Adapted from T227204#5494653

I suggest that an account [[User:WMF]] is created and serves as a central location. The user page could contain a lot of FAQs and a lot of "If you want to contact us about X, go here / talk to this person / use these emails." The user talk page would then be a fallback of the type "If you're not sure about where to ask your question, ask it here and someone will get back to you."

So if someone wants the opinion of WMF Legal about something like "Hey, we want to named a project *The Wikipedia CiteWatch* and we're wondering if there are legal/trademark issues with this?" and don't really know who to ask, the question could be posted at [[User talk:WMF]] and a reply like "We talked to Legal, and there are no issues" or "Your best bet would be to email Tony Sebro at [email]" or "Try WMF Legal at [email]"

Additionally, someone, possibly the same person (or general team) as the one assigned dealing with the tasks described in T227204 should be responsible for the account and verify when it's being pinged for input / directions. Or it could be made clear on the account that pings are not monitored and that only the talk page is.

Thank you @Headbomb. I see a critical problem with the approach of using a central Talk page to handle all questions to the Foundation.

If [[User:WMF]] is a central location then I assume you mean that it would be located in Meta, having a redirect to this Talk page from all the other equivalent user pages in the hundreds of wikis. This means that we can imagine a high traffic Meta talk page with questions in multiple languages. And this would also mean that it would be very difficult to search previous questions/answers, and watch that your question is being answered without having to watch the rest of the activity of the Talk page. I think this would be very impractical for those who have questions, for those who have to answer questions, and also for those interested in the outcome of specific questions but not willing to follow the entire activity of the page.

To avoid these problems, we are leaning towards a central location in Wikimedia Space, specifically one category in the forum dedicated to questions for the Foundation. Discourse is a powerful software designed to handle a use case like this one.

At the Space forum it is easy to restrict searches only to one category, and we are working on multilingual functionality that will allow users to search/watch/ignore topics on specific languages. It is possible to watch only one topic (one question) ignoring all the rest. We can also tag questions to notify automatically those watching specific tags, also tag questions by status, assign questions to users, mark questions as solved... All this would allow everyone to see which questions have been addressed, which ones are open but assigned to someone, which ones are open without any takers yet...

Supporting questions and additional comments about these questions is also possible and very easy giving 💙, which is a very subtle and yet powerful way for other users to show support for a question. What is also interesting is that Discourse has a feature to sort topics in a category by popularity and we could use this feature as an additional criteria to decide which questions should be prioritized if we get more questions than what we can possible answer quickly.

This popularity ranking calculation is based on factors like visits, likes comments... You can see a similar example in the this top sorting of the category for Space's feature requests.

@Qgil, well one of the several links the user page could point to would be that Discourse / Wikimedia Space page.

However, I'm personally loathe to have yet another thing I need to monitor and yet another workflow I need to adapt to on yet another external site with yet another separate login / account. The point of having that space on wiki would be that we don't need to jump through yet another registration hoop and have [[User:Example]] on enwiki be "Lord Geronimo" or "User 23414" on Discourse. And that we can leverage the power of notifications.

I won't throw too much of a fit if that's ultimately what's decided to be the best solution, but every time you require a registration loop and that people need to care about a separate thing or go to a separate site, no matter how easy it is to handle, you will lose engagement. Especially when presented with very arcane OAuth messages to people who might be complete newbies or have low levels of technical literacy.

I understand the initial resistance but, really, it can also be said that sending regular Wikimedia contributors to high traffic talk pages in Meta has also a risk of losing engagement. I don't think many volunteers feel engaged keeping up watching a page with a traffic like, say, en.wiki Technical Village Pump, only to check whether a certain question has been answered, check a diff across multiple sections...

We are about to implement Wikimedia Login in Space. Yes, it comes with a one-time OAuth message, but I'm not sure it is arcane. We can edit the text if needed. Wikimedia usernames will be the same in Space, users will not be able to edit them. Whatever the power of Mediawiki interwiki notifications are, Discourse allows for more granularity, and we are working on integration of Space notifications in the wikis.

We understand the risk of using an additional platform, but this type of participation and collaboration isn't optimal on-wiki. Kind of works for experienced editors, but it is as alien or more than a forum like Discourse for most volunteers, numerically speaking. We have first hand experiences like the Community Wishlist Survey and the Movement Strategy discussions, where we can see the amount of work that it takes to set up and maintain a complex process with efficacy, and the work it takes for participants to find their ways and follow. We want to try a system that is equitable and friendly for all Wikimedians, and needless to say a system that can be managed efficiently.

[Edited] By the way, it just occurred to me that we could also support asking questions via email, which would result in topics created in the forum just like any other, and replies would be received by the "staged user" via email. We have to think more about this possibility, technically feasible but also very exploitable.

