Hi @Gryllida - at first blush, this sounds like an interesting idea. However:

• What types of feedback are you thinking that visitors would want to put into the text box?
• Who would be notified of these concerns (assuming that the entry is not garbage text)?
• Who would fix the 'issue' raised?
• Wiki projects currently do not use feedback boxes (other than quick surveys)

@Gryllida: Could you please answer debt's questions?

What types of feedback are you thinking that visitors would want to put into the text box?

Feedback about relevance of results, ways to improve the UI, frustration points.

Who would be notified of these concerns (assuming that the entry is not garbage text)?

A talk page on mediawiki.org could be used for storing the comments. Or a phabricator section marked with 'discovery', 'sister snippets', and 'user story'. Whichever is more convenient for you to manage.

Who would fix the 'issue' raised?

Any volunteer. Or if the idea is useful, any WMF employee.

Wiki projects currently do not use feedback boxes (other than quick surveys)

Perhaps wikis could start using feedback boxes. They would be only a click away. I understand that the text would potentially be garbage but in that case we can reduce the volume by showing the text area only to a fraction of the user base, so that moderating is manageable.

Hi @Gryllida,

Thanks for your responses.

We've had a few other comments such as yours come up in the past, but we haven't taken action on them. Mostly because of the time involved to setup the interface, determine how often to show it, which users to display it to, what type of searches, what pages to display it on, where to store the feedback data, who would go through the data to get out the interesting information and who would weed out the 'bad' information that was posted in the feedback box.

Also, we're not entirely sure that the data entered in the feedback box would not be personally identifiable information (PII) that someone entered by mistake (or being malicious). I wouldn't want that to be a public facing mediawiki page that anyone could view and potentially abuse.

We have thought about using a sort of smiley face type of feedback (similar to what other sites occasionally use and pictured below) but haven't gotten the time to actually do that yet.

If you'd like, you can write a new ticket to investigate using the smiley type of interface to see if users are satisfied with the results they receive.

I would like to have a text box. Show it to users at random, so that the volume of the received feedback is manageable.

See the previous comment by Debt - some text box without a concept why or how to use the provided feedback just wastes everybody's time.