Talk:Wikimedia Fellowships/Project Ideas/Help pages redesign leader

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Is this scalable?[edit]

  • yes. not easy, but needed. Could maybe do it in pieces? Scalable to other languages? -- phoebe | talk 17:25, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • This seems like a major multi-language project. It would be great if help was uniform, but I worry because the help pages are still quite in the process of being written even on established Wikimedia projects and there is a lot of variation between projects and across languages. I would hate to commit to developing any project only to find that the community sees fit to implement major policy changes and which might necessitate re-doing some work. Could you narrow the project field even more? Otherwise, can you justify why this needs to be an English-language only project? Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:49, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Politics[edit]

I think that "help" quickly shades into policy, and paying a "help page leader" would be taken as setting up a czar over how policy is to be interpreted. Despite all being "help pages", this is still a very diffuse project and I don't see that much someone could bring to the project other than centralized power. Wnt (talk) 17:40, 25 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Suggested timeline[edit]

Per Siko's request, this is what I think a rough timeline for this project could look like. It adds up to about 6 months in total which is probably going to be the minimum time required, although hopefully the work will build a solid base for volunteers to carry it forward in the longer term. Feedback on this is welcome. the wub "?!" 01:08, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Analysing existing research (~2 weeks)
Pages I found of particular interest:
Examining current pages, routes, welcome messages etc. (~2 weeks)
  • Build on work done by User:Ironholds
  • Page view statistics
  • Maybe look at examples of help pages from other wikis/sites
  • "The Missing Manual" and similar projects
Planning overall structure, what pages to focus on (~2 weeks)
Testing methodology (~2 weeks)
  • Using the Article Feedback tool to solicit ratings & comments
  • User statistics tracking
  • Click tracking?
  • Readability scores
Drafting and refining new pages (~4 weeks)
Putting pages live and gathering results (4-8 weeks, time to get good results will probably depend highly on page traffic)
Analysis and Report (~4 weeks)
  • What has been learnt?
  • Opportunities to continue the work?
  • What can be transferred to other languages and projects?
Ongoing elements
  • Community engagement: discussion, recruitment and reporting

Accepted for fellowship[edit]

This project idea has been matched with The wub. Thanks to Ragesoss for the idea and to the wub for taking on a 6 month fellowship to tackle it! See the project documentation on EN:WP as this fellowship moves forward. Siko Bouterse (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 12 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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