Wikipedia:Help Project/Community fellowship/Report 2012-05-15

Fellowship report - 15 May 2012

It has now been just over a month since my fellowship began, so it’s time for an update on where things are.

I’m writing this report from the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco, which I’m visiting for a week. This has been a great opportunity to meet people able to help out with the project, and have some very productive discussions. Tomorrow will mostly be taken up by meetings with Jonathan Morgan, to talk about pursuing usability research.

So far I've done quite a bit of work on the Help Project pages to try and make them better structured and less intimidating, in order to get more people involved in the broader help page fixup effort. There really is too much for me to do alone, so I think this effort was definitely needed and is going to pay off going forward. It will also help attract more people to comment on the more specific fellowship work. The next step here is to promote the project more widely, including starting up a regular newsletter.

Statistics

I wrote a script to gather help page statistics, including number of views and readability scores. This data is at Wikipedia:Help_Project/page_statistics and has already been very useful in identifying pages to work on. Am hoping to update these statistics about once a month.

Metrics

Unfortunately it’s looking unlikely that the Article Feedback Tool will be available for this project, however I’m hoping to get an easy comments form set up, based on the one used in the Teahouse.

Questions survey

I conducted a survey of questions asked at the Help Desk and the Teahouse. This surfaced a number of surprising facts. One is the large difference between questions asked at each. The Help Desk certainly seems to be attract more “technical” questions. Another is how common questions about WikiProjects to join or tasks to do are at the Teahouse. We should be better at surfacing these, the Community Portal does to some extent but it’s not too obvious and rather overgrown.

Less unexpected is the fact that referencing and images are very common problem areas.

"Introductions"

For pages to focus on, I’m beginning to think that "modular" tutorials/introductions like Help:Introduction to talk pages are going to be the way forward for this fellowship. There's been some extremely positive feedback on some of the ones that exist already, both from new users and from members of the help project. Once we have them established and proven to work, we can promote them heavily through welcome templates, interface messages etc. and hence make sure they reach the right audience.

I think it will be easiest to keep the old pages also in parallel to provide detailed info for experienced users. We can certainly try to improve those too, but I believe it will be best to focus on new users for the fellowship, and leave the other work largely to the existing help project.

The alternative is to work from the existing pages and attempt to replace them. But to get those anywhere near useful for new users we’ll have to move advanced content elsewhere, or implement hiding - neither of which will go down well. Even for experienced users, finding the specific help content you need is already difficult, and further fragmentation of those pages isn’t going to help. Hiding more advanced content (in collapsible boxes etc.) was something I was also considering, but it too poses issues for advanced users.

Another advantage of “Introductions” is that it also gives us a basic structure, and a meta-structure - they can all start with “Introduction to...” and we can work out a standardized navigation within and between them (yay breadcrumbs!). Plus it’s nicely modular and easily expandable to other topics in future, and will give us something that's ideal for other languages/projects to pick up and run with.

So what strikes me as a good approach would be to start to prepare a few of these, get them on wiki and begin to iteratively improve them using feedback and usability tests. Once we’re fairly happy with them, we can begin slipping them into existing flows - welcome templates and the like. We can also work on iteratively improving the existing ones too, plus fixing up the navigation between them. Help:Getting started seems like a good focal point for new users.

Important elements

• tabs
• obvious flow with next/previous buttons
• bullet points
• screenshots
• not too many distracting links
• a summary of what was learnt
• Sensible “What next” links at the end

Possible issues

Need to be very careful on the technical side. Need to make these layouts accessible, and ideally work on mobile.

Introduction topics

Thinking about what topics to cover with these, I'm planning on referencing and images as these are the source of many newbie questions and the existing pages on them are rather complicated. An additional topic I've been thinking about is navigation - encompassing basic searching, namespaces, the links in the sidebar, and maybe a few key community pages (such as village pump). Just to help new users get their bearings a little better, since I get the impression people do find it quite confusing.

Better help on tables is commonly requested (to replace the existing fragmented pages) and was certainly on the shortlist previously, but I think it’s not that well suited to an “introductions” style approach. Maybe something to tackle later if I have time.

Of course we can also do some work with the existing introductions to fine-tune them.

Help:Contents, and navigation

Help:Contents is one of the most viewed help pages by far, given its prominent linking in the sidebar and in other places. However it has trouble catering to all users. Groups using this page:

1) Readers looking for info (“-1” edits) - Biggest volume. Not primary target of the fellowship, but certainly need to retain in Help:Contents, and could be enticed to edit by call to action.

1.5) Readers who want editors to fix something. Similar to above.

2) Brand new editors (0-1 edits) looking to get started, most likely with tutorials.

3) New editors (10-100 edits) looking for specific help.

4) Experienced editors (100+ edits) looking for more advanced help or reference.

Since this is such an important page, it definitely needs some attention as part of the project. I don’t think the current rigid structure of subpages is helpful and would like to try out a different approach, based more on separating out content for readers, newbies and experienced editors. And maybe even a different name (“Help:Hub”?)

However we have little knowledge on how the above groups use the current help page system and Help:Contents. Therefore I plan to conduct a survey of both new and experienced editors about their use of help pages, which will better inform any redesign. Have obtained a Qualtrics account for this.