Hi folks,

Here's a quick update on Article Feedback v5, our reader engagement tool.

After a six-month pilot, the German Wikipedia community has just started a two-week poll to determine its next steps for Article Feedback. German editors are now voting to decide whether or not to introduce AFT for all their articles -- or only make it available on an opt-in basis, using the new enable/disable tool. If you know people who contribute to the German Wikipedia, please invite them to participate in this poll (1).  

After a three-month test, the French Wikipedia community is getting ready to deploy Article Feedback more widely, on 40,000 articles. The plan is to test the tool on this wider sample for another six months, then to deploy it on all articles at the end of the year, unless a new community vote is requested. (2) 

As requested by English and German community members, we recently deployed a new Enable/Disable Feedback tool, to make it easier for editors to quickly invite reader feedback for articles they work on -- or to disable that feedback if they no longer need it. You can learn more about this tool on our AFT talk page on the English Wikipedia (3) -- and we encourage you to use it on articles you edit. This was our final feature for this release, and we hope you will find it useful.

We now have updated metrics dashboards for all projects that are using Article Feedback at this time (4). They are helping us track which of our new moderation tools are being used the most by users across different languages: on average, about 12% of moderated feedback is marked as useful, with 4% marked as resolved, 46% as no action required and 17% as inappropriate, as detailed in this spreadsheet (5). 

Once we hear the results from our first pilots, we will consider supporting a second group of projects that wish to use to AFT5 in the second half of 2013, as outlined in our updated release plan (6). If you know of large projects that would be interested in enabling reader feedback on their sites, please invite them to contact us by email to discuss a possible release later this year.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank German editors User:se4598, User:TMg and Denis Barthel (WMDE), as well as French editor Benoît Evellin for all their hard work in introducing Article Feedback to their communities in recent months: we have really enjoyed our collaborations with you, which have made for a much better product. Many thanks as well to developer Mathias Mullie, designer Pau Giner and analyst Dario Taraborelli for going beyond the call of duty to create some of the final features requested by our communities!

Regards as ever,

Fabrice

(2) French AFT page