Wikipedia talk:Gather/Moderation Criteria

Comments by TheDJ

I see a lot of very innovative ideas here, but I should tell you that people won't use them. We missed some key concepts again, that seem logical from the en.wp side:

• The way editors monitor and maintain wikipedia, is mostly through recent changes feeds and new page patrol. This is also what gets fed to IRC etc for usage by the bots. On top of these 'feeds' there are a number of mostly custom tools that are used by the editors to take actions and to do messaging, mostly geared towards wikipages. So whatever you build, if it doesn't integrate with default flows like that, people are not very likely to make use of it, because it is 'yet another place the need to visit'. Now that is a problem to solve in my opinion, but let's not solve it at the same time we make Gather.
• Something that requires moderation, requires a fully operable work environment on desktop. That's where our moderation is.
• Special is not a content namespace, but Gather uses it for 'publication'. You could argue that we have many types of public lists in Special, but these all have an administrative or a non-personal context. You wouldn't share their links. Here you do. Since it's also very much 'owned', publication belongs in the user namespace, just like the books.
• Simplify before complicating: we knew people wanted multiple private watch lists, why didn't we deliver that before delivering Gather lists ? We could still have made Gather lists at the same time, but that doesn't mean we need to enable it for everyone before we delivered private watch lists ?

—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:31, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments, TheDJ. I'll respond to them 1 by 1:

1. we were considering putting changes in recent changes, but based on the conversation on the noticeboard and my recent conversation with Alsee on my mediawiki talkpage, we are not going to be promoting Gather moderation to administrators or editors. If you feel strongly about it, I recommend you discuss with Alsee who feels very strongly about it.
2. my team is focused on mobile web readers, but despite that we were building this out for desktop expressly for this purpose, but please see note above.
3. Regarding the url stuff, I have heard it from others now too. It honestly is something I am still confused by. I understand that within the community there is a meaning, and that is important in and of itself, but I don't think the readers of wikipedia pay any attention to url formatting practices. I know I, a fairly technical person and avid wikipedia reader, never paid attention. I think this is particularly true of readers on mobile web who do not see the url. It is hard for me to imagine the non-wikipedian who will notice there is a 'special:' before the username and think that this lends credibility or how this will impact spam. Okay, that sounds like I am trying to convince you, but I am really just trying to explain how utterly confused I am.  :)
4. my team is focused on mobile web readers, so that is the primary reason...but that being said, we are trying to figure out how we can replicate watchlist functionailty to give you what you want using collections: multiple, shareable watchlists.

Thanks again for your helpful, constructive advice. Let me know if you continue to have concerns. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 00:51, 17 April 2015 (UTC)