Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wwwyzzerdd user experience improvements and critical maintenance (ID: 22024892)
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Applicant Details[edit]
- Please provide your main Wikimedia Username.
BrokenSegue
- Please provide the Usernames of people related to this proposal.
N/A
- Organization
N/A
- Are you a member of any Wikimedia affiliate or group, including informal groups like Wiki Fan Clubs, emerging language communities, not recognized Wikimedia groups etc.? Please list them all.
N/A
Grant Proposal[edit]
- M. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Wwwyzzerdd user experience improvements and critical maintenance
- Q. Indicate if it is a local, international, or regional proposal and if it involves several countries? (optional)
International
- Q2. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.
This is an open source software project. Currently anyone that speaks English can use the software anywhere in the world. With the proposed changes non-English speakers will be able to use it too. Development will take place in the United States of America.
- R. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has.
- 1. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important.
Wwwyzzerdd is an open source browser extension I authored for Chrome and Firefox. It allows people to edit Wikidata directly from Wikipedia. You can learn more about it at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wwwyzzerdd.
Wwwyzzerdd has seen strong and growing adoption. Across Chrome and Firefox the extension has 84 installs. Since edit tags were added to the extension in March 2022 a total of 96,212 edits have been made using the extension by 61 distinct users. Usage has trended upwards through the year with an average of 7000 edits per month in the first half of the year and 13500 edits per month in the second half of the year.
In preparation for this proposal I surveyed some of the extension's power users. Wikidata administrator Wd-Ryan said the extension "is extremely helpful". User Mcampany said "I LOVE wwwyzzerdd. It's super helpful and I'm so glad you've created it." User Simon Villeneuve said "This extension is one of the most usefull I've seen...I'll strongly support any grant application for this." User Infovarius said "thanks for the extension! It is extremely useful!".
The goal of the project is to make contributing to Wikidata lower friction and to encourage users of the various Wikipedias to contribute to Wikidata using Wwwyzzerdd. Wwwyzzerdd should continue to drive valuable edits to Wikidata. There are lots of Wikipedia articles with incomplete information in Wikidata and increasing the completeness of Wikidata will improve our ability to leverage structured data generally and will also improve the quality of the future Abstract Wikipedia.
If this project is not undertaken then Wwwyzzerdd will cease to be available to Chrome users in 2023. Chrome is the browser with the largest adoption of Wwwyzzerdd. To that end this effort proposes investing development time into updating the extension.
- 2. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.
The strategies are 1) keep Wwwyzzerdd functional 2) respond to user demands 3) improve international accessibility.
Wwwyzzerdd is already driving valuable contributions to Wikidata. Our strategy aims to extend those wins by keeping the extension operating, delighting our existing users and increasing the size of the potential user base.
- 3. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?
In particular this grant is to fund three concrete lines of work.
First, the extension needs to be partially rewritten because Chrome is deprecating the "Manifest v2" specification and so without this work the extension will become unusable in Chrome in 2023. Chrome represents the majority of Wwwyzzerdd installs.
Second, I surveyed the power users of this extension and identified a few key areas of improvement. In particular my users asked for improvements in three categories 1) general bug fixes 2) improved workflow 3) new capabilities. There are several minor bugs that make using Wwwyzzerdd more difficult than it ought to be. These include: 1) not properly handling case insensitive identifiers like twitter usernames 2) not parsing some identifiers properly 3) not notifying the user upon error conditions 4) not working on redirect pages 5) properly renew access token when it expires. Many users pointed out workflow issues with the extension and asked that the extension require fewer clicks to get the same work done. While Wwwyzzerdd already is faster than alternatives it could be even better. Finally users asked for new capabilities. These include 1) ability to link dates/timestamps 2) ability to link arbitrary external links 3) the ability to control what entity you are linking to 4) the ability to see inverse links 5) the ability to specify qualifiers. The hope is that responding to some of these asks will improve the experience for existing users and encourage the adoption by new users.
Thirdly I plan to add multi-lingual support to the tool. Currently the app requires some knowledge of English to use. By leveraging the multi-lingual aspects of Wikidata I hope to support every language that Wikidata supports. I also plan to produce outreach materials in languages other than English. The added date parsing feature will require support for international date formats (Japanese date formats, for example, were specifically asked for).
- 4. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign or event? If so, please select the relevant campaign below. If so, please select all the relevant campaigns from the list below. If "other", please state which.
