MZMcBride, I agree with you, but let me split out one thing:
On 20 August 2014 04:09, MZMcBride wrote:
> the one complaint I _never_ hear is that
> Wikipedia has a readership problem.
Then you'll hear it from me.
First, let's make one thing clear: the reader doesn't exist; it's just a
rhetorical trick, and a very dangerous one. For more:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_of_the_reader
Page views, however brute a concept, exist; and I think they're telling
us we do have a readership problem. For it.wiki, in the last year I see
a suspiciously similar decrease in desktop pageviews and editing
activity (possibly around –20 %). It would *seem* that every user
converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki.
Long story:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_sudden_decline_of_Italian_Wiki…>
The page above is just a collection of pointers that I probably won't
be able to pursue in the coming months, to study an unprecedented
collapse of editing activity and active editors on it.wiki. However,
there /are/ several things worth looking into and we do have a huge
problem (or several).
Can anything be done about it? I don't know. In its brief history, WMF
software development has always been irrelevant for the increase of
editing activity and reach. Let's hope for a counterexample.
Nemo
P.s.: Yes, this message is focused on one small thing only. That's just
about what we are/were already doing, while most opportunities lie in
what we're not doing, see the sister projects and [[strategy:List of
things that need to be free]]; we like to think otherwise, but our free
culture projects are still very marginal.
Hi,
It is nice that there are several official blogs. However it is hard to
navigate from blog to blog to discover what is going on at each chapter.
Would it make sense to link to all official blogs from
http://blog.wikimedia.org/ ?
Cheers,
Micru
Hello everyone,
At the request of the Board of Trustees, I have posted the minutes of the
August 6-7, 2014 meeting in London, which you can find here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2014-08-06
Thank you,
Stephen LaPorte
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
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> These are just assertions, however. I liked your earlier comments
> because they are testable against the architecture (even if the
> current implementation, early as it is, will fail many of these
> tests). What real world needs cannot be met by a comment-centric
> architecture for .. commenting? How important are they?
>
Erik, a major property of a document-centric architecture that is lost in a
structured one is that it's open-ended, which means that end users can
build new features and flows on top of it, without the need to request the
platform developers to build support for them (sometimes even without
writing new software at all; new workflows can be designed and maintained
purely through social convention).
That's not something that's easy to do when the basic raw material for
communication is split into comments and compartmentalized as table records
with different owners. Such change means that a community that now can
handle their own growth is made to utterly depend on the developers as
gatekeepers for its expansion. In a project where the development team is
understaffed, that's not a healthy proposition.
Sure, you have proposed a Workflow management system in the works, but with
all respect that's pie in the sky. That possibility is under-specified,
would require a lot of research and development with unclear goals and
requirements, and there's no guarantee that it would ever be fit for the
purpose. Please understand why we are wary of such proposal as the solution
for all the flexibility requirements.
Sincerely, it looks like you have this grand vision on how a comment
platform should work, and there's this blind spot to it. Despite repeated
attempts by several experienced editors trying to explain to you how this
architectural change would affect the essence of the project smooth
operation and well-being, you dismiss them by focusing on a single feature
at a time and missing the forest for the trees.
The point is not how we could replicate this or that feature on Flow, it's
how we allow support for all future workflows that we don't know about yet,
without requiring that software changes are made to the platform for each
new need. We know that Wiki systems are valid platforms to support such
expansion requirements, because we have seen them working; but we don't
know how the structured architecture will behave, and there's no reason to
believe it would work - no other structured system have achieved anything
similar. You ask "how important are these needs"? I tell you they are
*essential* to the community; the existing encyclopedia couldn't have been
built without this openness.
You asked Todd to make requirements that are testable against the
architecture. Well, I have one: how well does it allow end-users to build
new unforeseen workflows without requiring development of ad-hoc software
and changes to the platform?
I hope you give consideration to this argument before dismissing it as
inconsequential. So far it seems that the decision has already been made
and that your question ("Do we want discussions to occur in document mode, or
in a structured comment mode?") is rhetorical. I hope that this happens not
to be true, and the decision is still open to debate from the community.
Wil Sinclair wrote:
>
> Flow needs a deep and broad community consensus
> to what would probably amount to the biggest single
> change in the history of the project for the day-to-day
> collaboration amongst editors that is so vital to our success.
Wouldn't it be easier to achieve such consensus if there was any
actual evidence that Flow or any other improvement on talk pages would
improve editor engagement? There is an existence proof that tens of
millions of editors have created nearly ten million articles amounting
to dozens of gigabytes of text using talk pages as they have existed
since 2003. Why haven't the Foundation's major engineering changes
ever been made contingent on the existence of conclusive empirical
data about improvements for those editors?
Where are the usability studies to determine whether Flow makes things
easier or more efficient for editors? Are any planned?
Foundation strategy increasingly seems to me like Craigslist if it had
been infiltrated by hundreds of engineers adding add real-time ad
listing updates, black backgrounds for pictures, WYSIWYG ad editing,
and replacing hypertext function links with minimalist icons. Someone
should sneak up on Craig Newmark and make a video recording of his
reaction to suggesting WYSIWYG editing, and play his reaction to
Foundation leadership staff every morning at the start of their work
day.
I wrote the email below to Lila and the WMF Legal department asking
for access to records (and reports) they hold on me, but I'm sad to
say that after 3 weeks waiting, I have yet to receive an
acknowledgement. As a Wikimania London volunteer I had a moment to
speak with Jan-Bart, and some of my Wikimedia Commons uploads were
even featured as part of a presentation by WMF Legal on their
successes in the past year, so there was plenty of opportunity for us
to have the friendly chat I suggested.
Can someone recommend if there is a WMF policy on transparency that
volunteers can rely on for questions like mine, or does the law in the
USA give me any specific rights of access to records or reports the
WMF may keep on me that would mean that WMF Legal would do more than
stay silent in response to reasonable requests from its established
volunteers?
Thanks,
Fae
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2014 13:49:45 +0100
Subject: Request for disclosure of all WMF records relating to Fae
To: Lila Tretikov <lila(a)wikimedia.org>
Cc: legal <legal(a)wikimedia.org>, Jan-Bart de Vreede <jdevreede(a)wikimedia.org>
Dear Lila,
The Wikimedia Foundation keeps information such as management
summaries about me, which have never been shared with me.
[Redacted example material]
Could you please ensure that all records that the WMF has retained
about me are copied to me? It would seem fair that I have the
opportunity to both understand what the WMF management and board have
available to refer to when discussing my activities for Wikimedia, and
that I have a chance to both correct any mistakes in this personal
data, or to ask that inappropriate material gets permanently removed
from WMF databases.
I will be active in both the Wikimania hackerthon and conference in
the coming week, should you or an employee wish to informally review
this request with me in person, along with my reasons for making the
request at this time.
...
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Dear WikiMedia foundation,
in the context of a EU research project [1], we are interested in accessing
wikipedia access traces.
In the past, such traces were given for research purposes to other groups
[2].
Unfortunately, only a small percentage (10%) of that trace has been made
made available (10%).
We are interested in accessing the totality of that same trace (or even
better, a more recent one, but the same one will do).
If this is not the correct ML to use for such requests, could please anyone
redirect me to correct one ?
Thanks again for your attention,
Valerio Schiavoni
Post-Doc Researcher
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland
1 - http://www.leads-project.eu
2 - http://www.wikibench.eu/?page_id=60