I am happy to announce that we have completed the most collaborative, interactive drafting of a proposed terms of use for any major website.   For more than 120 days, the Wikimedia community reviewed, drafted, and redrafted with more than 200 edits modifying the original proposal.  While accumulating 19,000 page views, community members offered comments, edits, and rewrites.  Complete or partial translations appeared in 20+ languages.   With over 4500 lines of text and as many words as Steinbeck’s classic “The Grapes of Wrath,” discussion helped ensure a thoughtful process.

These proposed terms of use are intended to replace our present version. It is not commonly known that our present terms are nothing more than a licensing agreement, not traditional terms of use. The new proposed terms of use represent a step forward and a more comprehensive view of the Wikimedia projects.  Among other things, they provide for:

• Better understanding:  The proposed agreement includes an easy-to-read template summary to help facilitate understanding of the terms.
• Stronger security: The proposed agreement prohibits a number of actions – like installing malware – that could compromise our systems. We thought we should be clear as to what is unacceptable in this area, though most of these restrictions will not be surprising or represent any real change in practice.
• Clearer roles: We have heard a number of community members asking for guidance, so we set out clearly the roles and responsibilities of the community, including editors and contributors.  The proposed agreement also seeks to provide guidelines to help users avoid trouble.
• More community feedback: With this version, and with each major revision afterwards, we want the community to be involved. So the proposed agreement gives users at least a 30-day comment period before a major revision goes into effect (with Board approval). There is a 3-day exception for urgent legal and administrative changes.
• Clearer free licensing: We feel our present agreement is somewhat confusing on the free licensing requirements. The proposed agreement attempts to explain more clearly those requirements for editors (without changing existing practices).
• More tools against harassment, threats, stalking, vandalism, and other long-term issues: The proposed agreement would make clear that such acts are prohibited. Novel for us, the agreement raises the possibility of a global ban for extreme cross-wiki violations, a need that we have heard expressed from a number of community members.  While the global ban is authorized by the terms of use, it will be implemented by community policy.
• Better legal protection: The proposed agreement incorporates legal sections that are commonly used to help safeguard a site like ours, such as better explanation of our hosting status as well as disclaimers and limitations on liability for the Foundation.

If you’re interested in more detailed reasons why we are proposing updated terms of use, you can find a thorough discussion here.  Suffice it to say, we are consistent with other like-minded organizations, which have incorporated similar agreements, including Internet Archives, Creative Commons, Mozilla Firefox, Open Source Initiative, Project Gutenberg, Linux Foundation, StackExchange, WikiSpaces, and WordPress.com.

Specifically, in its more than 320 printed pages of discussions, the community raised, discussed, and resolved more than 120 issues.  There were many substantive and editorial changes that greatly improved the document.  Much language was deleted or tightened at community request.  As part of this process, the community addressed a number of interesting topics, such as:

• Whether we should emphasize that the community (not WMF) is primarily responsible for enforcing policy:  We agreed to underscore this primary responsibility of the community to avoid any confusion.
• Whether we should include an indemnification clause to the benefit of WMF:   We chose to delete it in light of community concerns.
• Whether we should adopt a “human-readable” version to facilitate understanding:  We agreed to incorporate such a summary.
• Whether we should expressly prohibit linking to certain sites:  We chose not to, deleting earlier language unacceptable to the community.
• Whether we should require civility and politeness:  With varying views, we decided to “encourage” it.
• Whether the WMF should provide resources to support forks:  We chose not to address this now, though we agreed to highlight the discussion to the Board for its consideration.
• Whether we should emphasize the independent roles of chapters:  We chose to do so.
• Whether we should increase the liability limitation for WMF from $100 to $1000:  We answered affirmatively.
• Whether we should provide for additional comment time after the posting of translations in three key languages:  We said “yes” to address international community concerns.

From a process standpoint, the legal department will circulate the proposed terms of use within the Wikimedia Foundation internally, and then the department anticipates recommending their adoption to the Board.  We expect the Board will take some time to review before reaching a final decision.

Needless to say, this project would have been impossible without the hard work and expertise of our community. Through their tireless effort, the community mentored important and deep discussions on critical subjects for Wikimedia.  The process forced us to think about issues that we had never addressed directly. In short, the value of collaboration quickly became obvious. Its magic created a document many times better than the original.

Geoff Brigham, Wikimedia Foundation

WebFonts is the first extension that gets user documentation served from MediaWiki.org. At the time of writing, the documentation has been written, it does serve people with help text about WebFonts and it is ready for translation. People looking for help will be served help in the language of their user interface if there is a translation.

