Talk:Community Wishlist Survey 2021

New format

Maybe I'm just tired but I do not understand this new format. Am I correct that if the community wants section name in diff, named references in VE, and insert attestation as a corpus the community will have to vote for them again?

I also don't understand what happens after the vote. Some proposal gets the most votes. Is anything promised to happen then? Do I understand correctly that if even the foundation decides to research a project that nothing might happen? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 05:00, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

@Barkeep49: It has always been true that if our team decides to research a project, it may turn out to be too much work for our small team or for some other reason beyond our control we are unable to take it on. We discuss every wish before we enter the voting phase, but sometimes the unknowns don't surface until we actually start work on the project. This has happened time and time again, where we have to postpone or decline a wish after we promised we would do it in a given year. One or two other wishes always end up taking too much time, and then we are expected to conduct a new survey and commit to yet another new 10 wishes when we haven't finished the previous ones. The system unfortunately just didn't scale. So, under the new system, every year we ask the community what they would like (some are reconfirmations from previous years), and we pick out as many as we can fit throughout the course of the year, piecemeal. This way there are no more broken promises, but we stay just as busy and we know we're working on things people want (and not what they said they wanted from X years ago).

The other advantage is we will have a separate page showing the top wishes in each category. While the global backlog is our priority, some smaller projects don't have the voting power to ever get their wishes addressed. With a separate backlog for say, Wiktionary, we can freely pick out the easy wins that topped that leaderboard. Again, the global backlog/leaderboard is still the focus and makes up the bulk of the work we do in a single year.

In a nutshell: nothing really has changed except we don't commit to the top N, because we've never successfully been able to do that in a single year. Your participation in the survey is just as important. The survey is not just for us, either; other teams may see a popular wish in their scope and take it on, or it may turn into a Hackathon project, Google Summer of Code, etc. The survey is a means to reflect the wishes of the community to the broader movement, while Community Tech's job is to work exclusively off of the survey results.

To answer your actual question, under the new format, yes, we are asking for reconfirmation of the three wishes you point out as we were unable to get to them in 2019/2020 as we had hoped to. They don't necessarily have to make the top 10 though, for the reasons stated above, but the more votes the better the chances it gets, of course, also bearing in mind that smaller projects have their own backlog so-to-speak (such as the Wiktionary wish). More at the Status report for 2019 wishlist.

Hopefully this satisfies your concerns. We will update the documentation on the landing page accordingly to better clarify this. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:30, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

I am not a fan. When I worked with this team for changes around en:WP:NPP, I found you great collaborators and on the whole a pleasure to work with. However, the community has now gone from having one way to actually get some developer time for things it thinks important to zero ways. In order for a community desired change to happen it needs to pass an initial screen to be allowed onto the community wishlist. It needs to attract some level of support (but not necessarily the most support since it's neither a vote nor a discussion). It then needs to be selected, by whatever method the team feels like using, for research. Then the research needs to be positive. Then the development needs to be completed successfully. That is, by my count, 5 different places where, no matter how much the global community desires a change, that the it could simply not happen. The fact that the team is small is not an indictment of you but of the leadership who allocates funds, including the board. But the rest of this are changes I'm dispirited to see and I am not at all reassured by the idea that if I'm really lucky some other benevolent entity will do a wish. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:00, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

This is not a good system.

I would recommend just not running the wishlist this year, and for the team to just continue working on the uncompleted wishes from the past two years. We already have a community-voted wishlist full of things that would probably take longer than the coming year to complete. The cost of having another run of voting (including volunteer time spent, advertising measures, and amplifying general frustration with the team) outweighs whatever slight possible benefits might come of updating the list for any change in preferences. (In practice, I expect the new list to not match previous lists, but more because of issues with expectations of the team than anything to do with the wishes themselves.)

If the team can't handle a whole new list every year, we'll have to manage, but over-promising while falling further behind isn't really helpful. --Yair rand (talk) 22:11, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

I mean this is clearly their plan to not fall behind. If we want past wishes to be done we need to vote for them again so there is no backlog. They no longer promise to do any set number of wishes. They have complete discretion about which wishes to do. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:57, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

@Barkeep49 and Yair rand: Hello! We just met as a team to discuss some of the feedback we received, and we’ve decided to clarify and change some things, in light of the feedback.

First, we added to the documentation that we will evaluate wishes in order of the number of votes they receive. This means that the wishes with the top number of votes will receive our attention and focus first. The votes of the community matter, and top wishes are still top wishes. We’re just not committing to a number in advance.

Second, we understood the frustration people felt about the 3 remaining wishes from the 2019 & 2020 surveys. People wanted us to evaluate and consider the wishes, rather than be asked to vote on them again. For this reason, we have decided to include the remaining 3 wishes in our backlog. This means that we’ll consider them high-priority wishes, along with the top 2021 wishes, and we’ll try our best to evaluate them in the coming year.

Third, about why we’re having the annual survey: We had extensive conversations about whether or not to have the survey this year. This was something we took seriously. While we knew we had limited capacity and resources, we also knew another truth: the wishlist survey is a time, once a year, when people can share what’s important to them and what they want us to work on. If we don’t do it, we miss out on a crucial venue for people to share this information. Sometimes we work on wishes; other times, volunteers or other teams work on wishes. But the wishlist survey is powerful not only because of its direct collaboration with the community, but also because of its regularity. This is what we do—we connect with and learn from volunteers every year—and we wanted to keep on doing that.

Finally, this process is very similar to the old one. The main difference is that we’re not committing to a number of wishes in advance. However, we'll share with everyone how we pick wishes to work on next and why, and we'll collect feedback on these choices. So, with all that being said, thanks for all of your feedback so far; it's helped us rethink some things. We sincerely hope that you give us a shot with this new system and let us demonstrate our values of communication & collaboration. --IFried (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

Ranking? Whose choice? Limited key points? And 2 year backlogs?

I'm really confused by this - the entire thing seems to have so many caveats, that it's going to be impossible to know which ones will get chosen (even if the actual number of items on that list wouldn't be decided until later).

It really needs clarifying.

We also need summary on why those items from 2 years ago remain non-complete - part of the reason last year's massively truncated set was accepted was because it would allow completion of all of the backlog, and now we seem to have multiple items carrying through. That is immensely offputting. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:30, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear: An update on the 2019 wishlist can be seen at Community Tech/Status report for 2019 wishlist. We agree it is off-putting that these wishes have gone unaddressed (though investigations were completed). This is why we want to remove the "top N" aspect from the survey, since that never seemed to work for a single year, as we have no idea what that year will bring, or how big each wish will actually turn out to be, etc. My reply to Barkeep49 above may also answer some of your questions. In the end, we're confident this new system will be better for you and for us. There is no sure-fire 100% way of knowing what will get worked on in a year, but as time has proven, this was already the case. The difference now, we hope, is that we don't disappoint anyone by making broken promises. If your wish didn't get addressed, simply re-propose it for the next survey. Rest assured, though, the same familiar concept applies: the more votes a wish receives, the better the chances it has. We are working to clarify this in the documentation and apologize for the confusion. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 9 November 2020 (UTC)