Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Simplicity

Random proposal ►◄ Archive The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Simplicity

N Proposes a social/community policy change rather than a technical feature

Problem: This wish list is too complicated for many contributors to understand
Who would benefit: People who write articles, but don't understand the technology
Proposed solution: Help ordinary contributors to make suggestions on improvements
More comments:
Phabricator tickets: A case in point
Proposer: AlwynapHuw (talk) 07:55, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I have read every single proposal on this "wishlist" but I don't understand 90% of them. They appear to be technical questions about technical issues that I don't understand. Answers to the few problems that I can emphasise with appear to be dealt with by "Phabricator tickets" and other jargon. So my wish is a way for people who write articles on Wikipedia, who are unfamiliar with the guts of the system that produce the articles, to be able to add to this discussion in simple "non tech" language - like this is a problem I have encountered, can it be overcome? AlwynapHuw (talk) 07:55, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@AlwynapHuw: Hi, this sounds like a social problem and not like something that the Community Tech team could solve technically. There are for example technical village pumps to discuss technical issues and work together if something is complicated, and anyone is free to add comments in the "Discussion" section of every proposal in order to clarify. Have you run into any issues trying that? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry everything is so hard to understand! Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it), that is the exact purpose of this survey. We are a technical team and we want to build technical solutions for the community. As AKlapper says, you are most welcome to comment on proposal to get more insight as to what they are about. From there we can reword the proposals to make them easier to understand. That's about the best we can do :( I am archiving this as a social problem, but please feel free to continue discussion here, or even start a thread on the survey talk page. Kind regards, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that my point has been understood. I know how to ask for help on Village Pump / Cafe / Tavern sites for tools etc that are already available. My problem is with this annual survey. I write on average 500 new articles per year and edit many more. In doing so I often think I wish there was a way of doing XXX easier. This annual survey should be a place that I can ask Is there any way to make doing XXX easier?. But I can't because the survey is too technical for my understanding. Say, for example, having posted an article without any images and linked to Wikidata I would like a "hint box" coming up saying have you thought of using one of these images to illustrate this article?, I don't know how to add such a suggestion to this survey because I don't know how to suggest it in the technical terms that the survey requires. (I am not asking for an Image Hint, just suggesting that such everyday language suggestions should be allowed as part of a wishlist) AlwynapHuw (talk) 05:16, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]