In a way it seems like a minor thing but consider;

• MediaWiki can serve help texts for its functionality
• this help text may differ based on the language of the user
• the help text can be translated
• a new community for MediaWiki help text translation is needed
• functionality like Narayam will surely get its user documentation in the near future

It will be a challenge to other developers and developer teams to adopt and refine the way assistance to our users is provided. We learned at translatewiki.net that documentation did improve the quality of the localisations. We hope that user documentation will reduce confusion and makes for happy editors and readers.

The WebFonts user documentation was deployed last Tuesday. This and some other changes can be found in the deploy list. As the holiday season is in full swing, sprint 6 has started; it will run into the new year.

In this sprint stories will be developed that will make “Translation review” feature complete. When this is implemented, it will help translators and localisers review each others work and assign a status to their work for further considerations. As you can imagine, the different statuses themselves will become available for translation; card 326 defines this and will make this possible. This is just one of many stories that make up this feature.

For the localisers of the MediaWiki software a long held ambition will be realised; card 206 will see “plural” support implemented for JavaScript. When this functionality is deployed, it will result in a long list of future changes that will see changes to the actual messages.

The new year will bring us many new challenges and opportunities to the many many language communities. The Wikimedia Localisation team will work hard to provide you with the tools to be efficient in any language to get our message out and provide information in any language. For some of us the new year starts at a different moment so it will be very much business as usual; we welcome you to have a look at our sprint backlog (user:guest password: guest) and bug us in bugzilla with whatever needs fixing.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

For about ten days in December, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy, and I met with various professors, students, and local Wikipedians in Cairo, Egypt. The initial Arabic Catalyst Project trip from October showed that there is potential in working with faculty members and students on improving the Arabic Wikipedia; this December trip made clear that there is a very high level of interest among people at universities in Cairo to do so.

The Cairo pilot project – the newest part of the Wikipedia Education Program – will begin in early 2012. Its primary goal will be to improve the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia, which is currently very small (only about 150,000 articles) even though as the fifth most common language in the world Arabic has about 400 million speakers worldwide (compare this to Japanese, which has about 130 million speakers worldwide but almost 800,000 Wikipedia articles). As part of the Cairo pilot, students from Ain Shams University and Cairo University will contribute new content to the Arabic Wikipedia or translate content from another language into Arabic on Wikipedia. The plan is to have about 4-6 classes in the pilot, and only the top 3-15 students from each of these classes will actually contribute to Wikipedia. We want to keep the pilot very small, to make sure that we’ve figured out what works and doesn’t work before we expand the project to more people and more places.

Wikipedia Education Program staff meet with Arabic Wikimedians in Cairo, Egypt, in December 2011.

We were surprised by how many instructors in Egypt were excited about participating in the project. Everybody we talked to was convinced that growing and enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia would be a good idea – in fact, many professors and students told us they felt the responsibility to make free knowledge in Arabic better. We have identified about six professors for participation in the pilot, based on their understanding of Wikipedia, their genuine interest in enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia, and the writing skills of their students. Almost all the students we met also showed genuine interest in learning more about Wikipedia and contributing to it.

We are also very happy to have the support of local Wikipedians. Essam Sharaf – a long-term Wikipedian and a student at Cairo University – connected us with professors and students, helped us maneuver the streets and campuses of Cairo, and enhanced our understanding of Egypt’s social, cultural, and political context. Frank, Moushira, and I also met with an active group of Cairo-based Arabic Wikipedians and went on a photo-walk with them, during which we took pictures of Old Cairo and then uploaded them onto Wikimedia Commons (including the panoramic photo now on this Wikipedia article). We’ve also been communicating with other members of the Arabic Wikipedia community, whom we’ve found to be extremely helpful and inspiring. We feel very fortunate that this group of enthusiastic, smart, and motivated volunteers has expressed genuine interest in becoming Wikipedia Ambassadors (who teach students how to edit Wikipedia) and laying the foundation to make the Cairo pilot a success.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager

If you’ve been to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the last 10 years, chances are you’ve admired the Milwaukee Art Museum’s building, especially its brise soleil, whose wing-like span closes at night. But until recently, the Wikipedia article on the museum lacked a video of the brise soleil in action.

