Topic on Extension talk:Newsletter/Archive 1

Qgil-WMF et al,

As I believe you're aware, we've been running a poll of our readers since January 17. Thus far we have pretty strong response; while we plan to keep the poll open for another few days, I doubt the results will change significantly. Some of the information will be especially useful to us in determining our engagement with the Newsletter extension, so I thought I'd share some early results here.

• 6% of respondents feel that subscription information should be kept private.
• 56% prefer to receive the Signpost, with links to individual stories, on their talk page.
• 39% first learned about the Signpost by seeing it on another user's talk page.

These results suggest to me that we should be cautious about changes, especially ones that either remove existing options or strongly change the dynamics of how people learn about them.

We'll publish a more thorough breakdown in the next edition, but I wanted to give a heads-up about our thinking here in the meantime. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 19:23, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, this is useful.

The universe of this poll are existing Signpost readers, presumably many of them subscribers through MassMessage, and this introduces a bias that needs to be acknowledged.

• About privacy, the big majority doesn't have a strong opinion, which sounds fair enough when probably many of them have posted their username in a MassMessage page already. 19% says it should be kept public. Does the poll offer any hint about their reasons? My (totally subjective) suspicion is that the same question would obtain a very different answer when asked to people not subscribed to the Signpost, to casual editors not familiar with MassMessage, to Wikipedia readers who have never subscribed to any of our newsletters. In other words, to people who have subscribed to many publications in the Internet, and never saw their subscriptions made public. The Newsletter extension wants to become a tool to get readers a bit more involved in Wikimedia life, easily. I personally fear that public subscriptions will confuse this target audience and drive many away.
• About support to Talk pages, again, it is not surprising that those who are already receiving the Signpost through that method are OK with it. I still wonder how heavy would be the use case of talk pages compared to web/email when looking at newsletter in general and the subscribers they don't have yet. Support to talk pages would be nice to have, the question is who will code it and when. Meanwhile, since MassMessage will continue to exist, publications really needing that feature can use / keep using MassMessage, alone or in combination with the Newsletter extension.

Good observations, Qgil-WMF

Your statement about bias is puzzling; as you can see above, I presented this to you as "a poll of [the Signpost's] readers." I made no claims about Wikimedians more generally; if somebody (not me) were to do so, then yes, that would introduce bias.

But hopefully, I have persuaded you that digging into the wishes of Wikimedians broadly construed is a worthwhile pursuit. I continue to hope you will undertake an effort to vet your personal opinions, whether through broader surveys or another scientific approach, before seeking broad adoption of the extension.

Some further breakdowns, which may speak to your points:

• Of the sample used for my previous statistics, 67% self-identify as Signpost subscribers. The meaning of that may not be 100% consistent, as we did not specify; but I expect that means that 67% receive the Signpost on their user talk pages via MassMessage.

Considering only the self-identified non-subscribers:

• 3.7% say the list should not be public; 19% say it should stay public; 78% don't care.
• 52% prefer single Echo web notification; 35% prefer user talk page notification; 13% prefer a single link via email.

The non-subscriber cut is of course getting down to a pretty small sample size (30 responses), so caveat emptor. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 01:08, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm not saying your poll is biased, it is a fair poll of Signpost readers indeed. I was trying to say that Signpost readers are probably not a representative sample of the different audiences the Newsletter extension aims to satisfy.

About vetting my personal opinions... As volunteer contributor, my personal priorities are to deploy this extension in Wikimedia (starting with MediaWiki.org) and to prioritize improvements taking as main indicators feedback from actual/potential users (like yours, which I appreciate) and adoption data. Prioritize is all I can do, as I am not a software developer, I cannot code or mentor others to code. The actual implementation of new features depends on volunteer developers showing up, and many times they work on the features interesting to them, which may or may not coincide with project priorities or user research.

If The Signpost or someone else find developers willing to work in the features they are missing, they are welcome to join this project.

We seem to be talking in circles again. I have not been strongly urging you to develop features, I've been strongly urging you to gather information about whether the communities you intend to serve actually want the things you think they want.

I want to add -- thanks for the expression of appreciation for my feedback. But I think the more important stakeholder group is newsletter readers (and potential readers). We publishers can work any hiccups in the publication process into our workflows; but at the end of the day, our work is intended to reach an audience, and the engagement and satisfaction level of that audience is paramount.

And, there's no timetable on my requests, besides hoping that you will undertake them well in advance of proposing broad adoption. It's my understanding that the features for the current version are pretty well established, and that you intend to deploy it on MediaWiki.org. I have no quarrel with any of that. But anything that would change the nature of subscription/notification on production wikis should be accompanied by strong buy-in, which I believe will only result from design adjustments informed by actual end-user preferences, and a sound basis for predicting their behavior (i.e., will potential subscribers actually find the publications, and actually subscribe).

We published the results of the poll, and our analysis, here: W:en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-27/From the editors