Community Tech/Add a user watchlist: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:06, 14 November 2017

Latest revision as of 12:01, 19 June 2018

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* We could make it opt-out, so that people who don't want to be followed could take themselves out. But there's only a tiny fraction of new users who would know about the feature – of the many things that a new contributor needs to know, "there's a user watchlist you can opt out of" isn't high on the list – so an opt-out wouldn't make any real difference.

* We could notify people that they're being watched, so that they could opt out, but that's a scary and distracting message to send to new users, and could easily be seen as a bigger thing than it is.

* We could make this tool available to admins, which was suggested by several people during the survey. However, a lot of vandal fighters and mentors are not administrators. Also, to be honest, as active Wikimedians, we’re aware of many cases where admins have been part of personal conflicts. While the vast majority of trusted users would of course use it in good faith, it would create the perceptionsperception of admins having a tool that could be used for stalking, which is invisible and inaccessible to other users and beyond their control. We’ve been strongly discouraged from doing this.

Happily, there’s some good news for the #2 use case: Helping mentors and trainers keep track of the participants in their program. The Community Tech team is helping to finish the WMF [https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/ Programs and Events Dashboard], a program management tool that’s specifically designed for program leaders to manage the participants in their program. There’s some more work to do on the dashboard, but we expect to finish it before the end of the year.