Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2018/June

Message to Trizek
Hi Trizek (WMF),

Regarding the RfC above I regret having to spend time on this improvement which gives us so little impact on productivity of news writing and news reviewing compared with the semi-automated dialog tools and other tasks done in a similar fashion which really need urgent attention and are getting it from technically minded volunteers very gradually.

Compared to these tasks, the conversation about recent changes feed above are a waste of time because there is many changes proposed. I would suggest that you withdraw the plans to implement the live recent changes feed and repeat your research with the aim of identifying which tools would have a greater impact here.

While I see that the recent changes feed has anti-spam features, these have been discussed poorly and it is not super clear how they work or how they may be tested in isolation.

Similar research could be done at Wikibooks, Wikisource, and other sister wikis. I am sure that Wiktionary would benefit from having dictionary-specific facilities for word lookup.

Identifying which implementation would suit these needs best and could allow decentralised development by volunteers themselves who know their needs better than you do would also be a great task, I think. I greatly appreciate centralised properties and centralised skins and scripts (global.js etc) and would suggest that you put more effort into that direction. --Gryllida (talk) 02:12, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Hello Gryllida
 * I share your analysis of the time spent on that case, which has also impacted others projets I have to work on. However, I don't regret the discussions we had, where your community shared the concerns about your work environment and future improvements. Like I've said, I promote non-Wikipedia projects more than you may think, so that feedback will not remain unused.
 * Concerning the deployment, while you haven't been able to give me identified and reproducible blockers. That's what I'll report to the product manager. Then the plans will remain the same a scheduled. Don't forget that I'm still around if you have any question about how to use the filters. I'll be happy to guide you. If you personally don't want them, you can opt them out.
 * Concerning global tools, maybe you've missed Special:GlobalPreferences; I hope you will like that feature! For other developments, maybe you should create a user group for Wikinews wikis in all languages, so that you can weight in feature requests, by asking for improvements that would fit your wiki. This is how Wikisources benefit of an ongoing work on visual editor and Wiktionaries are discussing about Lexemes on Wikidata (disclaimer: I'm not familiar at all with those projects).
 * Best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * On a section above, you've written a comment I haven't seen before replying there. I quote:
 * "However about 'toggle back' for example recent changes includes a button to 'HIDE anonymous users' (where Hide is a link) and when clicked it switches to say 'SHOW anonymous users' (where the 'Show' is a link to toggle it back) With the new interface I tried it briefly and I found that when some filters are clicked they simply disappear from the list of filters and re-adding them requires me to remember the name of the filter and type it into a text box below. I will most certainly try to add the ui jumps information as soon as it is practical for me to do so (the hardware failure has also prevented me from doing trip arrangements for early July, this would perhaps also have a higher priority). --Gryllida (talk) 02:12, 20 June 2018 (UTC)"
 * If you remove a filter by accident, you can find it back by searching for it. Filter can be found both by searching for their exact name, so as in their description. For instance, if you search for "pages", you will have more results than only a filter named "pages". Do you manage to find a filter back in the 25 filters available on Wikinews? That small problem you encounter is due to the new interface discovery, which is common when someone faces something new. :)
 * You can save filters combinations you use most; I've done that on my volunteer account and that helps me a lot.
 * I wish you to feel better soon, and solve all your hardware issues. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello Trizek and Gryllida, I smell misunderstanding here. IIUC, there are at least 4 versions of the RC UI one could be speaking of at this time.
 * The JS enabled fully-featured version
 * The non-JS version
 * The JS-enabled version you see when you roll back the new UI changes in Special:Preferences
 * The corresponding non-JS version of 3 (not significantly different UI wise from 3).
 * Again IIUC, there are just a few minor differences between 2, 3 and 4, but it's better to speak of them separately for the sake of clarity. Gryllida seems to be specifying the issues they face with 2, 3 or 4, but not about 1. Is that correct? Trizek seems to be specifying solutions for 1 (which isn't suitable for 2, 3 or 4, AFAIK). Is that right? (For the note, Bookmarking of filter combinations is not possible in 2, 3 or 4 :-)
 * That said, the issue that Gryllida speaks of seems to be serious ones that limit usability as far as it is about 2, 3 or 4. Gryllida, could you please state the version of UI you are facing issues with? Further, it would be great if you could provide little more details by sharing URLs, screen shots, environment details such browser, plugins (affecting JS, cookies) etc. I tried to re-produce the issue in 2, 3 and 4 but failed. The filters don't seem to be disappearing when I toggle the anonymous users preference. Are cookies related to this issue?
 * Hope you get well soon, Gryllida. - -Kaartic (talk) 18:04, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Kaartic, I don't have any difference between #1 and #3 when I disable RC filters.
 * 2, 3 and 4 are the old state and I'm here to help with state #1. If there are issues with state 2, 3 or 4, that's not due to the filters, while nothing has been changed on those default states. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:51, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi Kaartic ,
 * 1) I am facing issues with version number one. It is difficult to toggle things if they are not saved like Trizek linked above.
 * 2) I also dislike the fact that with and without javascript users get a different version which requires them to spend their effort on learning a new interface.
 * 3) I also dislike that the version number one is drastically different from what we had before in the way it looks, this is not really required from any usability perspective/
 * 4) I believe that the advantages of the new interface are two fold: not only it is better (in some ways) but also simply looks different meaning that people who did not use filters previously start seeing something fancy at the top of their RC and learn to use filters. To rule out this 'attention catch' factor I would suggest to repeat the research and not only test the 'old RC' and 'new RC' but also include a test for 'old RC ui with a different border or background color' so that users attention is drawn to it but its ui is in fact the same as it was before. This could allow to establish the usefullness of the ui while ruling out the attention catch factor. --Gryllida (talk) 05:38, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Trizek (WMF), "Concerning the deployment, while you haven't been able to give me identified and reproducible blockers." is inaccurate; left a message at T178990 about it. At this project the discussion of this change has a relatively low priority; its addition would have little impact compared with the impact of implementing adequate news identification and article authoring and article review tools. Because of this, and because of the small size of this wiki, I would suggest to extend the time for this RfC and leave it open until consensus is reached about what needs to be deployed. Hopefully this sounds reasonable. --Gryllida (talk) 06:44, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
 * You will have a reply on T178990. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Update on page issues on mobile web
Update on page issues on mobile web

