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Changes to Research Showcase MediaWiki
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Description

A topic was added on the discussion page for the research showcase mediawiki that the page is getting too long and that possibly parts of it should be archived.
This is an opportunity to reexamine the use of this page and offer a redesign- is Search a possibility? Can we add a Search box? Maybe leave some information on the page and archive previous years?

We will respond on the talk page and revisit this task when Isaac is back from Sabbatical.

Event Timeline

fwiw, this is how we have archived formal collaborator info in the past: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Collaborators/Archive . You can follow a similar approach if you decide to move the past ones to another page. (I do agree with the comment that it's too long.)

Example search box for when we archive content: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Isaac_(WMF)/sandbox

There's currently one subpage that has essentially no content but if you search for the word details, you can see that it is found. I think this functionality allows us to reasonably do one page per year -- e.g., /Showcase/2022, /Showcase/2021, ... The alternative is a generic numbered archive but given that each year should be about an equal and reasonable chunk of content, we might as well keep it that way. And maybe we can decide to archive the past year in March or something each year.

fwiw, this is how we have archived formal collaborator info in the past: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Collaborators/Archive

Thanks for pointing this out! My understanding is that the word Archive in the page title is essentially a norm and doesn't actually do anything technical. In that sense, I think I like the years approach for this use-case for the reasons above but I'd forgotten we have that archive for collaborators.

@Isaac indeed it's just a name and I see how other ways can be more useful.

w.r.t. the search box: I searched for "Aaron" and see only 1 result, while we have had multiple Aaron speakers. Do I miss something in the way the search is intended to work?

@leila it'll just do one search result per page so that's intended behavior and can't be changed, but it does point out that as long as we're shifting to Search as the means for discovery of content over skimming, we could make every month's showcase it's own subpage without too much additional overhead and then indeed a search for someone's name would pop up every showcase they were a part of as a separate result. So /Showcase/2021/01, /Showcase/2021/02, ...

I see. That clarifies. Thank you!

Thanks all for the patience on this -- I have now moved all the past showcases onto monthly archive pages and added the search functionality to the main page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#Archive

Ahead of Wednesday's showcase, I will likely now blank the showcases from pre-2024 from the main page to reduce down its size. This will break section links to prior showcases but I suspect this is minimal traffic (and hopefully any readers would then discover the archives and find what they're looking for). Going forward, I suspect we'll maintain no more than the current year's worth of showcases on the main page. But please let me know if you anticipate any issues around this that mean I should hold off from this next step.

Thank you for taking this on, @Isaac! I think this is a nice improvement for the page.
Would it be possible to add the theme of the showcase to its subpage title so that it reads something like Showcase/2021/01 - Addressing Gender Gaps? Not a big deal if it's not possible, but I think it would help those that prefer skimming vs. using the search functionality since the latter can be a bit confusing sometimes.
Regardless of whether it's possible, I don't think this is a blocker and I like the idea of archiving anything pre-2024 and announcing this in tomorrow's showcase so people are aware.

Would it be possible to add the theme of the showcase to its subpage title

Good idea. I think it should be doable (just need to move the pages to the new titles). The downside would be it's harder to guess the page title but maybe that's not an issue. One alternative too: when we picked up this task, there was also a question about whether we wanted some sort of "summary" of our archive too. Maybe the listing of pages isn't the place to do that and instead we add a basic table to the page with each month, a link to the full description, and the theme?

@KinneretG is this task done? (per current description it reads as done to me.) If it's not done, can you update the description to reflect what's left?

Resolving this since the mediawiki page is indeed updated.
Thank you @Isaac for your work on this!