Alverno College student Katy Lederer created this video of the Milwaukee Art Museum's brise soleil as an assignment for her class, which was participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

Katy Lederer changed that in November. Katy is finishing up her final year of school at Alverno College, a women’s college in Milwaukee, and her professor this term joined the Wikipedia Education Program. Professor Jennifer Geigel Mikulay’s Advanced Media Studies course required students to create a video to add to a Wikipedia article. Longtime Wikipedians User:OrangeMike and User:Protonk served as Wikipedia Ambassadors for the class, offering students information about how Wikipedia works and how to add their videos to articles. Katy chose to make a video of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s brise soleil.

“Ever since the announcement about the addition to the art museum was made I have been captivated by the work. With every stage of its construction I waited anxiously for the next and could not wait to see it finished and working. I am very surprised a video didn’t exist already [on Wikipedia],” Katy says. “I don’t know if Milwaukee understands the magnificence of the brise soleil. I am truly shocked by the number of people–friends, peers, classmates, Milwaukee residents–who told me they had never seen the wings move before watching my video.”

Katy, a lifelong Milwaukee resident, has been thrilled by the reception her video has gotten since she uploaded it in mid-November. The video appeared as the Wikimedia Commons Media of the Day on November 26, leading to hundreds of people viewing her video. Katy says she really enjoyed putting the video together, and she was especially moved that her work for class would appear on a resource like Wikipedia that she uses often.

“I consider myself to be generally non-traditional so doing this assignment was a breath of fresh air. Stressful air, but fresh none the less!” she says. “I am grateful that we had this opportunity. With online resources being so prevalent in our lives today–and Wikipedia being such a valued resource–it’s important to understand how it works.”

Next up for Katy is finishing her degree in Professional Communication, but she says she hopes to create more videos for Wikipedia in the future. She and a classmate are talking about taking a river tour in Chicago of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and Katy’s already scheming to create a narrated video for Wikipedia of the trip.

“I’m drawn to visual work, so the appeal of working with a camera always takes precedence over books,” she says.

With contributions by: Tbayer, DarTar and Jodi.a.schneider

Mental health information on Wikipedia more accurate than Britannica and Kaplan & Sadock psychiatry textbook

Wikipedia articles on schizophrenia and other mental health topics were assessed for accuracy, richness of references and readability.

In an article for Psychological Medicine,^[1] ten researchers from the University of Melbourne conclude that “the quality of information on depression and schizophrenia on Wikipedia is generally as good as, or better than, that provided by centrally controlled websites, Encyclopaedia Britannica and a psychiatry textbook.”

The study focused on ten mental health topics (e.g. “antidepressants and suicide in young people” or “side-effects of antipsychotics”), five each in the areas of depression and schizophrenia. “Using the topic terms (or synonyms) as key words for the searches or through manual browsing, content relating to these topics was extracted from [Wikipedia and 13 other websites selected for prominent Google results for depression and schizophrenia] and from the most recent edition of Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry … and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica” by two reviewers. For both depression and schizophrenia, three psychologists with clinical and research expertise in that area evaluated these extracts on accuracy, up-to-dateness, breadth of coverage, referencing and readability, on a scale from 1 to 5 (“e.g. Accuracy: 1 = many errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 3=some errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 5 = all information factually accurate”). As in an earlier study of the quality of health information on Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: “Wikipedia’s cancer coverage is reliable and thorough, but not very readable“), readability was also measured using a Flesch–Kincaid readability test, which is calculated from word and sentence lengths.

For both depression and schizophrenia, Wikipedia scored highest in the accuracy, up-to-dateness, and references categories – surpassing all other resources, including WebMD, NIMH, the Mayo Clinic and Britannica online. In breadth of coverage, it was behind Kaplan & Saddock and others for both areas. And “of the online resources, Wikipedia was rated the least readable [by the human reviewers], although some of its topics received an average rating.” Likewise, the Wikipedia content had relatively high Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level indices (around 16 for schizophrenia and 15 for depression – indicating that a tertiary level of education is necessary to understand the content), similar to that of Britannica but higher than most other resources examined.

