Charles,
Thank you for the clarification! That helps a lot. I agree with you that -
particularly for Abstract Wikipedia - such a policy will be extremely
important, as it would create content which will be served through numerous
languages. This is one consideration we need to have once we get to the
discussion about where Abstract Wikipedia should be stored.
Regarding Wikifunctions, I am much less concerned. Wikifunctions has,
compared to Wikipedia or even Wikidata, much less of a potential to capture
a conflict of interest: a function either does what it promises, or it
doesn't.
Obviously, that is a naive baseline. After all, the whole idea of
Wikifunctions is that functions are a form of knowledge, and therefore can
indeed capture conflicts of interest, particularly as a library of
function. I do expect that they do. But these issues should not become
immediately pertinent, because we're going to start with functions such as
adding numbers, or counting the length of a string.
Having said that, it is exactly this step now where we hope that the
community will draft its first set of behavioral guidelines. So, yes, now
is the time to also draft a policy regarding conflict of interests. I think
your suggestion is a good and important one! There are many policy,
guideline, and documentation pages that will need to be created.
For now we encourage in particular to consider the early drafting of two
specific ones (Staff editing and ideas related to Conduct/Behaviour/Being
welcoming) that we know it is important to have rough-outlines for, in
place from the start.
Beyond that, I believe the standard practice is for most local policies and
guidelines to be created "as needed" in the early months of a new wiki, in
order to make them contextually appropriate based on any unique
circumstances or issues that arise, and to enable the active community to
guide those decisions/discussions.
The standard global policies will of course be in-effect, and experienced
Wikimedians will bring familiarity with the usual best practices.
Cheers,
Denny
On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 1:11 PM Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia <
abstract-wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Nick,
Thanks for the link
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Disclosure_of_paid_editing
of which I was not aware.
It will help me clarify my concerns. I note that the page was created in
2020, which is quite some time after Wikidata was founded.
Without giving too many details, I'd like to mention that I was in
discussion in 2019 with a bot operator on Wikidata, about some
unsatisfactory edits. They were (clearly enough) related to some contract
work being done.
I agreed to have a face-to-face discussion about the matter at WikidataCon
2019. When that happened, it was a tense meeting. The person in question
was surprised and put out that I asked whether the editing was paid. But
there was no clear statement. And it turned out that the need for a
face-to-face was because the person was editing in bad faith on the
Wikidata talk page of the bot, because management wanted it that way.
So this was a classic conflict of interest.
I was operating as an individual here. I sent an account of the business
to Lydia Pintscher, but nothing happened as far as I know.
When I next had trouble with a bot operator, I just had to accept that
some bad edits might or might not have been paid. I worked through an
admin, and after nine months got something done.
The special circumstances here, that over 50% of edits on Wikidata have
been made by bots, have I think led to a very lax approach to paid editing.
This might have been predicted, but I think was not. In any case the
community-led approach, such as obtains on enWP where Jimmy Wales took a
tough line with paid editing early on, is very different. Wikidata for a
long time got along with a soft redirect to meta as its statement of
conditions of use.
I have no idea what the state of discussions of machine editing, or
commercially-oriented editing, on Wikifunctions might be. I'm raising this
now, because I think these matters should be aired.
Charles
On 22/11/2022 18:01 Nick Wilson (Quiddity) <nwilson(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Charles,
Yes, the Terms of Use will apply.
Please could you further clarify what you mean in your last line?
As far as I know the editing community is responsible for enforcing this
at all projects (except for the exceptions
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_paid_contribution_disclosure_policies>).
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the software team should help to
actively patrol new users and remind them of the disclosure requirements
(for the first few months), or if you're suggesting we all ought to create
an Alternative Policy for Wikifunctions specifically, or reminding us all
to create a local copy/confirmation of the basic information like Wikidata
has done
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Disclosure_of_paid_editing>, or
something else entirely?
Thanks,
Quiddity (WMF)
On Sat, Nov 19, 2022 at 2:43 AM Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia <
abstract-wikipedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
It shouldn't need saying that Wikifunctions will require compliance with
the WMF Terms of Use:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en
But I would like to say that anyway. In particular what is stated under
"Paid contributions without disclosure".
I would like to be assured that these conditions will be actively
enforced. By which I mean that these matters will not be delegated to the
nascent community to raise and deal with.
