Out of curiosity, why does our wiki partnership strategy change from feature to feature (or does it?)?

In T274193#6972409, @iamjessklein wrote:

Out of curiosity, why does our wiki partnership strategy change from feature to feature (or does it?)?

I'm reading the question above as having a couple of parts. Those "parts" and "responses" are below.

Parts

1. "What is our strategy for identifying and partnering with wikis in the development of new features?"
2. "Why do the wikis we partner with sometimes vary from feature-to-feature?"

Responses

1. "What is our strategy for identifying and partnering with wikis in the development of new features?"

For each new feature, @Whatamidoing-WMF and I define:

• What the feature "promises"
• Which projects and people are most likely to value said promises
• Which "representation" looks like in the context of this particular feature (e.g. the project's language and script, the geographic location of the volunteers who contribute to a project, etc.)

I wonder if looking through the spreadsheet where Sherry and I do this thinking will be the most helpful way of understanding how the above come together: Talk pages project/Wiki selection.

2. "Why do the wikis we partner with sometimes vary from feature-to-feature?"

In short, people and projects will identify with/value different features differently.

In T274193#6974476, @ppelberg wrote:

2. "Why do the wikis we partner with sometimes vary from feature-to-feature?"

In short, people and projects will identify with/value different features differently.

Also, we often rely on one or two editors in a smaller community to keep us informed about what that community is thinking. If that person stops being available, then we may not be able to find anyone else in that community who is willing to provide in-depth help. Our volunteer partners may spend dozens of hours on a project over many months, and not everyone is both willing and able to do that.

Quick note: I think this might be useful for French Wikipedia, MediaWiki.org, and Meta-Wiki, as well as arwiki, cswiki, and any of the interested partners from previous projects.

In T274193#7067804, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

Quick note: I think this might be useful for French Wikipedia, MediaWiki.org, and Meta-Wiki, as well as arwiki, cswiki, and any of the interested partners from previous projects.

All that you described above sounds good to me, @Whatamidoing-WMF.

Next steps
From the conversation Sherry and I had this afternoon:

• Contact volunteers at ar.wiki, cs.wiki, fr.wiki, hu.wiki, meta.wiki, mediawiki.org, and nl.wiki to confirm their interest, or lack thereof, in having the Topic Subscription beta feature be made available at their projects in the coming weeks.

@ppelberg , this is done. All seven of the communities we've talked to would like to have this feature.

I note in particular a wish at arwiki to have it enabled in the entire Wikipedia: namespace, as being useful for admins. A per-page or per-namespace (default-on) setting is something that we might want to explore further as part of scaling or testing.