Community Wishlist Survey/Future Of The Wishlist/Preview of the New Wishlist

Future of the Community Wishlist Survey

• Introduction
• Redesign Conversations
• Potential Modifications

Latest Update: May 2024

Coming soon.

March 2024 Update

Hello everyone,

In January, Community Tech shared some early decisions about changes coming to the Community Wishlist Survey, and soon after, we invited you to participate in ongoing conversations (please join if you haven't yet) about what a new Wishlist survey should look like.

I have also shared my learnings from talking with volunteer contributors and Wikimedia Foundation staff on the same page as the conversations.

So the question is: how do we fulfill more wishes and make more impact for the Movement? We can start by experimenting with these changes:

1. The Wishlist should be a forum for volunteers and the Foundation to discuss new ideas and raise awareness of impactful bugs. If we’re able to capture all sorts of community needs, large and small at scale, we’ll have a clearer picture of volunteer needs, from which we tackle the biggest problems.
2. We’re going to have lots of wishes, but we need to recognize that not every wish will get an intensive review and response from the Foundation. But we will look at each wish and reply within a reasonable time frame.
3. Our goal is to eventually have more engineers focused on fulfilling wishes, in the areas where they have expertise. This should lead to faster, more impactful development. But, as the revised Wishlist process kicks off, it might not feel like much is changing.
4. We’re not going to close wishes for being “too big” or “too small.” Instead, wishes will remain open so volunteers have an opportunity to work on technical solutions together, even when Foundation teams do not take up that idea. This means that the number of open wishes will grow over time, and that it is treated as an idea space more than a task list.

We want to increase participatory design and achieve the most impact. To do this, we’ll need your input.

Preview of the New Wishlist (Potential Modifications)

We’re still ironing out the details of the new Wishlist and wishlist process, but I wanted to give you a preview of what’s to come. We still plan to launch the pilot Wish intake process by July 1, and will add additional functionality throughout the year.

Key attributes:

1. The Wishlist will be open year-round. We won’t ever “close” an actionable wish, or flag a wish as too big or too small. The Foundation aims to respond to wishes in a timely manner, and will focus on Wishes that can be technically resolved.
2. Logged in users will be able to access a new “Wish form” and submit a wish.
3. Users won’t need to know Wikitext to submit a wish.
4. Wishes can be categorized by project(s) and by “type” (bug, feature request, optimization, other).
5. We’ll eventually have a dashboard which will allow users to search for wishes and filter by project or wish type.

Currently Exploring:

1. Opportunities to integrate with Phabricator
2. How we might expose the “status” of a wish
3. How the Foundation and community prioritize wishes together
4. How to strengthen the role of volunteer developers in granting wishes
5. To what degree wishes should be editable after they are submitted

I’m so excited to pilot this new process in July with our volunteers.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share our Key Results for the Future of the Wishlist and design directions to solicit feedback.

If you have any feedback on this update, please click the blue button below.

–– Jack Wheeler, Lead Community Tech Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Give feedback