Talk:Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Results

Translation

Hi MusikAnimal, I would like to mark this summary page for translation. Is it useful? Is there a risk to break Community Tech bot’s work? —Pols12 (talk) 14:35, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

@Pols12: We usually wait until after the survey has concluded. Indeed, Community Tech bot would just overwrite the translate tags, unless of course I program it to use them. Also, during the voting phase it will list the vote counts in real-time, so you'd have to continually re-sync the page for the non-English versions to stay up-to-date, so I'd argue it's not worth it right now. Thank you for the offer, though! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

We can work around the second concern putting vote counts into TVARs. But I understand that the bot would regularly remove translate tags. Thank you for your answer! —Pols12 (talk) 18:17, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

@Pols12: This page can be set up for translation now, if you'd like! I added transclusions for existing translations, such as the categories and column headings. Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:48, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

New OCR tool

Hi IFried (WMF), you wrote that a "project page will be launched in November or December" about the task 2 (new OCR tool). Is there any news about it? Pamputt (talk) 12:31, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Current status

ping MusikAnimal and/or IFried (WMF). Can the status of last years projects be updated ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:10, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Done to the best of my knowledge. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal (WMF): I am surprised that the OCR tool is already consired "done", given the result we have. The community wished a fully integral tool and it was explicitely written in the wish that no external tool is desired. However, the tool is still external and so I thought that the tech team is still working on it to make it integral. The necessity to leave Wikisource page and open the tool externally if one wants to work with columns or needs to set the language slows the work too much if you need to proofread a volume of a journal of 500 pages or more.

Overall, there were only 5 wishes in 2020 and in fact only 2 were fully fulfilled by the Tech Team, which is a big disappointment. The only non-Wikisource project whose wish got among the 5 chosen ones was a wish by Wiktionary and after years of waiting they are simply told that the Tech Team ran out of time, but they are allowed to keep wishing it in the following years. Does the Tech Team not feel how discouraging it is? -Jan Kameníček (talk) 11:57, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek We sure do! We are admittedly understaffed and for the 2020 survey in particular were deeply affected by the pandemic, as many of us in the world were (or still are). The OCR tool is probably what we spent the most time on and that work bled well into 2021. The reception has mostly been positive so I'm surprised you feel it is incomplete. For most users, at least from my understanding, the default settings should suffice without need to visit the external tool. I can tell you with assurance that the tool, while still technically external, was by far and large the correct path to go technically. If we wanted to get it into production (completely written within MediaWiki), we would likely still be working on it now. The wish as we understood was more about full-time WMF support and ensuring uptime, and you most certainly have that now despite it being external. It is also significantly faster than the old Toolforge-hosted services (though that runtime might not be noticeable depending on your workflow), and the ability to add more OCR engines can be done with ease while still keeping it under the same roof that's maintained by Community Tech. You may be happy to know there are still features to come on the on-wiki experience, such as region selection (phab:T294903). Perhaps that will help you when dealing with multiple columns. Additionally, the API built into the tool allows all features to be controlled from the on-wiki experience, it's just a matter of building those UI components in a way that doesn't confuse new users. I think that was partly the reason why we didn't add the ability to change languages, since in most cases the automatic language detection is sufficient. It sounds like your workflow hasn't improved that much with the new system, which I'm sorry to hear, but nonetheless I hope it's clear how much time and energy was spent on the new system. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 16:47, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek: I agree with everything MusikAnimal said above, and just to add to this: making it possible to select multiple languages within the wiki UI is being discussed in phab:T279405. — Sam Wilson 22:45, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks both for the hope of having the OCR tool improved, with a remark that making the work with columns easier is probably more important than the language selector. However, there are two more wishes which were not fulfilled: one of them was only half-finished by a person outside the Tech Team and one not done at all. It should also be remembered that Wikipedia and Commons wishes usually roll over other projects and so 2020 round was meant to give a chance to smaller projects, although they were promised to have only 5 wishes fulfilled. I am really sorry to hear that the Tech Team is understaffed, although I have suspected it, given the huge backlog in the phabricator. I do not know whether the reason is a lack of skilled programmers willing to work in the team or unwillingness of WMF to reinforce the team, but this should definitely be solved and I am sure that if such a wish were allowed to compete in the next round, it would get a record-breaking number of votes. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:37, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Current status — 2

@MusikAnimal (WMF), could you renew the status of these projects? Proeksad (talk) 18:02, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Implementation of the remaining 67=72-5 proposals is unlikely? Proeksad (talk) 18:09, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Three more surveys were held since 2020. Naturally, the most recent one takes precedence. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:52, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Indeed. Sorry for the confusion, but we only work off the most recent survey except to complete projects we committed to in previous surveys. For 2020, that commitment was only the top 5. We completed all but the "Insert attestation" which we unfortunately ran out of time for. The #2 wish, Community Tech/OCR Improvements, was completed but someone was unhappy that it lives as an external tool and thus considered it only partially done. (Building something in MediaWiki would have taken ages longer and thus likely wouldn't have happened; the end user never even knows an external tool is being used anyway as this all happens in the background.) MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 6 July 2023 (UTC)