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Community Tech/Who Wrote That tool

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This page documents a project the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team has worked on or declined in the past. Technical work on this project is complete.

We invite you to join the discussion on the talk page.

Other languages:
Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T2639

This is the project page for Who Wrote That?, the #4 wish in the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey (formerly called the "Blame tool.") You can follow this page and get updates as the Community Tech team starts working on this wish.

The purpose of this project is to give editors the ability to easily discover which user is responsible for a specific piece of text, without digging through every revision in the history. The user should be able to specify the wiki, the page and the text string that they're interested in, and the tool will locate the specific diff where that string first appeared on the page.

Status

February 26, 2020

The Who Wrote That? (WWT) tool is officially available as a Chrome and Firefox browser extension, and it is no longer in beta mode. For this reason, we are marking this project as complete. In addition, we have also conducted an investigation to determine if we can expand the accessibility of the tool to other wikis/languages or if it can be converted to a gadget. We have found that expansion may be possible, but it requires time and resources that are not immediately available to the Community Tech team. However, there may be opportunities for expansion in the future. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the tool and that it helps simplify common editor processes. Thank you to everyone who helped us develop the tool!

January 13, 2020

I’m very excited to share a beta version of the Who Wrote That? tool, available as a Chrome and Firefox browser extension. With Who Wrote That? (WWT), you can find authorship information directly on Wikipedia articles. When you hover over content, the tool highlights all content by the same author. When you click on content, the tool identifies the author of the revision, along with revision details.

Currently, the tool is in beta mode, and we would love your feedback. There are still some minor bugs to fix (and please let us know if you find any!), but the tool is now functional. You can download the Chrome and Firefox extension, and documentation on the tool is available on the MediaWiki WWT page. The data and analysis in WWT come from the WhoColor API, developed by WikiWho, and the MediaWiki API.

We hope that WWT helps simplify editor processes and that you all enjoy using the tool. We'll also ping voters on the Talk page, so we can begin collecting feedback. Thank you, everyone!

September 10, 2019

We're excited to share that development work has begun! The feedback on the Talk page was incredibly helpful; it helped us think through various use cases for the tool. We've also incorporated some of the recommendations from the Talk page (such as displaying the edit summary in the revision details pop-up) into the project requirements. As we continue to develop the tool, we'll be sure to share more updates. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out some of our work tasks (related to Who Wrote That) in Phabricator.

June 19, 2019

Hello! Community Tech team is ready to kick-off work on this project. We have prepared an interactive mockup for you all to look at. To activate it, follow the pop-up box and click on the Who wrote that link under the Tools menu in the sidebar. Then either click on the word Henry (middle of second paragraph) or Mother (last line of second paragraph) to see how it will work. In implementation, clicking on any word will show you authorship information, but for the mockup we couldn't do it for every word. Looking forward to hear your feedback on the mockup and activation/deactivation process for the tool. Thank you.

March 27, 2019

This project is on a brief hold while we put together an interactive prototype and perform user testing on it. As the prototype becomes available, I will post a link to it here so everyone gets a chance to look at it.

February 20, 2019

We have a mockup ready for what the feature will look like, once complete. You can see it below. The colors and fonts you see in the mockup are only meant to indicate that it is a rough design. The main workflow we are looking at for this tool is:

  1. On a given page, the user can click a button (or link) to enter the "Who Wrote That" mode, where they will be able to use the feature
  2. The user can click on any word and it will be highlighted, along with any other words that were added in the same diff.
  3. A popup will be shown with the following information:
    1. Name of the user who added the word
    2. Link to the diff where the word was added
    3. Timestamp of when it was added
    4. Links to the user's contributions and talk pages

Note: We may end up adding more or less information than what's listed above. We are in the process of figuring out what is feasible and what isn't, from a technical standpoint.

Please leave feedback and comments on the talk page.

January 15, 2019

We're getting the ball rolling on this project now. We are in the research phase of the project and are looking into using WikiWho/WhoColor as a starting point for creating this tool.

March 16, 2018

No progress has been made on this project. We are still focusing on completing other Wishlist projects at the moment before we start anything new. This is next up and we anticipate to begin development in April or May 2018.

February 23, 2018

We took this investigation out of our sprint, as we want to limit our projects in process by completing what's already started before starting anything new.

February 21, 2018

Our investigation (T184144) is in our current sprint and we hope to complete it by the end of February. Once the investigation has been complete we can proceed with deciding to improve an existing tool or creating a new tool.

Jan 2, 2018

First discussion with the team.

As noted in the discussion and voting, there are some existing tools.

  • WikiBlame tool by Flominator
  • WikiWho by faflo, maribelacosta, bitnik
  • There was a Blame feature in the previous version of XTools that was decommissioned in the recent update.

The task for this wish is to figure out what works and what doesn't with the existing tools, and either fix or rewrite one.

WikiBlame tool could use some UI help -- the results are presented in a confusing way.

Do we build this on Toolforge or as an extension on wiki? It's an expensive inquiry, and it'll involve caching lots of data to be performant. This would probably be easier on Toolforge.

What's not working about the existing tool? Accuracy, speed? On an initial test, it performs on some queries and bails on others.

Also: we should figure out another name for it. "Blame" comes from version control on Git -- it's developer humor which won't necessarily translate to other users, especially across languages. "Praise tool" was suggested. We may want something that's more descriptive of what the tool is used for.

Investigation ticket: T184144

December 13, 2017

The team will start investigating this project early in 2018. If you've got suggestions or questions, please write your thoughts on the talk page!

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