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Community Wishlist - the Future

Community Tech team, Wikimedia Foundation

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Sam Wilson. Runa Bhattacharjee

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About this session

The wishlist survey has been running for the past 6 years in the same format. While it provides an important service, it has been seen that the process has not been able to handle the growing needs of users and technical complexities.

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The WMF Comm-Tech team started thinking about the future of the wishlist to propose a newer model to invite technical requests from the community, and improving the response mechanism.

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In this workshop we share our early thoughts and discuss next steps.

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What is the community wishlist survey?

Annual survey of active Wikimedia editors run by the WMF Community Tech team, to gather requests for technical improvements in expert-focused curation and moderation tools.

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Short history of the community wishlist

  • 2015: First run
  • 2016: automated the counting of votes and publishing a real-time leaderboard.
  • 2020: only survey dedicated to specific projects (non-Wikipedia, non-Commons).
  • 2021: replaced the top 10 concept with prioritization scores.
  • 2022: redesigned with a new FAQ and more thorough docs.
  • 2023: first 100% translatable survey

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Stages of the Community Wishlist survey

1. Call for wishes through banners

2. Wishes submitted by active contributors

3. Comm-Tech team reviews the list using the prioritization score

5. List of wishes to be delivered announced

6. During the year Comm-Tech team works on declared wishes

4. Top wishes identified through voting; open to all

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Need to prepare for the future

  • Longer time taken for wish completion
  • High levels of technical debt
  • Problems of bigger scope could not be prioritized
  • Lack of visibility on issues with wider impact
  • Engagement restrictions
  • Untapped opportunities of working with other wishlists & collaborators

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Proposal for change

  1. Use the wishlist to intake and connect more effectively into ongoing WMF Product and Technology planning.
  2. Make the wishlist process more accessible for participants from underrepresented communities.
  3. Create opportunities for collaborative problem solving, alongside other wishlist processes.

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Proposed timeline for wishlist improvements

Research, and review of wishlist survey process

FY22-23 Q4

FY23-24 Q1

FY23-24 Q2

FY23-24 Q3

Proposal and objectives; more conversations

Proposal refinement; Preparation for next wishlist survey

New wishlist plan in place

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Interactive session

https://ahaslides.com/UACQ4

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Next Steps

  1. Broader Conversations
  2. Decisions about the survey process for the next wishlist survey
  3. Improvement to wishlist tools
  4. Hiring a new Product Manager for the WMF Comm-Tech team

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Discussion spaces

1. Meta-wiki page

2. Emails

3. Community conversations

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Inspired by the beauty of national flowers of ESEAP countries

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