The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2022-09-27
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Right from the start, Wikifunctions will be somewhat more complex than many
other Wikimedia projects. Sure, over time many of the Wikimedia projects
have accrued a lot of complexity: just think about Lua modules
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua>, conditional templates
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:If>, or the sophisticated use of
MediaWiki features to support the workflows of the community.
These complexities, however, have grown in scale alongside their wikis'
communities, and all of the projects have started out with a very simple
workflow. Wikifunctions will not. Though we are trying our best to make the
project as accessible and usable as possible, we also want to help the
community as best as possible to get the project off the ground.
In order to do so, we at the Wikimedia Foundation want to do something that
we usually don’t: directly support the community by contributing on-wiki to
the main namespace of Wikifunctions in our capacity as staff, from our
staff accounts.
Usually, edits to the main namespace for staff accounts are limited to
exceptional circumstances. This is primarily to make it very clear that the
content of each of the projects belongs to its community. This is
particularly important for projects like Wikipedia, where sometimes subtle
changes in wording can be very important and have significant real-world
consequences, as we were just reminded again recently
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Recession>.
Wikifunctions is different. Its content will be functions, their
implementations, and other supporting objects. We would like to be able to
work together with the community, in our paid time as staff members. This
means working on functions, helping to improve implementations, showing
exemplary cases of how to use new features, and also speeding up the
creation of implementations for functions requested by the community.
One particular domain where we are planning to contribute is for functions
around natural language generation. I think that, without staff support,
the necessary functions to make Abstract Wikipedia possible might take a
long time to develop, and that support by staff can speed up that key area
considerably.
Despite this approach, we also want to make sure that Wikifunctions remains
under the full ownership of the community. Whereas in the beginning our
staff accounts might have certain special rights on Wikifunctions (e.g. the
right to create instances of certain types), we want these roles to be
transferred to the community sooner rather than later. We don’t want to be
the ones making policy decisions beyond what is technically necessary (e.g.
for platform performance or code-security reasons). We don’t want to be
assigning sysop rights or other community leadership positions. We don’t
want to make policy decisions about which functions, implementations, or
which test cases are deemed necessary, valuable, or acceptable. All of
these areas, and more, should be fully owned by the Wikifunctions community.
It seems prudent and necessary, in order to be transparent, that the
community drafts a policy together with us in order to define how we will
be editing the Wikifunctions main namespace as staff. Since we will need
this policy to be in place from the beginning of Wikifunctions, we are
proposing to go the unusual path of creating a preliminary policy here on
Meta with interested community members, which we will then transfer to
Wikifunctions upon launch. That policy should be revisited once the
Wikifunctions community has formed, and once we have hands-on experience
with such edits.
*Request*: We are calling for contributors to lead the creation of this
preliminary policy, and asking everyone to comment and contribute to the
policy. If no contributors step forward, the Abstract Wikipedia team will
take the lead on drafting the preliminary policy. The policy will be
drafted at Abstract Wikipedia/Staff editing
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abstract_Wikipedia/Staff_editing&action=edit&redlink=1>
and
discussed at Talk:Abstract Wikipedia/Staff editing
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia/Staff_editing&action=edit&redlink=1>
.
There are many questions to be answered: what limitations should staff
accounts face, if any? What about staff who are also volunteers? Should
staff also apply for sysop rights and other roles, or should they
automatically have certain rights and thus also responsibilities? How
should staff engage in debates, if at all? These are difficult questions
that would benefit from a preliminary answer, given to staff by the
community.
Note that all of this is strictly regarding Wikifunctions, and does not
have any implications for the other Wikimedia projects.
We are looking forward to working together!