The authors note that their “findings largely parallel those of other recent studies of the quality of health information on Wikipedia” (citing eight such studies published between 2007 and 2010):

“Despite variability in the methodologies and conclusions of these studies, the overall implication is that Wikipedia articles on health topics typically contain relatively few factual errors, although they may lack breadth of coverage. … Given the number of patients, would-be patients and concerned others using the internet to search for information on health issues, it seems that Wikipedia is an appropriate recommendation as an information source.“

Psychologists gauge impact of Wikipedia’s Rorschach test coverage

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You might be asking yourself, “Who are those people in the banners on Wikipedia?  Why are they asking me to ‘please read an appeal?’”  They are members of the Wikipedia community and they believe strongly in the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Some are employees of the Wikimedia Foundation and some are volunteers; editors, contributors, and users of Wikipedia without whom Wikipedia would not be what it is today.  The people in the banners asking you for money to support Wikipedia are real people who believe in spreading free knowledge throughout the world.

Brandon Harris is a Senior Designer at the Wikimedia Foundation and he has worked at Wikimedia since the Spring of 2010. He was raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he has spent most of his adult life in San Francisco, CA. He is aggressively passionate about his work and loves feeling like he is making the world a better place. He listens to heavy metal, plays guitar, and hosts an ongoing RPG night.

Susan Hewitt is originally from England and has lived in the US for more than half of her life.  She does volunteer work of different kinds, she loves to write (including Wikipedia articles, of course!) and she loves to teach. She also enjoys doing field research and writing papers on mollusks. She is fond of swimming and being in the ocean. At home you might find her reading a stack of science magazines or studying Buddhism. She thinks the most important thing any of us can do is try to make the world a better place for everyone else.

Karthik Nadar is from Mumbai, India.  He is a student and he works part-time.  His favorite part of his job is he has enough time to contribute to Wikipedia.  He contributed a lot to the 2011 Mumbai bombings article, including adding a picture he took after a bomb blast. In his free time, other than editing Wikipedia, he enjoys playing the drums and playing cricket.  He also enjoys photography.

User GorillaWarfare is a student at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.  She began editing Wikipedia when she was in high school and currently she mostly focusses on anti-vandalism editing on Wikipedia.  Her main interest is Wikipedia and she considers it to be more of a hobby than volunteer work.  She remarked that some people think it’s a “weird way to spend her time,” but when they see what she is actually doing, especially with anti-vandalism, “they almost see it as kind of a game where I’m reverting the bad guys.”

Bruno Linhares is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  He has a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Ph.D. in Practical Theology.  In all of his many activities, he finds research to be the most enjoyable part for him.  He enjoys reading about aviation and 20th Centrury world literature and journey accounts.  He enjoys film and he goes to the movies every week.  He also enjoys walking, hiking, and photography.

Dr. Sengai Podhuvanar is fom Chennai, India.  He is currently retired after having many jobs:  he worked on a rural farm, as a school teacher, as a state-appointed journal editor, and as a PhD expert on indigenous Indian games.  He “was born a poor farmer, and still considers [himself] a farmer with a single plow.”  Currently he enjoys his retirement by  reading, writing, taking walks and adding lots of his knowledge to Wikipedia.

Maryana Pinchuk is a Community Organizer at the Wikimedia Foundation. She works with editors to support the growth of all the Wikimedia projects. Her favorite thing about her job is getting to work with an international team of “brilliant, crazy, fearless people who are completely rabid about the goal of sharing knowledge with everyone in the world for free.” She is originally from the Ukraine and has spent time living in many places in the US including Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, and Mississippi. She is a fan of going to bookstores and picking up classics and science fiction, and she likes motorcycle riding.

Basil Soufi was born in Washington State, spent the first few years of his life in Saudi Arabia, then moved to Canada, and later moved to California.  Basil realized the power of Wikipedia when, in 2004, a high school assignment led him to Google “John Kerry.”  The encyclopedia in his home library was printed in 1993 and did not have much information on John Kerry who was not as notable at the time.  He needed current information that can be found on the Internet but he also needed an encyclopedia, so Wikipedia fit the bill.  Basil speaks several languages including Arabic, French, and English and he owns and operates a diversified media company.

Alan Sohn grew up in Lawrence, NY, lived for a decade in Manhattan, and then moved with his wife and children to Teaneck, New Jersey. It was the article for Teaneck that was Alan’s first experience with Wikipedia, launching thousands of new articles and over 300,000 Wikipedia edits.  Aside from his passion of editing Wikipedia articles, Alan has a penchant for puzzles, both in his work as a financial systems analyst, and crossword puzzles, namely the famous NYT crossword puzzle.  Alan plays in a softball league with one of his sons, has coached his kids in various sports, and spent 3 years as a bicycle commuter riding 16 miles daily from NJ to NYC.

