Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-11-04/Op-ed



Starting on November 9th, the Community Tech team is inviting all Wikimedia contributors to submit proposals in our Community Wishlist Survey.

Community Tech is a new Wikimedia Foundation product team that’s dedicated to supporting core Wikimedia contributors with features and fixes that make curation and moderation more efficient. We want to work on projects that will help as many contributors as possible – and to reach that goal, we need a process that helps the most important needs rise to the top, in a way that’s inclusive, open, and fair.

The Community Wishlist Survey gives everybody the opportunity to propose fixes and solutions and determine which ideas have the most support. It’s an exciting (and slightly terrifying) prospect.

Here’s how it works: For two weeks, starting November 9th, contributors can come to the Community Wishlist Survey on Meta-Wiki, and post their ideas for projects that will directly benefit the core community.

We’re encouraging people to participate from any project and any language. Volunteer translators have been helping us translate the survey announcement into as many languages as we can get. Once people start submitting proposals, we’ll be canvassing for people to help translate proposals into English.

The proposals are posted on a wiki page, and everyone is invited to discuss the proposals as they come in – to ask questions, add ideas, and help to make the good proposals better.

The proposal phase ends after two weeks, and then the Community Tech team will sort the ideas into broad categories, merge duplicate proposals, and post the ideas for community vote.

The voting phase will also run for two weeks, from November 30th to December 14th. During this time, Wikimedia contributors can add votes of support on any of the proposals that they find worthwhile. We’re encouraging people to continue discussing the ideas during the voting phase, but we’re only going to count support votes.

At the end of this process, we’ll have a prioritized list of projects to work on. The proposals with the highest votes will become the Community Tech team’s top priority backlog to investigate and address. We’re also working with Community Engagement’s Developer Relations team, who will use this backlog when volunteer developers want to find new projects to work on.

The inspiration for this survey comes from Wikimedia Germany’s Community Tech team – “Technischer Communitybedarf”, or TCB – who have run successful Community Wishlist Surveys in 2013 and 2015. We’ll be the first team to encourage cross-project and multi-language participation in a survey like this, which should present some brand-new challenges that I’m sure we’ll discover along the way.

I hope you’ll join us over the next several weeks on the Community Wishlist Survey page and contribute your ideas and your opinions. See you there!


 * Danny Horn is a Product Manager on the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team.