On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Peter Coombe <thewub.w...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Wasn't there a proposal a while back for a Stack Exchange [1] site > like this? It seems like the ideal software for it.
StackExchange and the open source OSQA equivalent are indeed powerful tools and worth experimenting with. Anyone wanting to set up a public instance of these or other tools to play with can do so through Wikimedia Labs and of course the toolserver. See https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Access for Labs access and policies. We've focused on creating a more integrated help experience with two projects, the feedback dashboard (FD) and the teahouse. The FD gives new editors an opportunity to ask a question or register a complaint. It pops into view the moment you first click edit, which is a more obvious affordance than a separate help site you have to find out about and visit. It's been active on en.wp and nl.wp for a few months, and was recently activated on French Wikisource as well. On en.wp, we register about 100 feedback submissions a day, and about 30-50 responses. FD includes a few features which elevate it above ordinary talk page responses: - an in-line response tool on the dashboard itself which shortcuts the path to the user's talk page - a "mark as helpful" feature which the recipient of a message can use to indicate that they were helped. - friendly email notifications (not the standard talk page notifiers) - a leaderboard of top responders, which has been helpful at incentivizing participation FD for English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard FD for Dutch Wikipedia: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:DashboardTerugkoppeling FD for French Wikisource: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:FeedbackDashboard We're currently letting the project sit for a while to gather metrics about any impact it has on editors who are being helped. The teahouse is a less technical and more social initiative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse It is supported by some shiny templates and a nice little in-line response gadget. But it's primarily an effort to mobilize lots of people to engage in user-to-user help. As you can see, lots of folks have signed up as hosts (people who respond), and early metrics indicate that there's indeed a positive impact on retention. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Teahouse/Metrics IMO setting up a separate Q/A site would be in some ways a workaround for Wikimedia's poor internal discussion system, and would incur lots of disadvantages (detached from workflows, no easy login integration, no easy integration of wiki markup / templates, separate technical infrastructure with additional maintenance/scalability/security burden, need for additional policy development on copyright, terms of use, etc. ......). But it's worth experimenting with, for sure, if only to find out what UI/UX patterns are worth applying to our own solutions. LQT is on hold for now, because it's an overambitious and underresourced project. We're going to start work soon on this project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) This is a larger effort to improve Wikimedia's notifications infrastructure, and will lay the groundwork for messaging improvements, as well as other next generation features. We hope that we'll be able to improve user-to-user messaging features in this process, which would be a technical foundation for improved direct user support systems. For the tech side of things, our goals for next fiscal are still draft, but give a good idea what we're thinking about (pending approval of associated staffing/funding): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l