Not applicable
- 5. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
I (User:BrokenSegue) am the original developer of the extension. I am a professional software engineer with a decade of professional experience and have authored multiple browser extensions. I am also a Wikidata and English Wikipedia administrator so I have relevant domain expertise. To date all of the work I've done on the extension has been volunteer work. Nothing that is proposed is especially difficult or requires special expertise that I lack.
- 6. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.
Language
- 6.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.
One of the improvements planned for the extension as part of this work is to have the extension be usable in non-English languages. Currently text displayed to the user are always in English. Despite this the extension has non-English speaking users like User:Чаховіч Уладзіслаў.
Additionally I hope to prepare outreach material on the extension in non-English languages.
- 7. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.
Open Technology
- 8. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities?
Linguistic / Language
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities?
A key goal is to make the tool more usable by non-English speakers. To date, Wikidata has been dominated by English speakers. Wwwyzzerdd already has non-English speaking users and I hope to expand those numbers. I will also be producing documentation in languages other than English.
- 10. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants?
Wwwyyzzerdd as a tool is all about lowering the barrier of entry to contributing to wikidata. So in that sense it is already intended to create an more opening and equitable environment.
As a developer and member of the community I make it a point to be helpful and kind towards my extensions users. I respond to github tickets in a prompt and kind manner. Toby Hudson described me as "a truly likeminded and responsive extension developer" after a user support interaction on Twitter.
- 11. Please tell us about how you have let your Wikimedia communities know about the planned activities and this proposal. Use this space to describe the processes you carried out to make the community more involved in planning this proposal. Please link the on-wiki community discussion(s) around the proposals.
I have personally reached out to majors users of the extension and inquired about what features they want and whether there are bugs that are impacting them. I also have repeatedly advertised the tool on Wikidata and English Wikipedia.
For example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:Mcampany#Re:_wwwyzzerdd and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Wwwyzzerdd and https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Project_chat&oldid=1488774813#Wwwyzzerdd_for_Wikidata:_Public_Launch
- 12. Are you aware of other Rapid Fund proposals in your local group, community, or region that are being submitted and that align with your proposed project?
No
If yes:
- 12.1 Did you explore the possibility of doing a joint proposal with other leaders in your group?
- N/A
- 12.2 How will this joint proposal allow you to have better results?
- N/A
- 13. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedia partners to implement this proposal? Required.
No
- 13.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.
- 14. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of THREE options that most apply.
Improve User Experience
Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation[edit]
- 15. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?
How much demand is there for tools like Wwwyzzerdd in languages other than English that is not being satisfied?
How much demand for more sophisticated functionality in Wwwyzzerdd is there? Are the features people are requesting going to be used? How much more room is there for even more sophisticated functionality (e.g. auto-suggesting links).
- 16. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following spaces provided.
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| % Increase In Extension Usage | Change in number of active users and edits made using the extension before and after the changes | 10 |
| Number of new feature edits / month | Number of edits made to wikidata using the newly implemented features per month | 500 |
| User satisfaction survey | Conduct a survey of regular users and ask if they are satisfied with the recent changes, if they want more new features, etc.
Use a Likert scale to measure overall satisfaction. |
4 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 17. Core quantitative metrics.
| Core metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | While this extension does benefit non-editors this metric is very difficult to measure. Optimally we would look at number of usages of the statements added to Wikidata using the extension but that metric is very difficult to track. | |
| Number of editors | This is the number of active users of the extension. I can track this number by looking at the "change_tag" table in the DB replica. In the most recent month we had 32 distinct users. I also hope to increase this number as has been the trend so far (in September the extension only had 25 distinct users). | 32 |
| Number of organizers | Not tracking |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Wikidata | Number of edits per month to Wikidata. I hope to keep the number at its current levels or to increase it further. Currently it's hovering around 15,000. I think with more adoption we could hit 20,000 per month. Even just keeping the extension at current levels would be seen as a win. | 20000 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 17.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.
- 18. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support.
We can track all these metrics by using the Wikidata databases
Financial Proposal[edit]
- 19. & 19.1 What is the amount you are requesting from Wikimedia Foundation? Please provide this amount in your local currency.
4825 USD
- 19.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
4825 USD
- 20. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6CXgUlgQrOXC_8Qk2Ryt4aocDyQBUUeIkNZU9CFJ2U/edit?usp=sharing
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback[edit]
Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).