Akshaya Iyengar is from India.  She grew up in Solapur, a city in Maharashtra state.  She moved to the US for graduate school and now lives and works in Seattle, WA.  Akshaya is a Software Developer for a technology company.  She likes the fact that the software she writes is directly used by many, many people.  In her free time she enjoys ballroom/latin dancing, playing the guitar, and solving jigsaw puzzles.

Aniruddha Kumar is from New Delhi, India.  He is is a blind Wikipedia editor who finds it important that Wikipedia remain ad-free because he does not have to waste time listening to advertising text on the site.  He also likes that there is no barrier of nationality, ethnicity, religion, caste, or gender for editors or readers of Wikipedia; it is information for all written by all.  He is a research scholar in Jawaharial University, New Delhi.  He enjoys the art of winning a debate and convincing others to see his point on topics, spreading information, and eating tasty food.

Ward Cunningham is computer programmer and the inventor of the wiki. He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. (c2.com) and currently resides in Oregon, USA.  Read more about him on Wikipedia.

Isaac Kosegi Kips is from Kenya and he’s a recent graduate from Egerton University in Nakura, Kenya.  Isaac is a Wikimedia volunteer and his major project is distributing offline versions of Wikipedia to several schools in Kenya that do not have Internet access.  He is also working on improving Wikipedia in Africa’s native languages.  When he is not editing Wikipedia he loves to read, and he loves soccer.

Stacey Merrick
Social Media Coordinator

(For the Portuguese version, please see the Wikimedia Brazil site.)

It was during Wikimania 2011, in a small restaurant in Haifa, when the news was announced: the largest popular computer manufacturer in Brazil, Grupo Positivo, is interested in installing an offline Portuguese Wikipedia version in their products. All of us from Wikimedia Brazil who were present got excited because of the tremendous potential of such a distribution in spreading the free encyclopedia and its mission around Brazil. In other words, this meant the Portuguese Wikipedia for approximately 13% of the national market of personal computers and with a greater penetration in the lower-income strata.

Despite the good news, a race against time began. It was necessary to prepare the offline version of the Portuguese Wikipedia, with 5000 articles of good quality, within a very short time: March 2012. The challenge was huge and to overcome it we needed to step on the gas.

The list of 5000 articles which were critical to include in the offline version was created in only three months, with the great assistance of Wikimedia Brazil volunteers. But the volunteers found that the quality of these articles still was not high enough: they were in desperate need of improvement before being taken offline. It was then we had the idea of hosting our own “Grand Prix” – like the famous auto race. No cars and no laps, but with articles to be improved and many awards for the “pilots” who accept this challenge. Thus began the “I GP Wikimedia Brazil,” where each improved article is a completed lap.

The take-off will begin in January 2012, and it is very easy to attend! Just subscribe to one of the existing teams or join a new team. The registration will last until January 7. At the moment of publishing this blog, we have 51 subscribers divided into 15 teams, but the goal is to have at least 100 participants. After all, this is a Grand Prix where everyone wins!

Prizes will be distributed as teams improve the quality of the articles included in the list. There are buttons, stickers, notebooks and t-shirts with the brand of Wikipedia, as well as trophies and medals on the userpages of the participants. The rules of the award will be released soon after the formation of the teams, but we know that the biggest prize is the offline version of Wikipedia in Portuguese!

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Imagine, now, a Brazil where thousands of people – some of them even without access to Internet – will share a little sum of this knowledge. This is what we will do. Join a team and participate of this Grand Prix too!

(Written by the Wikimedia Brasil Community)

Community Fellow, Sarah Stierch

I’m pleased to announce Sarah Stierch has been awarded a Wikimedia Community Fellowship for 2012.  Sarah’s fellowship is intended to support her commitment to encouraging women’s participation in Wikimedia projects.

As a volunteer, Sarah moderates Wikimedia’s gender gap mailing list, has done outreach to hundreds of editors in order to conduct a survey of women in Wikimedia, and curates a scoop.it collection of media related to women and Wikimedia.  She also serves on the advisory board for the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that supports women in open-culture communities like Wikipedia.  Sarah has been an editor on English Wikipedia since 2004, and has been active in GLAM-Wiki projects since 2009.  An art historian by training, Sarah was a 2011 Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C., organizes edit-a-thons on art-related topics, and is in the process of finishing her master’s degree in museum studies at George Washington University.

