery is now available as an opt-in feature on all wikis. Earlier in February, we deployed the feature to French, English and Arabic Wikipedia for testing and bug fixes. Read more from the linked project page.
April 4, 2024: Potential modifications coming to the Community Wishlist Survey
In January, Community Tech shared some early decisions about changes coming to the Community Wishlist Survey, and soon after, we invited you to participate in ongoing conversations (please join if you haven't yet) about what a new Wishlist survey should look like. Our latest update covers potential modifications coming to the Wishlist. Please read about these changes.
March 1, 2024: Multiblocks design updates
Over the last few weeks we’ve been designing the user experience and user interface while talking to some admins about Multiblocks. We have some design decisions we want to implement which we have shared with screenshots.
January 4, 2024: Shaping the Future of the Community Wishlist Survey
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey.
In summary, we would like to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resourcing, and communication around wishes. Until the new system is established, the Community Tech team will prioritize work from the recently audited backlog of wishes rather than run the survey in February 2024. We are also looking to involve more volunteer developers in the wishlist process, beginning with the first-ever community Wishathon in March 2024.
Please read the announcement in detail either on the Diff blog or MetaWiki, and give your feedback.
October 26, 2023: Edit-Recovery is now available for testing in Beta
Hello community, we have some updates. Edit-Recovery wish (formerly known as Auto-save feature) is now available on Beta Cluster, and you are invited to test it.
Start editing any page on any Beta site, for example simple.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org, but don't publish your change. Wait 5 seconds and close the tab. Reopen the tab. Your edit should be recovered!
We are working to make the feature more visible with an element like a toast notification when restoring edit data, with the option of discarding the recovered data.
Questions and feedback are welcome.
October 17, 2023: An Update on Multiblocks Wish
We have selected Multiblocks the #14 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023. The objective of the wish was to introduce layering blocks (a.k.a multiblocks). We have created a project page to share information about our approach. Please visit and give feedback.
September 25, 2023: It's Time for Wishathon!
The quarterly online hackathon known as Wishathon, organized by Community Tech to help fulfil more wishes from The Community Wishlist Survey, starts from Monday, 25 September 2023, to Friday, 29 September 2023.
Wishathon engages other Wikimedia Foundation staff to help fulfill more wishes, and also foster cross-team and cross-departmental collaboration.
August 8, 2023: Wish Updates
Hello everyone, there have been a few changes since our last major update in April 2023.
Displaying categories on mobile
We hoped to implement Display the categories on the mobile site for everyone – after completing the Better Diffs wish. Unfortunately, our key partner, the Web team, will not tackle this wish now. The importance of categories to readers must be researched further to prioritize this wish instead of other pending wishes. But wish fulfilment is often on a rolling basis, so your feedback is welcome. In the meantime, we are working on the Auto-save feature, the #8 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023, which has been renamed to the Edit-Recovery Feature to reflect more accurately what the feature is.
Who Wrote That
Secondly, we have responded to the “Extend ‘Who Wrote That?’ tool to more wikis” and currently, Who Wrote That? (WWT) is now available on 8 more Wikipedias – French, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Indonesian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Polish. This brings the total number of wikis with WWT up from five to 13.
June 22, 2023: Next-steps for Auto-save feature
The CommTech team is reviewing any investigations, discussions, patches that have happened around the Auto-save feature wish to determine what is next.
Please read about the project, and help answer some questions including how long we need to save the data for the auto-save functionality and what we should store in the database to be able to make autosave functionality work.
June 22, 2023: IPA transition to Language Team
Community Tech will hand over the IPA project to the Language Team this June. This decision is due to the Language team's expertise in localization, and their focus to create a suite of open language-supporting services such as the MinT machine translation service among other things.
April 27, 2023: Continuing on 2022 and starting the 2023 Wishlist
Dear Community Wishlist Survey Participants,
We would like to thank you for your participation in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. The survey is a crucial element in helping us prioritize the development of new features and improvements to make Wikimedia projects better for everyone.
Starting work on 2023
We are pleased to announce that the Community Tech team has identified the "Display the categories on the mobile site for everyone" wish as the priority for the team to work on in the coming months after we complete the work on Better Diffs for paragraph splits. This was also Wish #18 on the 2022 Wishlist. This decision was based on the wish's technical and design feasibility, as well as its potential impact in improving the user experience of the mobile site for all users.
We understand the importance of this feature for the community, and we are excited to work on it. We will keep you updated on the progress we make and will provide more information on the timeline for implementation as soon as possible. In addition, we’ve begun investigating how to Extend “Who Wrote That?” tool to more wikis, the seventh #7 most popular wish from 2023 and hope to make great progress on that work in the coming months. We anticipate launching Who Wrote That? tool to French Wikipedia in the coming days, with several other languages to follow in the coming weeks.
Dark Mode
We want to provide an update on the "Dark Mode" wish that was voted for in the survey. We are excited to inform you that the Web team has taken on this wish and plans to work diligently on its development. However, due to technical constraints and design feasibility, the Web team will be releasing the first version of the "Dark Mode" feature in Beta. We understand the importance of accessibility and inclusivity, and we are committed to ensuring that this feature meets the needs of all users. Additionally, there are many templates that need to be adjusted, and volunteers need to be alerted to modify before the "Dark Mode" feature can be fully released. The Web team will work on documenting these issues, and we appreciate your patience in this process. We encourage you to subscribe to the Web team's newsletter to follow the updates about this project.
