Grants:IEG/Wiki Image Ballot (WIB)

status: withdrawn

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eligibility and selection criteria

project:

Wiki Image Ballot (WIB)

project contact:

Rillke

participants:

join this idea!

grantees: Rillke

summary:

WIB aims to provide software written in JavaScript capable of handling the most common voting systems for large on-wiki image ballots, so the ballot turns into a pleasure for both for the voters and for the committee members. Presentation of the tool WIB will build on top of

engagement target:

Commons, Meta, all

strategic priority:

Increasing Participation

total amount requested:

200 EUR

2013 round 2

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

What do the Picture of the Year contest and a logo election have in common?

Well, there is a huge set of images that need to be voted on. Since publishing one's opinion about an image is less sensitive than over a person, on-wiki voting is used for that, which is also more transparent than a secret ballot.

However, this set of images must be managed, votes must be counted, voters must be able to vote without a lot of hassle like edit conflicts or multiple clicks and the ballot must be fair.

What is your solution?

A tool is required capable of handling all these aspects, Wiki Image Ballot (WIB).

Project goals

The goal is creating a JavaScript-driven software that is capable of supporting larger image ballots to relieve work from the community and providing a stable infrastructure for image-voting and improving the quality of existing structures by the most common voting systems for large on-wiki image ballots.

Draft

A working draft is EnhancedPOTY.js. It powered the Picture of the Year contests for 2 years now - with 130,000 votes in 2013 but has no intuitive setup-wizard and support for other systems than a simple majority vote is lacking. I was asked to provide these but this would break spare-time quota.

Features

General

Voting systems supported
- Schulze method (ranking mechanism by dragging and dropping & favourite box)
- Instant Runoff System
- Simple majority vote
Possibility to limit vote count per user
Multilingualism, as less text as possible, instead use of intuitive symbols
Flex-API. Modularity for the possibility of overwriting everything by custom functionality
Documentation.

For the voter

Eligibility check (cross-wiki, SUL) and saving the result in the browser's storage
- For a predefined time-span (both saving as well as contribution counting)
- Including or excluding deleted contributions
- Registration date check
Dynamic resizing of thumbnail images and saving the last used size in the browser's storage, reapplying this when the user re-visits the vote page
Automatic language detection for new users
A customizable welcome-screen for new voters
Randomization of the images in the gallery using the username as a seed (so the sorting of the candidates remains constant between visits of the same user)
Button to invoke the Slideshow
Control center showing the votes casted and allowing the user to manage these votes.
Adding or removing votes with just one click

Administration

Ballot-SetUp-Wizard advising about the different voting systems and automatically configuring other features of MediaWiki required to make the vote secure against manipulation including setting up AbuseFilters or TitleBlacklist entries, creating voting pages and providing information about all the matters that are important for an image vote.
Eligibility verification
Vote counting and table creation
Statistics-tool. E.g. ( votecount = f(time) ) for analysing which kind of advertising is most efficient.
Patrol script. The "bad side" of on-wiki voting is the spam of the recent-changes-log with unpatrolled edits.

Design specification

Written entirely in JavaScript and CSS.
Browser support: Ensure that those browsers with which 98% of the requests are made and that have JavaScript enabled are supported for the voter part.
Using as much as possible existing MediaWiki JavaScript core functionality including jQuery.
Using the MediaWiki API.
Using third-party JavaScript-libraries where MediaWiki does not provide appropriate ones.

Implementation

One maintained version, temporarily as Gadget at Wikimedia Commons with instructions how to make it available at other sites.
- This may be turned into a global gadget, once Gadgets 2.0 are completed.
One version having all dependencies compiled-into that can be copied and pasted.

Project plan

Scope

Activities

Evaluating feedback and data I collected over the last 2 years as well as coding WIB will be my main activity. A standalone JavaScript as well as a gadget or gadget-like script that I will further maintain will be produced. Since Commons is a media host, it is likely appropriate installing it as a gadget there so we can take the RL-advantages. Unless required (e.g. more contributors are interested in joining this project), I do not intend moving the code to GitHub or another social coding site for efficiency.

Tools, technologies, and techniques

C.f. #Design specification. All code I write will validate through JSHint/CSS-validator with sensible options.

I will further educate myself on how to make good user interfaces. Almost everything I need is available freely on the web or the library I do have free access to.

Budget:

Total amount requested

EUR 200

Budget breakdown

Food, drink and a nice, calm place for efficient coding for 8 weeks 3 hrs/day: EUR 200

Intended impact

Target audience

Administrators and voters of large scale image ballots will benefit from WIB.

Community engagement

Fit with strategy

By taking away workload from administrators of large scale image ballots, they can care for more important tasks like answering voter's questions or further improving the quality of the vote. Providing a frustration-free and well-working voting environment will enhance participation giving all users the felling their vote is welcome and important.

Since Extension:VisualEditor and Extension:UploadWizard obviously do somehow fit in the Wikimedia Foundation's "strategy", this tool will also. We are experiencing an ever growing number of people who are not able to contribute with the basics of wiki-markup; instead they wish nice user interfaces where they can just press some buttons. WIB will provide some nice buttons to the end-users who do not have to care about anything then, except making their choice if they are eligible for voting, which is also checked by WIB. And since WIB will be less complex than VE, it will be also less error-prone.

Sustainability

Image ballots always have been and will be held, whether it is POTY or a new logo election. Thus, it will be certainly further used and maintained. I personally intend doing so for the time I can.

Measures of success

Need target-setting tips? The goals are already very specific, so by their implementation one big step towards the goal is already achieved. Step 2 is listening and evaluating the voter's feedback in POTY 2013 (which will be held in January 2014). Whether the project was successful is then determined by the use of the end-product on large wiki image ballots.

Participant(s)

Rillke: I am administrotor at Wikimedia Commons and authored the script, I would like to use as a base for WIB. I wrote the gallery-tool and are maintaining some more JavaScripts at Wikimedia Commons. I lobbied for better multimedia-functionality, reported over 100 bugs and feature requests and submitted multiple small patches that got merged, most of them for the multimedia-tool Upload Wizard. I do come here because this task would exhaust my spare time that I would like to spend with the Wikimedia Commons community.

Discussion

Community Notification:

Please paste a link to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions, here.

I will do so ASAP. -- Rillke (talk) 21:31, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Endorsements:

Do you think this project should be selected for an Individual Engagement Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

I should note first that the Wikivoyage logo contest of 2013 could not have happened without the long hours that User:Rillke put in making it work. We will have other such events in the future, and there are many events that do or could involve large-scale voting on images. Having a tool such as this would be extremely valuable for those who hope to engage community in fair selections of this sort and seems potentially quite useful in helping with photographer recruitment, as competition encourages participation. :) For instance, if used in conjunction with Wiki Loves Monument type events, might it encourage those who upload for those contests to begin to engage with the community beyond their own entry if they are invited to take part in peer-review of this sort? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:17, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
Community member: add your name and rationale here.

I withdraw this proposal for 3 reasons: POTY can run without developing WIB and WLM prefers using Facebook for their voting; there is no community remaining that I could notify (specifically/targeted). It would be only a tool for rare cases. If someone discovers this proposal and would find it useful, just let me know at the talk page. Thanks for all the comments. -- Rillke (talk) 18:40, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Rillke, sorry to see this one withdraw as well. Perhaps in a future round you'll consider suggesting it again? WIB is a really impressive tool, thanks for all your work to develop it! Best wishes, Siko (WMF) (talk) 16:28, 28 October 2013 (UTC)