User:Sj/Suggestions

What would you like to see from the Wikimedia Foundation or the Board of Trustees? From community representatives in particular? Feel free to leave suggestions, comments, or criticisms here. +sj+

• For general suggestions beyond Foundation and the Board, see Suggestions and proposals
• For ideas about what the Projects could become, please contribute to the project suggestions.

Communication

Local discussions

Not all conversations are meta-related; having some planning or other chats here on en would be useful.

Software and tools

Technical roadmaps

The WMF takes on major projects and editors are left in the dark about when they will be finished. This seems to be better with core MW features than with monolithing projects like sul and flagged revs. Somewhere between meta, mw.org and private project plans, clarity is lost. And when there's an implmentation pushback as with 'create a book', that should show up on a roadmap somewhere as well. I don't know how to fix this, but it's important.

Feature requests

• New page creation by anonymous users : this right was revoked on en:wp by decree after the Siegenthaler affair, theoretically as a test, but its impact was never reviewed and the 'test' has remained in place without further discussion. This sort of change should be reviewed for its effect, so that other projects can decide whether they wish to implement the same, and so that the en:wp community can decide whether to reverse it.
  • I'm unsure if I should leave a comment here, but as an enwiki New Page Patroller, I would have to say "Please no". We're barely keeping up with the backlog now; there is no way that we could if IPs could create new pages. NuclearWarfare 01:19, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Yes, please leave suggestions and comments. This is a collection of suggestions and requests left on other talk pages. The request to turn it back on is often accompanied by a request to monitor what the actual impact on new page creation, deletion, and retention is. The data from after it was turned off did not show a dramatic decrease in new page deletions (at least not the 48 hrs of data I looked at), but it was hard to do a proper controlled experiment. Sj+ translate 01:48, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
• The Special:Book extension : this caused a bit of a fuss because it was implemented without sufficient transparency to a group of users who were distracted by its side-effects. This could have been avoided with more active discussion and testing leading up to the roll-out.
• Flagged Revs : Wikipedians who contribute actively to code discussions are still uncertain of when this is coming, and what is involved... it would be great to have a well-developed list of projects and their timelines and links out to implementations on different test wikis and smaller projects.
• Side-by-side translation : There are crude versions of this available and regularly used on wikisource to match two language versions of a source document. This could be a useful tool for all projects, and deserves more active discussion. To the extent that this addresses an element of systemic bias in the projects, it needs more attention than its representation in the community of active Wikimedians would suggest.
• Translation memory : Google, Microsoft and others have automatic translation tools that can be used to break a page into chunks and translate each chunk into a target language, capturing any modifications made by a human operator who edits and tweaks the translation. We should be capturing this information ourselves into a free public translation memory, which our projects and translation efforts worldwide can use. The Wikimedia corpus is the only body of general-interest text of its size that is available in many languages -- and even though they are not at all translations of one another, this is a holy grail of sorts of people who study natural language processing.
• A centralized repository for references.