WMDE Technical Wishes/Survey Results

2017

Overview on the top 9+1 requests from the 2017 Technical Wishes Survey on German Wikipedia. It is not finally clear yet if all of the top 9 wishes from the 2017 wishlist are feasible or not too controversal.

Note that the problem statements for each wish might change when we learn more about the background of the problem and relevant use cases. As soon as we have things to share, the respective project will get its own subpage.

The Top 9 from the 2017 Survey
Problem statement	Original wish title and discussion during the survey	Position in the survey	Number of votes	Status
When going through a wikipedia article, I want to keep my reading position while checking out a reference (project page).	Previewing References	1	85	Research
It is not easily visible who are the authors of a wikipedia article (without switching the page).	Show (all) author credits underneath an article	2	69	Research
As a reader, in articles about people, I want categories to be displayed in the right gender (e.g. in German "Ärztin" for articles about a female doctor). At the same time, I want to be able to find both male and female representants of a category when searching.	Show gender-specific categories within an article	3	67
As an experienced wikipedian, I want to be able to contact the main responsible person of an article so that problems can be solved more easily.	Determine the (main) authors of an article -> wikihistory	4	63	a.) Bug in WikiHistory fixed by volunteer; b.) the rewritten PageHistory tool provides statistics about the main editors including text shares
Link references often “die” and end up not working after some time. It should still be possible to view the source, though.	Automatically saving the content of external links into the Internet Archive (archive.org)	5	53	Already possible since 2013
When a reference is pointed to multiple times, once you jumped to the references section, you don’t know which letter will bring you back to where you came from (project page).	Highlighting letters in footnote links in case of multi-referencing	6	47	Deployed in November 2018
Sometimes, users who have the rollback right accidentally click the rollback instead of the thank you link-, which leads to very unpleasant misunderstandings (project page).	A confirmation prompt for “reverting without comment” (rollback)	7	45	Concept, design of first mocks, first feedback rounds were conducted
Some spaces (such as this one: “5 m”) should never be used for line breaking, but the non-breaking space character is difficult to use (if known at all). At the same time, source code should not be “made more complicated” without the users actively deciding for it.	Automatically insert non-breaking spaces	7	45
Some articles must be observed and maintained regularly (e.g. for sports), but so far one has to remember that oneself.	Reminder function for articles at a selectable point in time	9	44	Research, probably covered by Article reminder notifications

The top-voted project in the category "Projects by volunteer developers" from the 2017 survey
Background	Wish title & link to the discussion during the survey	Number of votes
Sometimes active contributors only want to watch the discussions they are involved in and not get informed about changes in other discussions on the same page. secWatch (project page in German language) is trying to solve this need. The Technical Wishes team is going to support this project by de:User:FNDE with advice & code review.	Sec.Watch release	30

2015

The 2015 wishlist is only available in German.

2013

The first technical wishlist survey is only available in German.