This ticket came from a discussion held on a Wikipedia user talk page and I think it's important to remember that need when thinking about this. While the ticket description says "within Wikimedia" and I suppose by a technical definition Wikimedia space is with-in the Wikimedia movement it surely doesn't feel that way to me and, if I'm reading his comments correctly, headbomb. So that's 100% of volunteer editors surveyed who feel that way :). If/when notifications and unified log-in work perhaps I'll feel differently. But I really wish the answer to concerns about barrier to entry for discussions on MediaWiki wasn't to go off MediaWiki software but to do the kind of work Danny and his team have been working on to make MediaWiki better in this regard.

In T232983#5511920, @Qgil wrote:

I understand the initial resistance but, really, it can also be said that sending regular Wikimedia contributors to high traffic talk pages in Meta has also a risk of losing engagement. I don't think many volunteers feel engaged keeping up watching a page with a traffic like, say, en.wiki Technical Village Pump, only to check whether a certain question has been answered, check a diff across multiple sections...

We already have pings, and cross-wiki notifications, and there's a team working on increasing the usability of existing talk pages further.

In any case, requiring contributors to go off-wiki to ask questions isn't really an option.

In any case, requiring contributors to go off-wiki to ask questions isn't really an option.

I would say that most questions to the Foundation (that we are aware of) come from off-wiki channels: mailing lists, direct email (a % of those for non-private question), Phabricator, social media. From the questions coming from on-wiki (that we are aware of), I would also say that a minority come from Meta, being the majority spread among multiple Village Pumps and some prominent Talk pages.

It is clear that we cannot require anyone to go to only one place to ask a question. No matter were this place is, someone will have an objection. But we have to define one official location, a location where searching for questions & answers is easy, where asking and following new questions in any language is easy, and where handling all these questions effectively can be done in an efficient way.

Many communities / projects / services with the size and the complexity of Wikimedia have specific websites with specific software designed to handle Q&A. This task here started with a discussion in one Talk page indeed, but that situation doesn't capture the full picture of "questions to the Wikimedia Foundation". This picture is way more complex, my team knows it quite well because we deal with it on a daily basis, and this is why we don't think a talk page in Meta will cut it. At least not in the short term, and we would like to start testing this new process sooner than later. In Space we have most of the functionality needed from the start, and wiki integration features won't take long to arrive.

Maybe we could set one on-wiki location where questions could be placed and/or the email bridge to Space mentioned in my last comment above. That would provide a diversity of channels to ask questions. When an answer would be published in Space, the person who asked would be notified through the same channel that the question was asked.

(I was thinking that another feature relevant for this use case is wiki integration of Space search.)

@Qgil thanks for concluding with the paragraph that you did. I would suggest that this ticket started from a frustration of an inability to contact paid movement workers in the same general way that we contact volunteer movement workers. Finding otherways for the foundation to be more accessible to other groups is a laudable goal but seems of a different task (and need) than this one.

A job post related to this task: https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/job-post-senior-communications-strategist-community-relations/1733

We are going to start working on this process this quarter, very likely before this new person joins our team. This is the role that will be in charge of making this process work.

Can we get an estimated rollout time for the forum? If it's more than a few months, I would strongly suggest the creation of a meta talk page, at least as a temporary solution. Takes only a minute to setup and CentralNotice to announce. FWIW, I don't think a talk page will be difficult to use at all, even for newer editors. I can't help but be cynical and think that the forum is solely a convenience for wiki-inept WMF staff. And given that many WMF staff already do not check their talk pages, how is the community engagement team going to ensure that the forum remains regularly checked and not become a graveyard of hundreds of unanswered questions? This is already the case for a large number of WMF staff's talk pages, and unless there's a significant change in attitudes or a dedicated community engagement role for each department, I don't see this changing.

We are starting work on this process this quarter and are aiming to have it up and running in the next few months.

Given that there is already a place on-wiki to ask questions to the Foundation (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_question), our intention is to update this page and integrate it into the process we establish.

@elappen: Mass-moving open Space (Oct-Dec-2019) tasks to Space (Jan-Mar-2020). In case this task has been fixed (resolved) already or is not being worked on anymore (declined), please update the task status via the Add Action... → Change Status dropdown. Thanks!

In T232983#5938324, @elappen-WMF wrote:

This is still an important process that we expect our team to own. It is currently stalled due to the closing of Wikimedia Space (https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/next-steps-on-wikimedia-space/3184), but will be restarted in another location in the future.

Sorry, I had not looked at each latest comment in each task before mass-adding my previous comment here while cleaning up a bunch of 2019 tags in Phab.
In that case, should another active project tag be assigned, so this is tracked on a project workboard where someone could find this task? Or should this be declined?

Thanks @Aklapper. I removed the Space tag and added Comms, since that will presumably be the new home for this project.