Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Development:New Reporting Portal

Information may be incomplete and/or change as the project progresses and will be taken into consideration.

Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and Wikimedia User Groups have a requirement to report certain information (such as grant reports, annual activities report, financial reports etc) every year to meet their affiliate agreement and maintain recognition as a Wikimedia affiliate. These reports are drafted and shared in a variety of wikis and ways and must be reported each year by posting the new reports each year to the meta Reports page and announcing their new report on the wikimedia-l list.

As the number of elements in the table has grown to index more than just these report details, we are working to create a new SOLUTION to help organize and archive reporting as well as ensure better monitoring of affiliate development by adding reporting portals (via forms and buttons) to help affiliates communicate their reporting to the Affiliations committee and monitoring staffs in terms of maintaining, or growing, core capacities related to the affiliates models. These capacities include basic information such as Membership Size, Budgets, Shared Governance & Key Contacts, Programs & Events, and Partnerships etc.

In addition to providing better structure to reporting announcements, to ease the practice of submitting reports, a new reporting form is being created to input this information. Moving from a process of manual mark-up (wikitable) to a Lua tables (on-wiki database) and linking to the chapter report page, home wiki, or elsewhere to consistently document report submission metadata overtime and designing the reports page to call that data directly. Importantly, not all data fields will be required, but available to give options to affiliates in what they wish to track and report at different reporting times.

The new form and related SOLUTION will make sure that report links are updated on the reports page and available for review as well as querying of the report metadata can be done easily. The successful use of this forms will create a need for a fully functioning portal to record financial and activity reports for the user groups and chapters.


Audience

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The audiences for the new form workflow include:

  • Reporters
    • User Groups
    • Chapters
    • Thematic Organizations
    • Allied Organizations
  • Monitors
    • AffCom Liaisons
    • Affiliations Committee
    • Grants Officers
  • The Public and Community Members

People in these organizations who are responsible for filing reports such that they are available on the reports page and updated with the latest content.

Statistics of Inconsistencies

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Only 23% (9 out of 39 chapters and thematic organizations) file their reports as a subpage on the Chapters page. The reports are filed on independent pages and linked to the report page or the chapters page. About 33% (13 out of 39 chapters and thematic organizations) have linked the reports on the chapters page. This location of reports is very inconsistent and does not guarantee if the report is adequately archived for reference. Because of this, many affiliates have incomplete records on their own report lists and pages which are missing different years of reporting due to this inconsistent structuring.

Task Workflow

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The old workflow of creating and filing a report is shown as follows:

 

The steps for the current workflow to file a report include:

  1. Creating a report on the meta Wikimedia website or outside of meta (wiki page),
  2. Once this is created and online, update the Reports page manually by coding in the updated link for the new report submitted

This causes the following issues:

  1. Reports not stored in the same format and space every time
  2. Updated reports not linked anywhere properly causing the report page to be lost
  3. Report page links may be old if not updated manually every time

The new workflow will allow the users to report in a consistent way and also collect the required information on yearly basis that needs to be filed by a Wikimedia entity and the steps are listed below;

  1. Open the WAD Portal page on Meta-Wiki;
  2. Click on a button corresponding to the information you want to submit (for example; Organizational information);
  3. Fill in the form with the necessary data;
  4. Click on submit at the top right corner of the OOUI dialog.

After doing these, the information goes to a Lua table and will be reflected on the Reports page UI.

Below are a list of useful links and resources related to the project;

System directory tree

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WADP landing wiki page & other related pages

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CSS for styling the layout of the forms

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JavaScripts to render forms and save data

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Lua tables to record data for future use

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Lua script for doing the backend logic of the WADP portal

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Templates for information surfacing/rendering

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WADP translatable strings

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Machine readable list (MRL) of affiliates

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Research Prompts

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The following questions helped us guide our choice of solution:

  • Does the solution scale over time and volume?
  • To what extent does the solution increase or decrease reporter burden?
  • To what extent does the solution satisfy each of the following criteria:
    • Allows at least semi-automated inclusion to the reports page?
    • Allows at least semi-automated inclusion to affiliates record-keeping page(s)
    • Allows query of reporting status to highlight those who are due for reporting
    • Auto-updates to the most recent on the reports page
  • To what extent does solution increase data exposure beyond community use?
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