Hi everyone. The Readers web team has recently begun working on exposing issue templates on the mobile website. Currently, details about issues with page content are generally hidden on the mobile website. This leaves readers unaware of the reliability of the pages they are reading. The goal of this project is to improve awareness of particular issues within an article on the mobile web. We will do this by changing the visual styling of page issues.

So far, we have drafted a proposal on the design and implementation of the project. We were also able to run user testing on the proposed designs. The tests so far have positive results. Here is a quick summary of what we learned: Our next step would be to start implementing these changes. We wanted to reach out to you for any concerns, thoughts, and suggestions you might have before beginning development. Please visit the project page where we have more information and mockups of how this may look. Please leave feedback on the talk page. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The new treatment increases awareness of page issues among participants. This is true particularly when they are in a more evaluative/critical mode.
 * Page issues make sense to readers and they understand how they work
 * Readers care about page issues and consider them important
 * Readers had overwhelmingly positive sentiments towards Wikipedia associated with learning about page issues


 * If this is about ambox templates not sowing up in m.wiki websites, I think we have migrated all the important templates to xambox/msgbox for them to show up on mobile sites. •–• 03:20, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Acagastya, you are correct it's about Ambox templates. It's good to hear English Wikinews is on top on these templates. If you have any thoughts on the mock up designs we'd love to have your feedback on the project talk page. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Postponement of the deployment of the New Filters on Watchlist
There was a recent announcement about the plans to graduate the New Filters for Edit Review out of beta for this Wiki. It stated that the deployment would happen by late June or early July. Since that announcement, we received feedback about a performance issue related to the change which is being actively worked upon. As a consequence, the deployment is postponed until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience caused, if any.

Please let us know of any other issues or special incompatibility that you may face so that we could make sure they are solved before the feature gets deployed. Thanks, Kaartic (talk) 15:30, 27 June 2018 (UTC)