Structured Data Across Wikimedia/Newsletter/11
Welcome to the newsletter for Structured Data Across Wikimedia (SDAW)! You can update your subscription to the newsletter at any time. If you have suggestions or questions, please let us know!
- Deployment of Search Preview on five new wikis
During June, Search Preview will be deployed for desktop versions on five new Wikipedias. These versions will be Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian, Norwegian and Ukrainian.
When someone does a search on Special:Search, the Search Preview feature will introduce a panel for each result, to help editors and readers discover relevant content and go directly to a desired section of the article. The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article.
You can read more about the workflow on the project’s page on MediaWiki.
- Deployment of Section-level Image Suggestions on seven wikis
Also during June, there will be a deployment of a new feature, called Section-level Image Suggestions (SLIS), on seven Wikipedias.
SLIS is an extension of the article-level Image Suggestions feature, and will recommend images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles. This work will build on the work already done on the Image Suggestions feature, in combination with the work currently in development about Section Topics.
The feature will be available for experienced users (i.e. more than 500 edits on a given wiki) and will be deployed on Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Finnish, Hungarian and Norwegian Wikipedia, where article-level Image Suggestions are already available.
- New Growth structured task for newcomers, based on Section-level Image Suggestions, to be deployed in June
The Growth team will be deploying a new structured task that will be largely based on the Section-level Image Suggestions feature. This is an extension of their existing “Add an Image” structured task. While SLIS is aimed at experienced users, this structured task will aim to recommend potential new images for articles’ sections to new Wikimedia users. The deployment of this task is planned for June.
- First data from deployment of Search Preview on Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian Wikipedia now available
Initial data about the deployment of Search Preview on three Wikipedias show some interesting and encouraging data coming from use of the feature. Search Preview has been released on Portuguese, Russian, and Indonesian Wikipedias in two phases: the desktop version was released in January 2023, while the mobile version was released the following month.
The first interesting data that we have is that adoption on mobile version is roughly twice that of desktop version, indicating that the feature has been deemed useful especially by users on mobile devices.
Secondly, text snippets in Search Previews are by far the largest source of click throughs. At the moment, though, it is not clear why this is the case: one hypothesis is that snippets are being more useful than other Preview components; another hypothesis is that this reflects the distribution of each Search Preview component in actual articles (it is possible, in fact, that search results might not have article sections, or images, or interwiki links to Commons to show, while they all have a snippet to preview).
- About the newsletter
This newsletter will be released only when there are things to discuss or to be announced, and we plan on doing it in the least invasive way for your talk (i.e. through your notifications). If you want it delivered to your talk, let us know.
Let us also know your thoughts on the project's talk page. If you have direct inquiries, you can also refer to my talk page.
Hope to read and see you soon!
-- Sannita (WMF) (talk)