Grants talk:IEG/WikiProject X/Renewal/Midpoint

Report accepted

Dear Harej and Isarra,

Thank you for submitting this Midpoint Report! I'm very pleased that you are able to roll your improvements out through an extension via the renewal funds for WikiProject X. The CollaborationKit approach promises to overcome multiple obstacles this project faced and I'm looking forward to much wider deployment of your end product across many wikis. I love the idea of the Wikipedia Requests tool, and would like to hear you explain more about how it will be integrated into the project as a whole.

Your partnership with WikiProject Women in Red is a high impact nexxus for your work, given that the initiative has been so active and so impactful. I'm curious, though, about how representative this userbase is of the needs of WikiProjects in general. Do you have plans for user testing with any other user groups?

I'll be in touch by email to request a video call meeting so I can ask you additional questions about your work-to-date and future plans. In the meantime, I'm approving your midpoint report so as not to further slow your progress.

Thanks for your good work on this project!

Best regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 11:48, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Marti. To answer some of your initial questions:

• Currently, Wikipedia Requests can be embedded into pages through a template that retrieves a list of outstanding requests based on the criteria provided in the template call. For example, {{Wikipedia Requests|category=Women artists}} displays ten requests that are sorted under the category "Women artists." There are currently a few WikiProjects making use of this functionality: Women in Red, Women Scientists, Hampshire, and my own Occupational Safety and Health project, off the top of my head. Before I push it to more projects, I will want to migrate more of the on-wiki lists over. Whether to integrate this directly into Wikipedia in the long run is an outstanding question and there are several UX issues that will need to be solved. This has to do with how it works now: because it's a separate tool, we have considerable leeway in how we design the processes and structure the interface. If we build it into Wikipedia, we would have to square its current interface with that of Wikipedia's, including figuring out their relationship with talk pages. (The Wikimedia Foundation has tried solving this problem in general with a discussion board feature called Flow, which bombed on the English Wikipedia.)
• We indeed focused on WikiProject Women in Red because of its high impact as a project. It is also fairly unique as a WikiProject, but I think it offers a promising template for other initiatives that seek to address content gaps. That said, we are also partnering with more "traditional" WikiProjects, including WikiProject Medicine, a particularly promising opportunity. We are currently drafting a prototype at w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/sandbox with the input of other WikiProject Medicine members and I am intrigued how they have adapted our design to their needs.

harej (talk) 18:12, 30 June 2016 (UTC)