I would also like to take a moment to thank the volunteers who took the time to collaborate with me in good faith during my tenure here and share that I am departing the Wikimedia Foundation and this team. Thank you to those of you who took the time to participate in proposals, problem solving with us, and to those of you who volunteered and tackled technical pieces of granting wishes – I will carry that inspiration with me for the rest of my career.
In my absence, a Product Trio will absorb my responsibilities so you can expect to reach out to the Engineering Manager KSiebert (WMF), Tech Lead DMaza (WMF), and Principal designer JSengupta-WMF as a united Product Trio after my departure in early May. You can expect to communicate with the team in the same way as before, the Talk pages for Projects, Updates, and the Team are the best way to reach the team. We collectively would also like to thank you once again for your participation in the Community Wishlist Survey. Your input helps us prioritize and improve Wikimedia projects, and we look forward to your continued engagement in the future.
Sincerely,
NRodriguez (WMF) and the rest of The Community Tech Team
March 13, 2023: Better diff handling of paragraph splits update
The team has continued work on this wish on both the engineering and design side and we wanted to share the updates with you.
Thank you to all of you who took the time to engage with us and provide feedback on the talk page. We read through all of the feedback and did an aggregate analysis on the points made. We then combined your feedback on those proposed designs, as well as unmoderated user research, and we've finalized the proposed designs to go into engineering for the improvements regarding the wish changes.
Please see the designs in this update which include:
- Switching between diff modes via dropdown
- Improving the accessibility of inline diffs with legends and tooltips for desktop
- Improving the display of a change that introduced a new line or paragraph
- Improving the display of a change that deleted an existing line or paragraph
In addition, a demo of the changes for the underlying comparison engine has been created.
Before you try out the demo to give us feedback, please note:
- It's a work in progress, our QA engineers are currently using a list of comprehensive diffs to make sure the changes are consistent with the current version of the two-column diff experience or an improvement on the UI.
- The demo page does NOT include all final UI changes but can give testers a good sense of how the completed two-column diff experience will end up looking.
- To use the demo, paste the same text into the two boxes and modify the text in the right box. The diff under it will show what changed.
We'd love to hear your feedback on our talk page!
Next Steps
- Accessibility of Design Colors: Our designer is working closely with our Design Systems team to determine the accessibility of the designs. We anticipate having to change the shade of them to a slight degree to make it more accessible but the colors will remain similar to the blue and yellow currently displayed on two-column and inline diffs.
- Release plan: We are working out a release plan and a timeline of next steps and will be including this in our next project updates! Releasing changes to the underlying engine on the diff follows a different process than traditional releases in Mediawiki software so we will be sure to update you with steps and details next time.
We also want to include big thank you in this update to a non-Community Tech staff member, Tim Starling, who graciously stepped up to help us with the underlying changes in the C++ engine of wikidiff2. We are always happy to receive support fulfilling wishes from other members at the Foundation that have the expertise necessary to fulfill a wish even if they are not in the Community Tech team.
We're looking forward to hearing from all of you!
Open Questions from first update: We want to hear from you!
- Are you interested in conducing user research on the new proposed interface to diff paragraph splits? If so, will you please post that you're interested in the Talk Page?
- What other pain points manifest themselves when you view the diff?
- How might we address the root pain points that address the confusion around paragraph splits?
- How does the use of color indicate which content is added, removed, or stayed the same?
March 7, 2023: Community Wishlist Survey 2023 results published
The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. We have published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
Past editions and projects
Summary of results by edition
This table includes both accepted and rejected proposals.
| Category | Proposals in top 10 | Most votes for a proposal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2019 | Total | ||
| Admins and stewards | – | 1 | 0 | – | 1 | 86 |
| Admins and patrollers | – | – | – | 1 | 1 | 157 |
| Anti-harassment | – | – | 0 | 1 | 1 | 118 |
| Bots and gadgets | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 7 | 111 |
| Categories | 1 | – | – | 0 | 1 | 84 |
| Citations | – | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 108 |
| Editing | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 7 | 127 |
| Maps | – | – | – | 0 | 0 | 59 |
| Miscellaneous | 1 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 154 |
| Mobile and apps | – | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 55 |
| Moderation tools Moderation and admin tools (2015) |
0 | 1 | – | – | 1 | 84 |
| Multimedia and Commons combined in 2017 |
1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 94 |
| Notifications | 0 | – | – | 1 | 1 | 101 |
| Programs and events | – | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 111 |
| Reading | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 130 |
| Search | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 110 |
| Special pages | 0 | – | – | – | 0 | 22 |
| Talk pages | 1 | 0 | 0 | – | 1 | 66 |
| Templates | 1 | – | – | – | 1 | 87 |
| Watchlists | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 104 |
| Wikidata | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 68 |
| WikiProjects | – | 1 | – | – | 1 | 72 |
| Wikisource | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 113 |
| Wikiversity | 0 | – | – | – | 0 | 4 |
| Wiktionary | – | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 40 |