Product and Technology Advisory Council/August 2025 draft PTAC proposals for feedback

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The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) is a one-year pilot of a group of Wikimedia Foundation staff and community members. Its role is to support and advise the Wikimedia Foundation on its technical direction and provide input on the long-term product and technical priorities for the Wikimedia movement.

Following recent community reactions surrounding two initiatives, the trial of AI-generated article summaries, which subsequently led to the RFC surrounding AI features by the WMF and the concerns surrounding Tone Check, members of the Product and Technology Advisory Council came together to form two working groups to brainstorm ways to improve how the Foundation conducts and communicates experiments and product development and how it engages with the community surrounding updates regarding its product development.

On July 23, the working groups within the PTAC proposed the following recommendations for experiments that the Wikimedia Foundation can conduct to see if the experiments increase transparency, trust, and lead to more constructive engagement between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia communities.

On-wiki discussion: Bring the community to this conversation and work with them to determine key channels for these conversations to occur. Provide the same resources with specific examples of how this didn’t go well, and solicit ideas for how it could go better.

Community members champion and drive community discussion: PTAC members (or other community members) participate in key product communications topics to help provide context regarding the experiments and guide feedback in conversations with communities.

Central overview: Building a central overview of all ongoing and upcoming experiments, where community members can track the development of features and keep track of currently ongoing development work.

Defining labeled phases for experiments: Explicitly labelling what stage of development a particular experiment is in, for example, exploration, testing, validation, iterative improvement, beta, graduation, termination/concluded. This will allow community members to understand what stage a particular experiment is in and what kinds of feedback are going to be most valuable.

Better prepared feedback sections: Often, when Wikimedia Foundation teams ask for feedback, there is a gap between what the team expects in terms of feedback and the kind of feedback the community provides. Having a better prepared feedback section would probably lead to better feedback being provided by the community, specifically on the areas the team expects feedback on.

The Product and Technology Advisory Council invites feedback from community members on the experiments (and proposals) above until August 22, following which, (provided there are no objections) we will forward these recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Product and Technology department, who will subsequently look into ways of implementing and incorporating these recommended experiments.

Following the feedback we received from the community, as well as PTAC working group conversations, we have iterated on the recommendation further in order to finalize it. This recommendation will be presented to the Foundation’s Product and Technology teams so that they can conduct experiments and communicate product updates in a way that increases transparency, trust, and leads to constructive engagements.

Explain prioritization decisions: Explain the rationale for why certain pieces of work are being prioritized and not prioritized. Explain clearly why the Foundation says "no" to some work.
Definition clarity for success vs failure: Be clear about definitions of success and failure, and engage the community on these criteria for experiments.
Timing is key: Bring community members into conversations early on, and be clear about what feedback is helpful and constructive in early stages of experimentation or feature designs. Off-wiki collaborative spaces, such as Discord, Telegram, or even well-publicized community calls, can often be good spaces to engage in a back-and-forth with the community on such early feedback.
Communicate as close as possible to the community: PTAC would like the Foundation to engage and communicate with the community as granularly as possible, ideally on a per-wiki basis. However, this experiment necessarily adds the overhead of translating each announcement and conversation into multiple languages. Both the PTAC and the Foundation recognize that many plans and communications are often not broadly translated. The Foundation would appreciate help from the community in sharing the workload of translations.
On-wiki discussion: Bring the community to this conversation and work with them to determine key channels for these conversations to occur. Provide the same resources with specific examples of how this didn’t go well, and solicit ideas for how it could go better.
Community members champion and drive community discussion: PTAC members (or other community members) participate in key product communications topics to help provide context regarding the experiments and guide feedback in conversations with communities.
Central overview: Building a central overview of all ongoing and upcoming experiments, where community members can track the development of features and keep track of currently ongoing development work.
Defining labeled phases for experiments: Explicitly labelling what stage of development a particular experiment is in, for example, exploration, testing, validation, iterative improvement, beta, graduation, termination/concluded. This will allow community members to understand what stage a particular experiment is in and what kinds of feedback are going to be most valuable.
Better prepared feedback sections: Often, when Wikimedia Foundation teams ask for feedback, there is a gap between what the team expects in terms of feedback and the kind of feedback the community provides. Having a better prepared feedback section would probably lead to better feedback being provided by the community, specifically on the areas the team expects feedback on.

These recommendations have been shared with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Product and Technology department, who will subsequently look into ways of implementing and incorporating these recommended experiments.