Template:Community Wishlist Survey/section-proposal-phase

The proposal phase is the first two weeks of the survey.

In the proposal phase, contributors from every project and language can submit proposals for features and fixes that you'd like to see in {{{1}}}. Proposals may be submitted in any language. If you submit a proposal in a language other than English, we will attempt to get it translated so everyone can read and vote on it more easily.

Proposals should be discrete, well-defined tasks that will directly benefit active Wikimedia contributors. Proposals should answer the following questions:

What is the problem that you want to solve?
Which users are affected? (editors, admins, Wikisource editors, etc.)
How is this problem being addressed now?
What are the proposed solutions? (if there are any ideas)

Your proposal should be as specific as possible, especially in the problem statement. Don't just say that "(x feature) is out of date", "needs to be improved" or "has a lot of bugs". That's not enough information to figure out what needs to be done. A good proposal explains exactly what the problem is, and who's affected by it. It's okay if you don't have a specific solution to propose, or if you have a few possible solutions and you don't know which is best.

Submitting a proposal is just the beginning of the process. The two-week proposal phase is a time that the community can collaboratively work on a proposal that presents the idea in a way that's most likely to succeed in the voting phase. When a proposal is submitted, everyone is invited to comment on that proposal, and help to make it better — asking questions, and suggesting changes. Similar proposals can be combined; very broad proposals should be split up into more specific ideas. The goal is to create the best possible proposal for the voting phase.

The person who submits a proposal should expect to be active in that discussion, and help to make changes along the way. Because of that, we're going to limit proposals to three per account. If you post more than three proposals, we'll ask you to narrow it down to three. Bring your best ideas!

Similarly, only registered users can make proposals to ensure they can watchlist the discussion and respond to questions. Just as with voting, you should be an active editor on at least one Wikimedia project. If you do not meet this criteria, or you have hit your proposal limit but have more ideas, you can seek other users to adopt your proposals.

One more note: Proposals that call for removing or disabling a feature that a WMF product team has worked on are outside of Community Tech's possible scope. They won't be in the voting phase.