Summary

Background

The Future IdeaLab Campaigns Survey was launched in early December 2015, and ran for one month. It was targeted across many projects including Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource, Wikidata, and Wiktionary across several languages including French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and English. Contributors on mailing lists for Wikimedia India and CEE were also contacted.

The survey asked community members "Which IdeaLab campaign topic do you prefer?"

Please refer to the AllOurIdeas page for complete results

AllOurIdeas provides a score for each option based on preferences from survey participants. The score answers the following question: If this campaign idea was randomly paired with another idea from this survey, what percentage of the time would it be preferred? In addition the score by clicking on the idea itself, AllOurIdeas will show how many completed contests it has gone through, which indicates how many times it was compared to another idea. Lower values in completed contests tend to produce more extreme scores.

Results

Additional notes and observations

• Several submissions to the AllOurIdeas survey were better suited as specific proposals or ideas rather than a theme for an IdeaLab campaign. In these cases, we identified a larger theme for which the idea would sensibly fit under. For instance, "Improve Abuse Filter" was considered too specific, but would fit in a larger theme of how to better address/prevent disruptive editing behavior.

Conversely, some submissions were too broad in scope, and would benefit from some narrowing so that a strategic problem or need within Wikimedia projects can be addressed. For instance, "Improvements in enabling content creation" (which admittedly, I, User:I JethroBT (WMF), initially seeded into the survey) could be interpreted to apply to most efforts that contributors to Wikimedia projects engage in.

Consequently, the above chart is sorted roughly by # of contests for ideas consistent with themes we identified from all submissions. The raw list of submissions and scores can be viewed on AllOurIdeas, and is also in the collapsed table above.

• Some ideas were added later in the survey, and did not get the benefit of being voted for (or against) very often. These scores tended to be more extreme and is based on the way AllOurIdeas calculates score.
• AllOurIdeas provides anonymized information on participants and their behavior in the survey. Review of this data shows behavior consistent with attempting to game the system by, for instance, selectively voting for or against specific topics while ignoring most other topics via skipping. These votes were discounted from analysis. Topics that were most frequently subjected to this behavior were:
  • Workflows or tools for editing and maintenance tasks,
  • Correcting systematic bias in article content,
  • Developing bots for routine maintenance tasks,
  • Accessibility to and use of multimedia content in projects,
  • Improvements in enabling content creation, Developing or improving content review or curation processes
  • Strategies and tools to handle cases of long-term abuse, and
  • Tools to help experts on a subject matter advise on that subject matter

In total, these invalid votes represented about 7% of the 1880 votes cast.

• One technical limitation in AllOurIdeas was that descriptions were limited to 140 characters that could not contain any external links. As a result, users were sometimes presented with choices that they did not recognize and could not easily get more information about.

Notes