Global Collaboration/Newsletter/Issues/2017/06

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

Integrated Filters

• The team is moving full speed ahead on a follow-up project to the New Filters for Edit Review beta dubbed "Integrated Filters." The name refers to the fact that we are integrating the Recent Changes tools that currently remain in the old user interface (like Namespace and Tag filters), along with some tools and capabilities from Watchlist and elsewhere, into the new Recent Changes interface.
• You can get an overview of the Integrated Filters projects, and the general release strategy, on the description page of the project Phabricator board. Among the more interesting new capabilities:
  • Category filters: We'll be adding the ability to filter by category. This is a little tricky, since wiki categories often work in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, with the broadest categories returning the fewest results—because categories like "Science" or "Art" tend to contain not articles but other categories. So we're exploring solutions where a category search will crawl at least a layer or two down the category treat to, hopefully, bring back more useful results. [1]
  • User filters: We're adding the ability to filter by any username, similar to what's available already on the the User Contributions page. [2]
  • Live update: Users will have the ability to look at a more or less continuous flow of changes. This is a much requested feature that we expect will open up new possibilities for Recent Changes, especially for patrollers who want to see vandalism or other changes as they happen. While the updates won't truly be "live," the page updates will be frequent, similar to the way real-time tools (like RTRC or LiveRC) works. [3]

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Have time for a talk?

• We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchenwikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.

Recent changes

• It is now possible to save your favorite filters sets by using bookmarks. [4]
  • This feature documentation can be translated.
• It is possible to filter only the last edits done on a page on the Recent Changes page. [5]
• ORES review tool has been deployed to French Wikipedia. This wiki can use predictions filters. To have the predictions filters on your wiki, you need to work on the labeling campaign for your wiki or request it. [6]
• There were some issues with loading highlighted results when the URL was copied and pasted. This is now fixed. [7]
• A "Watchlisted pages" filter group now lets reviewers use Recent Changes, and all its tools, to patrol changes to pages they've Watchlisted. If you have any feedback about how useful this is nor isn't—especially given that we plan to add the new filtering interface to the Watchlist page — let us know.
• There were issues with the tools still in the older filtering UI — like the Namespace filter and the number of results selectors. These have been fixed. [8]

Future changes

• Integration of new features on recent changes pages is planned. They will include menus to filter users, tagged edits, categories and namespaces. See the "What's new" section above for more information.
• Now that users can save filter settings, and declare any settings they want as the Recent Changes page default, we'll be reviewing the RC page Preferences with an eye to getting rid of as many as we can. For instance, if you want to hide minor edits or Category changes by default, you can now do that right on the RC page, instead of having to go to a separate page to manage defaults.
• On many Recent Changes Pages, the community has defined a large number of links that are displayed directly under the page name (example on Polish Wikipedia). Many of these links are unrelated or only peripherally related to Recent Changes, add informational complexity of the RC page. Research shows that they are used only rarely or never. We want to clarify RecentChanges page functionality, so we plan to put the links into a collapsible panel.
  • Should the panel default to open or closed? That is, should the default state (which users can change with one click) show the links as hidden or displayed? Let us know what you think.
  • The most used links are shortcuts to certain type of edits, (Mobile, Newcomers...). Users can already save their favorite filter settings to the Saved Settings menu, which should make some of the existing links redundant. We plan to provide default bookmarks for the most used filters combinations. [9]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Future changes

• Wikimedia Deutschland have scheduled the notifications of Wikibase notifications to Wikimedia projects: all the Wikivoyages on May 3; all the Wikipedias except en, fr, de on May 30; all other projects on June 13 and Wikipedias en, fr, de on September 5. [10]
• It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications. [11]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

• Flow has been activated on all talk pages on Catalan Wikiquote. [12]

Future changes

• On the Beta feature page, the activation message has been review to emphase the fact that the unstructured wikitext page will be archived. [13]

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