Her experience working with female editors in the community and enthusiasm for outreach makes Sarah a great candidate for what we hope will be the first of several fellowships focused on the gender gap.  Sarah’s initial project will be a new-editor support pilot where she’ll build a team of volunteers to actively reach out to promising new editors (particularly women) to offer help, mentorship and peer support, encouraging them to continue editing and become more integrated into the Wikipedia community.

Congratulations, Sarah, the Wikimedia Foundation looks forward to partnering with you!

And, as a reminder, we’re still looking for more fellows to join Sarah in 2012.  The deadline to apply for this round is January 15th, please contact fellows at wikimedia dot org with any questions.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

This is the last in my series of introductory posts about Wikimedia Platform Engineering, focusing on the MediaWiki Core group.  This group is responsible for our sites’ stability, security, performance and architectural cleanliness.  This ends up translating into a lot of code review, along with infrastructure projects like disk-backed object cache, heterogeneous deployment, continuous integration, and performance-related work.  While it’s not a prerequisite, everyone on this team started off as a volunteer developer.  The whole engineering organization has some level of responsibility for our code review process, but this group has more of a primary responsibility for it than most groups.  We have an open position in this group.

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We’re happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has started testing a new version of the Article Feedback Tool, to engage readers to help improve Wikipedia — and to become editors over time. We’re very excited about this new development, and look forward to getting more people to contribute to Wikipedia as a result.

Earlier this year, a first version of the Article Feedback Tool (“Rate this Page”) was rolled out to all articles on the English Wikipedia.  The idea behind this feature was two-fold: to provide a measurement of article quality from readers and to provide a potential on-ramp for these readers so that some may become editors.  We found through our analysis that while direct quality assessment is a very tricky matter (a rating of the Justin Bieber page says as much about the rater’s opinion of Bieber as it does about the quality of the article), the use of ratings as a form of low-barrier participation showed promise.  We also received plenty of feedback from the community around how we might improve this feature.

In October, we began development of the next generation of the tool (AFTv5).  Instead of focusing on explicit quality ratings, we shifted the direction of the tool towards finding new ways for readers to help build the encyclopedia.  So rather than primarily asking them to rate the quality of the article, we are asking readers for their input on how to improve the article. We are still testing different lightweight quality metrics, as well.

We are approaching this development in several phases.  The first phase, which went live today, is a test deployment of three new versions of the tool on approximately 10,000 randomly selected articles on the English Wikipedia and on a small number of manually selected articles. For examples, see Android, Wikipedia, and Global Warming.

Here is one of the three versions that are being tested:

This new version of the tool asks the reader whether they found what they were looking for, and if not, prompts them to explain what is missing.  The intent of this version is to provide editors with some idea of feedback on what readers are actually hoping to see when they read a Wikipedia article.  This information may then be used by the editing community when deciding how to improve the page.  The other two versions also ask for reader comments, but with different questions: the second version lets you make a suggestion, give praise, report a problem or ask a question; the third version lets you review the article. These new forms were developed by OmniTI, a web development firm, and were based on designs created by the Wikimedia Foundation in collaboration with the Wikipedia community. To learn more, visit the AFTv5 project page.

We are inviting members of the editing community to evaluate the quality of the comments coming in from each of these three versions of the feedback form.  The goal is to determine which of these versions is most effective at providing high quality feedback that can help improve articles.  Aaron Halfaker, a Wikipedia researcher from the University of Minnesota and a WMF contractor, has developed an evaluation tool that will enable Wikipedia editors to systematically evaluate the quality of the feedback provided. Assuming that these new versions provide constructive feedback, the next step would be to expose these comments in Wikipedia.  To that end, a “Feedback Page” is now under development with community input, and will provide a space where editors can view article feedback, moderate the comment stream, and promote the best contributions to the article talk page.

Oliver Keyes, a member of the English Wikipedia community, is under contract with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Liaison to involve editors in this project.  In this role, Oliver is moderating discussions, collecting feedback about the tool, and working with the development team to incorporate this feedback.  Many of the ideas that are in the current test versions came from discussions with these editors.  We will continue to work with the community very closely in the next stages of product design and development. If you’re part of the editing community and want to get involved, please email Oliver (okeyes at wikimedia dot org). Our immediate need is to help evaluate the comment streams generated by each option.  Very soon, we will also need editors to help us design the Feedback Page, which will be used to review and potentially act on the feedback comments.

We hope this new feature can help engage a broader community of readers to provide constructive feedback on articles, share what they know and contribute regularly on Wikipedia.

Howie Fung, Senior Product Manager

Fabrice Florin, Product Consultant