- Dec 16: Consumer Tools Team
- Dec 17: Traffic Team
- Dec 18: N&Rs Team
- Dec 19: UGC Team
- Dec 20: UXFCP Team
Hey hey, my lovely people! After Héctor for Consumer Tools, Jenny for the Traffic Team, and Dylan for News & Ratings, I am the last to speak about the product team I've supported (part of) this year, starting with the User-Generated Content team aka UGC!
The UGC team, dedicated to the creation of tools that will help you create content on wikis, started the year with two big pillars in mind:
- Structured content assistance
- Widgetized WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools
Aside from the weekly bug fixes, let's see what they released this year.
Simplified Version of the VisualEditor[]
Design mock of the new Simplified Editor
We started the year by releasing a simplified version of the VisualEditor in February. The change meant a new location of certain tools, a new name for some options, and some elements got hidden from first view in sub-menus. We also labeled all the items in the submenus, so it's clear which icon to use for what. These changes didn't help to bring in more edits or editors as we'd hoped, but the changes did prove to be more accessible and intuitive, and that was reason enough for us to productize.
CodeMirror Update for the 2010 WikiEditor[]
CodeMirror is an extension that provides the syntax highlighting in MediaWiki's wikitext editor. Updating this for the 2010 WikiEditor was a necessity but proved to be a more daunting task than originally anticipated. After a false start in February that led us to revert the release, we kept on working on the feature and opted for a phased release instead with more community testing. Toward the end of July, the CodeMirror upgrade was released to all wikis.
Suggested Pages[]
Suggested Pages banner on light (left) and dark (right) theme
Halfway through September, Suggested Pages got released after having experimented with it since July. Suggested Pages refers to the banner pop-up appearing in the down-left corner to desktop users only. It surfaces to the editor after they successfully complete an edit as a call to action to continue making edits on related pages, and it'll do this for the first 5 edits. The prompt includes 5 hyperlinks as potential other areas that may need similar edits.
Structured Quotes[]
This is probably the update that spread out the most over the entire year: Structured Quotes. Structured content is information or content that is organized in a predictable way and is usually classified with metadata. So you can say that Structured Quotes is a new template that makes the digestion of the information within the template easier on search bots, used by search engines such as Google. Throughout the year, we've been testing with the help of select communities, which then knew a proper site-wide release of the feature in August. However, even after the release, we've been improving on the template and adding the necessary template documentation. The last update here will be the addition of the StructuredQuote button within the VisualEditor, as an option in the "insert" menu, which went live yesterday.
User and Brand Safety Changes[]
A lot has also happened this year where our user and brand safety has been concerned, and a lot of these changes were made possible with the help of the UGC team:
- Enable emailconfirmed editing on wikis aimed at children only
- General anon editing changes and emailconfirmation requirements
- Building of tools to help reviewing edits for general user safety
Looking Ahead to 2025[]
The best way to move forward is to do so with lessons learned from the past. One of these lessons is that the UGC team discovered that the average editor struggles to stay updated with new releases and updates to existing features. Despite best efforts to communicate this through blog posts and Discord announcements, it's hard to reach everyone. So with that in mind, the team aims to introduce highlighting options to help draw attention to new tools and releases in 2025.
We are also aware that such a problem doesn't only exist on a global scale. Wikis often have lots of projects they want to undertake but despite using things like notices at the top of pages, it remains hard to get people's attention. The UGC team has already started to build what we're currently referring to as the "Editor Task Manager Tool". With this, we hope to make it easier for admins to create and highlight tasks that need to be done on the wiki.
To round this off, we will reiterate a 2024 commitment that sadly didn't reach productization before we ran out of days in 2024: the return of the Welcome Tool!
With that, I have not much more left to say than a big thank you to all the hard work the UGC team has done this year, and to all of you for sticking with the platform and working hard to make your wikis the best they can be! I'll catch you again tomorrow, but for now, I'll just say: Happy holidays, everyone, and happy editing!
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