Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Portal retrospective 2016-08-24

Format

This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Five_finger_retrospective

Action Items from last month

• Deb: send out email RfC for language dropdown and chat up the new updated page design
  • if all goes well, push it into production in next few weeks
  •  Done!
• Kevin: Carry idea of a/b test retros over to the search team
  •  Done (added a checklist item to the A/B test process)
• Kevin: Continue to work on timely code reviews
  •  Done (Got Trey involved a bit)
• Chris: Communicate that after we wrap up a few things on the portal that we'll take a bit of a less active role on the portal for a while (focus on accomplishments so far)
  •  Done
  • Deb has updated Portal pages and Dan/Katie sent out email to Discovery email list
• Mikhail: provide some data (related to the portal de-emphasisication) (ticket has already been created)
  •  Done https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138397

What happened since the last retro (July 7)

• Updated wikipedia.org with new page layout (Aug 16)
  • had a blog post about the release as well as twitter and facebook postings as well (Great job with that!)
  • Mikhail wrote up a comprehensive summary of the work we did on the portal: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138397
• Added 'refined' descriptive text for sister projects (in production)
• Added ability to ingest new translations for the portal page (almost completely ready)
• Fixed and deployed a few minor bugs and updated stats (done and will do again shortly)
• Added portal translations to translatewiki.net
• (Almost done with) Languages visited (from Portal) panels on dashboard
• Chelsy reproduced the results from an earlier session lengths analysis but this time for last month's data and the results look almost the same

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

• Community reaction to new page layout
  • mostly good and positive - especially the fb and twitter posts
  • Even the folks who don't like it are being civil +1
• Cooperation that we had with Comms (Ed and Jeff) was great!
• Jan did some wonderful work helping with community involvement and answering of questions related to the new layout
• Jan also did the wonderful work of finalizing the layout design! Yay!
• Jan quickly updated the new tickets that addressed a few things that the community requested after the layout release

Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know about the last month

• The portal layout talk page, with involvment from community and team members, significantly improved the final design.
• new portal layout was (seemingly) well received but community is upset that we're not going further with it now - mostly around smaller language wiki's and trying to highlight them
  • would be helped by adding in the translatewiki language by region/country idea that we have for the portal

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

• Didn't research page views within 60 days of the huge increase :( -1 :(
  • we'd like to toot our own horn but unsure of the reason for the increase
• discovered community translations can sometimes be wrong (or misinterpreted ) :/
  • look into maybe using https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CLDR

Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other

• Onboarding of Chelsy is ongoing and seems to be doing well
• Translate folks eager to help get portal into translatewiki.
• Mikhail and Chelsy found interesting things on the 'why' of some of the page view increases - good teamwork

Pinky: A little thing (good or bad) that would be easy to overlook, or that was overlooked

• The pre-onboarding work that was done by Mikhail to be sure that Chelsy had everything she needed to get started(Thanks!)
• Mikhails amazing language breakdown of the portal, in response to community concerns+1

Action items

• Kevin: Should this be the last portal retro for a while?
  • yes, unless something changes