User talk:Jess

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Jess!

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-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 02:32, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Revealing votes

Hi Jess,

I saw you revealed the votes on the two photo challenges. That's fine (they're closed of course) but there's no need to go to that trouble. I have a program I use to count the votes and one of its functions is to automatically produce a version of the voting page with the votes/creators revealed. I'll hopefully be able to count the votes tonight and see who has won. Thanks for all your votes and your contributions. -- Colin (talk) 19:46, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Awesome! Thanks for the notice. I didn't go to too much trouble... I know regex, so it just took a minute to remove the collapse templates and hidden comments. I figured I was helping out someone who was probably doing it by hand, but if you have a program written up already, then I'll leave it to you next time! :) Thanks for your hard work! See you around! Jess Mann (talk) 20:42, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

How's your HTML/Javascript? Would you be able to help make voting/submission easier? -- Colin (talk) 20:57, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure. I'd be happy to help if I can. What do you guys need done? You're looking for some kind of click-to-submit system that would work something like twinkle and a click-to-vote system like Netflix? Or did you have something else in mind? Jess Mann (talk) 01:20, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I've just looked at your webpage. I guess you might know something then :-). As well as scripts on pages, there are also bots that do some tasks on Commons (such as the one that closes Feature Picture Candidates) -- are you familiar with any of that area? I know C# and I've written a couple of programs I run on my PC that (a) create the voting pages from the entries, with some validation and (b) count the votes and create the awards, with lots of validation. There's still a bit of manual work needed, to deal with people who submitted invalid entries or who voted wrongly or who aren't eligible to vote. I'm not familiar with the two systems you mention. I know the Picture of the Year competition is a much easier-to-use UI and I think it does some validation too, but I believe it is very time-consuming to set up (so much so that I wonder if it is not going to happen this year) and also time-consuming to complete the validation before winners are announced. So it probably isn't a great example to copy. But apart from that Commons doesn't have a great UI, though I'm sure it is possible to extend pages with HTML/Javascript to add whatever features we like.

Ideally, Photo Challenge would be managed completely online by several volunteers. We currently have the "run over by a bus" problem. All that should be required manually is to create the new challenge pages, and some online scripts/bots would validate the entries, create the voting pages, ensure voting was always within the rules, and then count the votes afterwards. I suspect that's too much to ask, at least initially! But Photo Challenge gets a lot of newbie participants, so I think the priority is to make it easy for people to submit their photo to the entries page and easy for them to give their 3 votes + as many !likes as they want. And there's also the complication of internationalisation. If you think you could create something, that would be wonderful. Perhaps it is best to create a simple mock-up and go from there. There are probably folk at the Village Pump who could give help, but it needs someone with ability in this area and the enthusiasm to take it on. -- Colin (talk) 08:26, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Okay, so it sounds like we're looking for a bot to handle the setup and counting phases a little more efficiently, and a better UI for people to vote. I'm not familiar with the POTY UI. I'm trying to track down an example of it, but not having much luck. It looks like a button is created below each entry calling the {{POTY2014/votebutton}} template, which users can click on to vote. I'm not sure what it looks like in practice, but I trust it's probably nice and engaging. I'll put some thought into it and perhaps ask at the VP. None of it should be too hard. It's just a matter of finding someone with the time and interest, really :p I'll see if I can help out! Thanks! Jess Mann (talk) 16:31, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

A UI for entry submission is also important. In fact, if we can get a better UI for both pages, then automating the rest can be lower priority. As far as bots go, we don't want to get into the situation where we still rely on one person with the relevant logins or technical know-how. Creating the voting pages or counting/validating the votes is never a reliable task -- the program I use is rarely happy first time. Some of the errors on the page will disappear with better UI, but there may still be issues that someone has to fix either on the page, or to make the program more accomodating. Don't worry about the POTY appearance -- I only mentioned that's the only other enhanced UI I'm aware of on Commons for voting. -- Colin (talk) 22:09, 2 March 2016 (UTC)