On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
What was the publicising of the campaign prior to its launch?
It should be pretty apparent to people with experience within the
movement that this would be both entirely novel and pretty
controversial.
As mentioned on the Phabricator ticked, this is by no means the first
banner campaign inviting installation of an app.
In June/July last year, there was a global campaign announcing the
launch of the new Android app (like now, shown on mobile web for
Android devices only):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpap…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpap…
(also ran in a few other languages besides English)
I don't recall it being controversial back then.
And in 2013, the late Commons app was promoted in a similar campaign
on desktop and mobile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Common…
(on desktop Wikipedia)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=C…
(on Commons)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Andr…
(mobile Wikipedia on Android devices)
I'd expect some amount of transparency around it
(a
phabricator ticket is not, in and of itself, transparency).
For those not familiar with the existing processes around banners, WMF
staff and community members who use this indeed highly prominent space
have been coordinating for years on this page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar
Quite a lot of people who care about banner use are watching it for
controversial or problematic uses
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=CentralNotice/Calendar&act…
), discussion happens on the talk page there or is escalated to other
venues.
I see that the current banners were indeed listed there last week
before the launch.
To
contrast, with search when we make /experimental/ modifications to the
user experience of a tiny sample (through A/B testing) we not only
list those changes in phabricator but also send explicit mailing list
announcements - and those effect a smaller chunk of our user base on a
platform.
Perhaps you could post some advice at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CentralNotice about how people
running banners could learn from the WMF Discovery team in that
respect?
On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Ori Livneh <ori(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The links don't work for me (maybe because I'm not in Finland right
now); you can append "force=1" to make them show regardless of
targeting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2&force=1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1&force=1
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB