New Page Triage
Engagement Strategy
The Wikimedia Foundation is continuing to explore new, experimental ways to engage the community more effectively when developing software. This spring, the Foundation’s Features Engineering team will experiment with a number of ways to involve community members in the development of New Page Triage, a set of features aimed at improving new page patrol. The following document sets out a plan to accomplish this.
The job of the Wikimedia Foundation’s engineering team is not just to build software; it is to build software that people will use. By necessity, this involves engaging with the community during the feature development process and responding to their suggestions. During the past few years, this process has not always gone as smoothly as either side would like, leading to tensions between sections of the community and the Wikimedia Foundation. For the New Page Triage (NPT) project, we want to try an approach that will support editors in providing feedback on the tools we are developing. This will provide the engineering team with a better idea of the needs of editors, resulting in software that editors should be more comfortable using.
In summary, the plan calls for discussion of the feature to occur on the English-language Wikipedia itself, with a working prototype that editors can comment on rather than static mockups, and with regular and nuanced discussion between the Foundation and the community throughout the design process. This discussion will be facilitated by the Community Liaison, Product Development: a dedicated Foundation contractor, who acts as a bridge between the community and the Foundation.
This new form of collaboration may or may not work – failure is always a possibility – but either way, we hope to continue trying new ways to bring editors into the feature development process.