Hey all,
Apologies for the delay. Two overview pages covering the technical and
business side of the project:
Regards
Seddon
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:29 PM Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A well-provisioned bulk api has been missing for some
time. Thanks for
working on this. And clearing up the recommended way for WP content to
appear and be linked in third-party searches and infoboxes is important --
the sort of thing that an internal policy (and way to subscribe to feeds)
can help.
I do hope we can host this on WM or openstack infrastructure, and do it in
a way that expands and improves the solid existing frameworks for HTML
dumps :)
S
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 8:43 AM Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
It's interesting that of all the strategy
recommendations, two are so far
being implemented. One is the Universal Code of Conduct, which has at
least
had plenty of discussion and publicity, that even
precedes the strategy
process. The other is this, which hasn't been particularly prominent
before, but the WMF seems to have a team working on it just a couple of
weeks after the final recommendations were published.
So while doing this is one of the strategy recommendations, it doesn't
seem
that is is now happening *because of* the
strategy recommendations....
Chris
On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 10:46 AM Gergő Tisza <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You can find some more discussion at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Re…
>
> As I mentioned there, the premise of the recommendation is that the
> movement needs new revenue sources; in part because the 2030 strategy
is
ambitious
and requires a significant increase in resources, in part
because
> our current lack of diversity (about 40% of the movement's budget is
from
> donations through website banners, and
another 40% from past banners
via
> email campaigns and such) is a strategic
risk because those donations
can
be
disrupted by various social or technical trends. For example, large
tech
> companies which are the starting point of people's internet experience
> (such as Facebook or Google) clearly have aspirations to become the end
> point as well - they try to ingest and display to their users directly
as
> much online content as they can. Today,
that's not a whole lot of
content
> (you might see fragments of Wikipedia
infoboxes in Google's "knowledge
> panel", for example, but nothing resembling an encyclopedia article).
Ten
years
from now, that might be different, and so we need to consider how
we
would sustain ourselves in such a world - in
terms of revenue, and also
in
> terms of people (how would new editors join the project, if most people
> interacted with our content not via our website, but interfaces
provided
by
big tech companies where there is no edit
button?).
The new API project aims to do that, both in the sense of making it
possible to have more equitable arrangements with bulk reusers of our
content (who make lots of money with it), and by making it easier to
reuse
> content in ways that align with our movement's values (currently, if
you
> reuse Wikipedia content in your own website
or application, and want to
> provide your users with information about the licensing or provenance
of
> that content, or allow them to contribute,
the tools we provide for
that
> are third rate at best). As the
recommendation mentions, erecting
> unintentional barriers to small-scale or non-commercial reusers was
very
much a
concern, and I'm sure much care will be taken during
implementation
> to avoid it.
>
> Wrt transparency, I agree this was communicated less clearly than
ideal,
> but from the Wikimedia Foundation's
point of view, it can be hard to
know
> when to consult the community and to what
extent (churning out so much
> information that few volunteers can keep up with it can be a problem
too;
> arguably early phases of the strategy
process suffered from it). This
is
a
> problem that has received considerable attention within the WMF
recently
(unrelated to API plans) so there's at the very least an effort to make
the
process of sharing plans and gathering feedback
more predictable.
Also, the pandemic has been a huge disruption for the WMF. Normally, by
this point, the community would have been consulted on the draft annual
plan, which is where new initiatives tend to be announced; but that has
been delayed significantly due to so many staff members' lives being
upheaved. Movement events where such plans are usually discussed had to
be
> cancelled, and so on.
>
> (Written with my volunteer hat on. I was involved in the strategy
process
> and helped write the recommendation snippet
Yair quoted upthread; I'm
not
involved
in the API gateway project.)
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
--
Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
--
Seddon
*Senior Community Relations Specialist*
*Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation*