Wikipedia:New Pages Feed/Engagement strategy/Problems

This is part of a larger engagement strategy

Communication
The first step in the current process is communicating the Foundation's desire for input to editors. MediaWiki was developed to be a sandbox, not a forum; it is not structured as a communications medium. The Foundation can create site notices that hit all users, which is overkill, or post messages on individual noticeboards, which attracts a very small proportion of Wikipedia's volunteers. In addition, the noticeboards that are picked, such as the Village Pump or Administrators' Noticeboard, are fairly high-volume pages. Individual messages are lost under a deluge of other posts. This is one of the reasons that so little feedback is received - because so few editors actually see the request. Discussions with the community are also limited to talkpages, a slow-moving communications method based on text. As a result, it can take a very long time for suggestions, ideas and critiques to be communicated to developers by the community, and the same process occurs in reverse when it comes to the developers' responses. In addition, even when suggestions are communicated, the reliance on text makes it difficult to communicate in detail. If more detail is requested, this request is subject to the same latency problems as every other message. This makes the process frustrating for all involved. Developers also have a lot of things to do other than respond to talkpage messages, creating another delay which can frustrate editors used to a faster response rate on "active" wikis such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary.

Location
If editors somehow manage to find the messages left at various noticeboards, they are then directed to a talkpage at mediawiki.org, where they can post feedback on the designs. When asking for feedback, we should try at all times to avoid forcing editors into an alien environment. Directing people to mediawiki.org breaks this principle; the Foundation is needlessly forcing editors to step outside their "home" wiki and go to a relatively unfamiliar place in order to provide feedback. This unfamiliar location is also not a place they would normally pay attention to, requiring additional effort from editors to follow conversations and keep a consistent dialogue open. It may be the "home wiki" for the developers, but it isn't a place most other people usually choose to go to, at least not with any regularity. Realistically, it will be difficult to move entirely away from MediaWiki.org - we need some core location to keep design notes and code for our developers - but we should not be relying on it when it comes to engaging editors.

An often-overlooked problem in this area is in relation to customisation. Many experienced editors heavily customise their editing interface; I, for example, use monobook to browse, have the Article Feedback Tool and section-editing-by-right-click enabled, the advanced editing toolbar disabled, and so on. When an editor moves to a new wiki, such as mediawiki.org, their preferences are all reset to the default. Vector is the browsing experience, editing-by-right-click does not work, and the advanced editing toolbar is ever-present. This is endlessly and needlessly frustrating: a user is presented with three options. One, manually and laboriously re-enabling all of their preferences. Two, providing feedback in an unfamiliar user interface, or three, simply not bothering to provide feedback at all.

Opaqueness
Should editors find the messages, go to mediawiki.org, be comfortable with that environment, negotiate their way through LiquidThreads and decide to comment on the designs, there isn't actually that much to comment on. Most features pages on mediawiki.org, such as this example, are limited to a general description of the major features and mockups or screenshots. The general description provides limited detail, meaning that people seeking to give feedback can only really comment on the general direction of the feature unless they ask for more information (in which case they suffer from the problems with LiquidThreads and communicating through a high-latency system that are described above). The mockups or screenshots similarly don't allow for too much detail on the feature or how it will work; the best feedback an editor can really give is "I think the buttons are the wrong colour".

When the Foundation designs new software and seeks community input, it is seeking input into every element that will impact on editors - but realistically, that's impossible to get merely using a description of the feature's elements and a screenshot of how it will look. Editors can say "I think it should have X" or "I don't like the colour of the buttons", but they cannot come up with detailed, nuanced feedback like "I've tried using the software, and it directs me towards X, but actually I tend to use it for Y". There's no real way for editors to comment on the impact the feature has on the methodology of editing.

While it is possible to see a working demo when the feature is deployed on prototype, the prototype wiki suffers from precisely the same location problems as Mediawiki.org - and as users are invariably directed back to mediawiki to leave their comments, the same communications issues as well. In addition, by the time something has gone to prototype it is sometimes too late to change major elements..