Hi everyone – My name is Marshall Miller, I am a Senior Director of Product at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I work with many of the teams that are involved with the user experience of our websites and apps, such as the Editing, Web, Growth, and Mobile Apps teams (among others) [1]. I’m part of the leadership group that makes decisions about how the WMF teams approach things like graphs, interactive content, and video. Thank you all for having this in-depth and important discussion.
I know that issues with graphs [2] are what started this discussion, but I agree that it makes sense to think about this in terms of the broader category of “interactive content”, because other kinds of interactive content, such as maps or timelines, would share architecture with what is needed for graphs (video is a different and more complicated content type). I wrote a lot in this email, but here are a couple of the main points up front: to support graphs and other interactive content, we would need to take a step back and make a substantial investment in sustainable architecture to do it – so that it works well, safely, and is built to last. And because that’s a substantial investment, we need to weigh it against other important investments in order to decide whether and when to do it.
I know that it is very frustrating that the Graph extension has not been operational for many months – it means readers haven’t been seeing graphs in articles, and editors haven’t been able to use graphs to do things like monitor backlogs in WikiProjects. Over the months of trying to find a way to turn graphs back on, it has become clear that there isn’t a safe shortcut here and that the path forward will require a substantial investment – one that we have not yet started given the other priorities we’ve been working on. Every year we have to make difficult tradeoffs around what areas of our technical infrastructure we can and cannot take on. In the current fiscal year, the Product and Technology department has made experienced editors a priority [3], and many things that volunteers have asked for are either accomplished or in flight:
Improvements to PageTriage (complete) [4] Watchlist in the iOS app (complete) [5] Patrolling in the Android app (in progress) [6] Dark mode (in progress) [7] Improvements to the Commons Upload Wizard (in progress) [8] …and other projects.
But I know this conversation isn’t as much about what editors need as what current and future readers need. Between talking about interactive content and talking about video, it sounds like we’re having the larger conversation of what we should be offering today’s and tomorrow’s readers to help them learn from encyclopedic content – whether we need to be offering interactivity, or video, or perhaps enabling other platforms/apps to use our content to make interactive or video materials there. This is a really important conversation, because even working together we probably will not be able to build all of it – we’ll have to make hard choices about where to invest. One place where this broader conversation is happening is called “Future Audiences”, which does experiments on how to reach newer generations who use the internet differently than previous generations – and thinking particularly about video. Future Audiences has regular calls with community members to shape the direction of those experiments, which in turn inform how the broader Foundation prioritizes. I hope many of you will get involved in those conversations – you can sign up here. [9]
Focusing back on graphs, since that’s what kicked this thread off, the several approaches we’ve attempted for quickly re-enabling the extension have ended up having security or performance problems. Therefore, we think that if we were to support graphs and other interactive content, we would need to plan substantial investment in sustainable architecture. This way, our approach would work securely and stably for the longer term. But that would take significant resources, and we’ll need to weigh it against many other important priorities, like tools for functionaries, improvements to the editing experience, automated ways to stop vandals, etc.
To be clear, if we do assign resources to the planning and building of an architecture for graphs (and other interactive content), it means that we are still at least several more months away from having a working Foundation-supported architecture. Therefore, I think we should also be having the additional conversation that many others have brought up about what volunteers can do in these intervening months to make graphs somewhat available to users. I know people are talking about that concretely on the Phabricator task, and I will join that conversation as well. For the bigger question, I would like to start with some more learning about which kinds of interactive content are important for our encyclopedia, and how our community members see the evolution of the reading experience on our projects. I’d like to have some small conversations with many of you so that we can get into the details and ideas, joined by some of my colleagues. I’ll start reaching out to see who is interested in talking – and please let me know directly if you’d like to talk.
Thank you for weighing in so far, and let’s keep talking and planning together.
Marshall
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MMiller_(WMF) [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940 [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024#O... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/2023_Moderator_Tools_p... [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Watchlist#October_202... [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Anti_Vandalism [7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Accessibility_for_reading [8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:WMF_support_for_Commons/Upload_Wi... [9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences#Sign_up_to_participate!