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Contribute entry point
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Description

Persistent - Create.png (903×375 px, 48 KB)

The Contribute entry point is a persistent entry point that lists the different ways for editors to contribute. This is an extensible list where different products can add new ways to contribute. In this way users can discover the ways in which they can contribute, and have a place always available to return to them when needed. The entry point is available on a small set of wikis:

This Epic ticket will compile the tasks related to complete this entry point, extend it with more options, make it available gradually on more wikis, document it and support scaling the approach as the options to contribute grow.

Basic support and polishing

Instrumentation

Enablements

Discovery

Contribution activities for the list

Scaling the system

Avoid redundancies

Different projects may have added one-off solutions to support this type of functionality for their specific case. As the Contribute entry point becomes available we may want to remove these duplicated functionalities.

Related Objects

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Event Timeline

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General comment: this entry point should be customisable by the communities, both because that would be good to have and because many projects do not want unexperienced users to translate the pages through buggy ContentTranslation interface. Please ask ruwiki community before any deployment of this feature, for example, we have hid ContentTranslation adverts before and I will do it again since consensus in the community is pretty much the same: it should not be advertised widely (well, ideally, it should not be used by people that don’t know what they’re doing, as well, but that’s harder to do).

General comment: this entry point should be customisable by the communities

Thanks for the input @stjn. We plan to provide customization options which will include the possibility for communities to decide which items should not show for their wikis. We'll explore this as part of T321379: Special:Contribute should give the possibility to prevent specific cards from being displayed or change the link target.

The Contribute entry point has been created as a generic platform to expose all kinds of contribution tools from a central place. This will allow editors to find the tools available for them to contribute and for communities to decide which ones to expose more prominently.

Regarding customization, there are many possibilities. Feedback and observations from the initial set of pilot wikis (and others trying the features) will be super helpful to support this in the best way.

Jdlrobson subscribed.

Hey @Pginer-WMF do we have a sense of when we can ship this e.g. make Special:Contribute the default? When we added the feature flag SpecialContributeSkinsEnabled in 2022, the expectation was this was temporary and would be around for 1 year maximum but it is still there several years on which concerns me.

It seems currently the feature is only available on mlwiki, mnwiki, sqwiki and wlwiki.

I would like us alter the implementation slightly if it's going to stick around a lot longer (e.g. more than 6 months).

Thanks in advance for the update!

Hey @Pginer-WMF do we have a sense of when we can ship this e.g. make Special:Contribute the default? When we added the feature flag SpecialContributeSkinsEnabled in 2022, the expectation was this was temporary and would be around for 1 year maximum but it is still there several years on which concerns me.

It seems currently the feature is only available on mlwiki, mnwiki, sqwiki and wlwiki.

I would like us alter the implementation slightly if it's going to stick around a lot longer (e.g. more than 6 months).

Thanks in advance for the update!

Thanks for surfacing this, Jon.

We planned to move in this front much faster. We want to complete the improvements identified after the initial deployment (such as T345102) on pilot wikis before expanding to more wikis, but other fronts such as MinT MVP (T359072) have been taking more of our focus lately. This is expected to be the case for one more month (until the end of the fiscal year). I expect we can resume work on the Contribute menu on July onwards.

Thanks for updated. Since we are still a few months away from the feature being launched I guess we'll need to fix T365580 within the next month?

Ran across this in my http://localhost:8080/wiki/Special:SpecialPages today and started poking around to see if this was an old special page that could be sunset. Looks relatively new though.

Doesn't this overlap a bit with Extension:GrowthExperiments?

Is it being advertised in the right places? I'd never heard of it.

Above it sounds like there is an idea to replace the p-personal "Contributions" link with this. Is this accurate? I do not think this is a good idea. Power users use the "Contributions" link (the one that links to Special:Contributions/Your_Username) all the time. It'd be like deleting the "Watchlist" link, or moving the Watchlist behind an extra click or two, which would greatly decrease the efficiency of this common workflow.

Customization by each wiki was mentioned. Did that get coded up yet?

I hope this feature ends up being used and not just becoming technical debt in a couple years.

image.png (689×1 px, 128 KB)

I also have some concerns about what is being displayed. For example, the new page task is being displayed on enwiki. If given a choice, we would probably turn that off, as that is not a task we would want to channel newcomers towards. They will just have a bad experience when their articles get sent to AFD (Articles for Deletion). It takes a lot of experience to understand notability rules on big wikis.

Clicking the "new page" task on the Special:Contribute page brings up Special:WantedPages, which at least on enwiki, contains no useful information, instead containing links to recently deleted pages.

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The suggested tasks in GrowthExperiments Special:Homepage may be the same thing as Special:Contribute, but more mature and developed.

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I've moved tasks relating to the contribute entry point to the language team backlog as the language team are still working on this and web is not. @Pginer-WMF feel free to re-tag web team if you need to request code review from us!