Charles
On 17/11/2022 22:45 Denny Vrandečić <dvrandecic(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-11-17
--
Code of Conduct for Wikifunctions
An important non-technical goal for Wikifunctions is to have a friendly
and welcoming environment for newcomers, both for people from the existing
Wikimedia communities and from beyond, right from the start.
A way to ensure that this will happen is to establish a code of behavioral
policies, to which all the community members must adhere. As of now, we
have several (non-exclusive) possibilities.
As a Wikimedia project, the Universal Code of Conduct
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct> will apply to
Wikifunctions automatically. That is a great starting point.
The first question is: whether we should also adopt the Technical Code of
Conduct <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct>, which in some
places is more specific than the Universal Code of Conduct. Since
Wikifunctions is a technical project it seems to make a lot of sense.
The second question is: whether we should have some additional
behavioral/conduct policies in place, which are either more specific or
cover additional ground compared to the Universal and the Technical Codes
of Conduct. Inspiration can be taken from the lists of existing
behavioral/conduct policies
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_community_code_of_conduct>.
Also in the case that we do not want to adopt the Technical Code of
Conduct, we should write our own version of it.
I would like to see suggestions for policies around giving newcomers a bit
of extra protection, particular given the complexity of our project. I'd
also like to hear thoughts on policies regarding the multilinguality of
Wikifunctions, which can hopefully learn from the best examples on
Wikimedia Commons or Wikidata, the large multilingual projects we already
have. Similarly, a policy that limits any discussion about “vim vs emacs”
to no more than two posts per month per contributor could be needed, and
some of you may have a few thoughts on how to avoid edit wars around code
style.
As with the previous recommendation
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-09-27> for
starting to draft a new policy before Wikifunction launches, we encourage
everyone to discuss options, and perhaps draft content. Let’s centralize
the discussion in this update's talkpage, and link to draft policies from
there.
We will put a space where folks can state their agreement and disagreement
with adopting the Technical Code of Conduct (as well as state their
indifference, so we can estimate engagement). Besides that, the page is
open for suggestions for further behavioral policies, and even drafts for
these.
We are aware that we will not start with a perfect set of policies, and
this is not the goal. The goal is to at least try to have the most
important pieces in place from day one, so that we don’t start with an
entirely blank slate. This is similar to the initial staff editing policy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Staff_editing> that
was recently drafted. And just as with that policy, it is clear that the
results are not written in stone, but will be amenable to change and will
evolve as the actual community of Wikifunctions starts forming. But it is a
good idea to have the first few guidelines at hand right from the
beginning, and not to scramble reactively too much.
As it is always the case with such policies, a strong turnout would show a
strong commitment to these policies. I hope that our nascent
proto-community that is forming around Wikifunctions will show up and
demonstrate our commitment to a set of policies that will lead to an
inclusive and civil community in the future. Please take the time to let us
know your thoughts.
WikiConference North America
Last Saturday, we were presenting Wikifunctions virtually at the
WikiConference North America / OpenStreetMaps USA. The session was
recorded, but at the very end Denny’s Internet connection failed which took
away that opportunity from the community to ask questions live. However, we
still collected the questions and answered them on the wiki of the
conference
<https://wikiconference.org/wiki/Submissions:2022/Wikifunctions_-_a_new_Wikimedia_project#Questions>.
Thanks to all attendees, and thanks for these great questions!
Development updates
Experience & Performance
- Fixed more FE bugs
- Enabled websockets in the evaluator, allowing two-way communication
with orchestrator (T318359 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318359>)
- Implemented versioning of Avro schema (T321752
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321752>)
- Submitted fixes and test coverage improvements for current
perform_test flow (T321495 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321495>
, T321492 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321492>, T312290
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T312290>)
- Made function view page implementation and test tables
mobile-friendly (T310162 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T310162>)
- Implemented FE integration test for connecting implementations and
testers to functions (T318426
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318426>)
Meta-data
- Revised version finished: Record which implementation gets selected (
T320457 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T320457>)
- Further work on caching tester results in MediaWiki DB (T297707
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T297707>)
- Drop back-compat. code in orchestrator & evaluator (T291136
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T291136>)
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--
Nick "Quiddity" Wilson (he/him)
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation
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