User problem:
The Event List has data that could be useful to people, but it is hard for them to know which events and/or communities may the most relevant to them since some things are global (i.e., events) and some are local (i.e., WikiProjects). We should make this distinction more clear through the user experience, so that theypeople can go ahead and join thosemore easily take action to join events and communitiesities that interest them through the list.
Background:
The Event list was first developed as a global list of events that use Event Registration. The idea behind the global nature of the Event List was that a) many Wikimedians are multi-lingual so they may be interested in events across wikis rather than on just wiki, b) many events are on Meta-Wiki, but they apply to another wiki in terms of contributions, and c) it is useful for all Wikimedians to get a global sense of what's going on in terms of organized activity, even if they cannot directly participate in some events themselves, since this is a global movement and there should be broad transparency around the work that is happening overall.
The MVP of the Event List was very basic, since we wanted to build something that could be released quickly for early feedback. To do this, we built an MVP that only focused on the data that we already have for events, rather than collecting and displaying any new data points.
However, since the Event List is global, we do need to add more data points to make it useful. In particular, we should show the wiki(s) of the event. This way, users can know which events they can meaningfully participate in. We have an epic for this work (T366765), but it has not been worked on yet due to competing priorities. This is now becoming higher-priority, since more wikis are requesting that at the extension is enabled on their wikis, so the global list will truly becoming more global rather than largely being a list of events on Meta-Wiki (which is what it has been, more or less, over the last few months).
Meanwhile, we are also focused on expanding the event list to have an extra tab ("Communities"), which displays WikiProjects (see epic: T368329). Again, we are trying to do a simple first MVP. To do this, we are first creating a local implementation. This means that, for example, if someone is on Swahili Wikipedia, they will see WikiProjects for Swahili Wikipedia only on the "Communities" tab. In the future, we may make the Communities tab global, but we are starting at first with a simple local implementation.
Overall, this creates a confusing situation for the following reasons:
- Events tab is global, but users may not know that it is global and they may not know which events are directly applicable to them (in terms of the language wiki focus)
- Communities tab is local, but users may not know that
How we would like to improve usability:
We would like to improve this situation by looking holistically at the problem and seeing how the user experience can be improved so that users know how to usefully interact with the data so that they can:
- Find events and projects that they can meaningfully join
- Understand what is directly related to them vs. what is more of a general curiosity but less directly related to them
