COMPARATIVE REVIEW

Configuration/admin tools

Background

In 2021, the Growth team made Community Configuration available on all Growth wikis. This helps communities set up and control the configuration of Growth features themselves, aiming for customization and scalability.

With the success of this feature, it has become apparent that other WMF teams, external developers, and other users of MediaWiki could benefit from this tool, so the team will move the feature to MediaWiki core.

As this would mean an increase in complexity, we want to enhance the design and the scalability of the existing tool, improving product development and deployment and harmonizing collaboration between communities and the WMF.

Purpose

Review ways in which other platforms design admin/configuration tools so we can define best practices, and assess strengths and weaknesses for our own project.

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Aspects of the review:

• Layout design (organization of content)
• Permissions and access to configuration
• Typology of settings

• Fandom’s Admin dashboard is the central location for the tools used to maintain a wiki.
• Only administrators, discussion moderators, and certain global user groups can access a wiki’s admin dashboard.
• Wikis can activate or deactivate certain wiki features through a module on the Admin dashboard (‘Wiki features’).
• Tools split in two tabs: General (most used tools), and Advanced (lists most of the special pages).
• Wiki progress - for more established communities you might not see it anymore if you conclude all of your tasks

• Community settings allow you to make choices that determine how your community works.
• Community settings are found in the Settings section of the user’s moderation tools.
• Moderators are able to access Reddit’s community settings. In Reddit there are three ways of becoming a moderator: by creating your own community, by making a request, or by requesting an invitation.

• Reddit’s moderation log allows the user to see all mod actions taken by moderators of the user’s community or administrators of reddit.com.
• You can filter what you see by the time the action was taken, the account that took the action, the action taken, by username, and by post URL.
• Filter is accessed via dropdown.
• Interesting approach to take into account if we want to make improvements to how a user can see the history of the configuration.

• Control panel for a user’s entire Wordpress website.
• It’s where you create and manage content, add functionality, change styling, etc.
• When you first sign in you see the default screen with modules (Activity, first draft, etc.). It gives you a quick overview of your Wordpress website.
• Wordpress gives a quick overview on the dashboard page, but you can find other areas and menu options in the sidebar.
• You can hide admin panel elements that you don’t use.

• Personalized landing page: important announcements, stats, helpful tips, actionable insights.
• On the previous Creator dashboard, modules were draggable.

• Interface where administrators and other site officials with appropriate privileges can manipulate the look of a Joomla-powered website.
• Admin panel: central hub for managing your Joomla website.
• The first thing you’ll see when you log into the administrator is the dashboard (overview of your recent activity, quick links to the most commonly used areas of the administrator interface, etc.).

Relevant main insights to Community Configuration 2.0

• Most tools make use of a ‘Dashboard’ as the first thing you see when you enter the panel – you can access things like recent activity, quick links, actionable insights.
• In terms of organization/layout, most tools make use of modules while having a sidebar on the left, with menu items on it being expandable in some of the tools.
• Some platforms let users/communities customize modules and how they’re presented - for example, modules being draggable to different parts of the screen, or being able to hide modules that you or your community don’t use.
• Settings UI: for most of these, tools use components like toggle switches (turn on/off), text inputs, and dropdown menus.
• [extra] Fandom uses ‘Wiki progress’ a progress chart where the community is encouraged to complete a certain number of tasks.

Relevant main insights to Community Configuration 2.0

• Typology of settings
• Display settings: being able to change the color/layout/etc. of a feature
• Feature access: being able to activate/deactivate (turn on/off) certain features
• Thresholds/Limits: e.g., a certain activity can be done no more than X times per day.
• User access/permissions: only certain user groups having access to a feature
• Audience-specific or other conditional customisation: e.g. links to resources being different from community to community.

What’s next?

We will be using what we were able to extract and pull out from the Comparative review to:

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• Think of design directions, and shape our explorations.
• Establishing configuration guidelines about what’s configurable and who gets and has access to editing configurations.
• Provide valuable input and inform the user research that will be conducted.

Appendix

Paste board in Figma with other tools’ screenshots + notes