Wikimedia-l March 2016

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

214 participants
116 discussions

Campaigns for Growth (new editors)
by Katharina Nocun 30 Mar '16

30 Mar '16

Hello everyone, let me briefly introduce myself since I'm new on this list: My name is Katharina Nocun, but I prefer to go by my nickname Katta/kattascha. I just joined WMDE as Project Manager for (Online-) Campaigns. Why am I writing on this list? WMDE is currently exploring ways how to improve the attracting and “onboarding” process for new editors.[1] We do not want to reinvent the wheel and know that there already have been awesome initiatives in our movement. We are at most interested in projects or findings that can be transfered to the German context and are scalable to large numbers of potential editors/new editors. We know that initiatives such as the research conducted by the former Growth Team at WMF or the current MOOC-campaign run by the community in France provide important empirical values and some lessons-learned. So here's my question: Do you have any information on successful (or failed) projects that were already applied somewhere in our movement that managed to attract new users and are as well transferable and scalable? Or do you know any interesting research documents or tests that provide meaningful insights for us? Then please let me know. I think we all can benefit from an exchange of current or past campaigns and initiatives. We will as well share with pleasure the insights of our coming activities in this area. Thanks, Katta [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2015-2016_round1/Wikim… -- Katharina Nocun Project Manager (Online-) Campaigns Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Tel. +49 (0)30-219 15 826-0 http://wikimedia.de

1 0

any open search engine for web project starting
by carl hansen 30 Mar '16

30 Mar '16

https://about.commonsearch.org/ "We are building a nonprofit search engine for the Web" Sounds alot like Knowledge Engine, if there were such a thing. Any overlap with wikimedia projects?

5 6

Wikimedia DC Book Grant Program Announcement
by Keilana 29 Mar '16

29 Mar '16

Hello all! (Apologies for cross-posting!) I’m pleased to announce the second round of Wikimedia DC Book Grants, a pilot program in which we help provide editors with resources they need to improve Wikimedia projects. If you live in the United States and actively edit Wikimedia projects, you are eligible; you do not have to be a member of WMDC or edit English projects. Applications are open for one week, from today through Monday, April 4. We expect to let people know by April 10 whether or not their grant request has been funded. More information is available on the Wikimedia DC website [1]. Apply for a grant here: https://podio.com/webforms/14722557/986696 [1] https://wikimediadc.org/wiki/Book_grants Thanks, Emily Temple-Wood Vice President, Wikimedia District of Columbia

5 5

The Case for Federation: Should Parts of WMF Be Spun Off?
by Erik Moeller 28 Mar '16

28 Mar '16

Hi folks, Now that the dust has settled a bit, I would like to expand on an idea that’s been touched on a few times (most recently, in an editorial by William Beutler [1]): the notion that WMF might be a more effective organization if it limited its own size in favor of focused spin-off organizations and affiliates. I was very much part of building the current WMF in terms of both size and structure, but I also think recent events underscore the fragility of the current model. WMF is still tiny compared with other tech companies that operate popular websites, but it’s a vast organization by Wikimedia movement standards. With nearly 300 staff [2] (beyond even our ambitious 2015 strategic plan staffing numbers), it dwarfs any other movement org. I can see three potential benefits from a more federated model: 1) Resilience. If any one organization experiences a crisis, other independent organizations suffer to a lesser degree than departments within that organization. 2) Focus. Wikimedia’s mission is very broad, and an organization with a clearly defined mandate is less likely to be pulled in many different directions -- at every level. 3) Accountability. Within a less centralized federation, it is easier to ensure that funding flows to those who do work the movement wants them to do. My experience is that growth tends to be self-reinforcing in budgetary processes if there are now clear ceilings established. I think that’s true in almost any organization. There’s always lots of work to do, and new teams will discover new gaps and areas into which they would like to expand. Hence, I would argue for the following: a) To establish 150 as the provisional ceiling for Wikimedia movement organizations. This is Dunbar’s number, and it has been used (sometimes intentionally, sometimes organically) as a limiting number for religious groups, military companies, corporate divisions, tax offices, and other human endeavors. [3][4] This is very specifically because it makes organizational units more manageable and understandable for those who work there. b) To slowly, gradually identify parts of the WMF which would benefit from being spun off into independent organizations, and to launch such spin-offs, narrowing WMF's focus in the process. c) To aim to more clearly separate funding and evaluation responsibilities from programmatic work within the movement -- whether that work is keeping websites running, building software, or doing GLAM work. Note that I'm not proposing a quick splintering, but rather a slow and gradual process with lots of opportunity to course-correct. More on these points below. == Potential test case: MediaWiki Foundation == A "MediaWiki Foundation" [5] has been proposed a few times and I suspect continues to have some currency within WMF. This org would not be focused on all WMF-related development work, but specifically on MediaWiki as software that has value to third parties. Its mission could include hosting services as earned income (and potentially as an extension of the Wikimedia movement’s mission). MediaWiki is used today by numerous nonprofit and educational projects that are aligned even with a narrow view on Wikimedia’s mission. Examples include Appropedia, OpenWetWare, WikiEducator, W3C’s WebPlatform, Hesperian Health Guides, and too many notable open source projects to list. Among commercial users, it has lost much ground to other software like Confluence, but it remains, in my view, the most viable platform for large, open, collaborative communities. Yet it’s a poorly supported option: many of the above wikis are outdated, and maintaining a MediaWiki install is generally more work than it needs to be. Building a healthy third party ecosystem will have obvious benefits for the world, and for existing Wikimedia work as well. It may also create a proving ground for experimental technology. Which work that WMF is currently doing would be part of an MWF’s mandate? I don’t know; I could imagine that it could include aspects like Vagrant, or even shared responsibility for MediaWiki core and MW’s architecture. == The Wiki Education Foundation precedent == It’s worth noting that this spin-off model has been tried once before. The Wiki Education Foundation is an example of an organization that was created by volunteers doing work in this programmatic space in partnership with staff of the Education Program at WMF, who left to join the new org. It is now financially independent, building its own relationships with funders that WMF has never worked with, and achieving impact at unprecedented scale. LiAnna Davis, who is today the Director of Program Support at Wiki Ed, wrote a detailed response to William’s blog post, which I think is worth quoting in full [1]: ----begin quote---- I worked for the WMF for nearly four years and have worked for the spun-off Wiki Education Foundation for the last two, and I strongly support the idea of spinning off more parts of WMF into independent nonprofits like ours. As you noted, Wiki Ed is a test case for your proposal, so for readers who don’t know our history: We started in 2010 as a pilot program (called the Public Policy Initiative) within WMF, funded by a restricted grant, to support university professors in the U.S. who wanted to assign their students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. The pilot showed the idea was successful, and so we started piloting it in countries as part of the Catalyst project (Arab World, Brazil, and India). The U.S. program had lingered at WMF without any real organizational support because the U.S. wasn’t a target region. WMF leadership saw its potential, however, and formed a volunteer Working Group of Wikipedians and academics who created the structure of the organization that became the Wiki Education Foundation in 2013. WMF gave us a small start-up grant to get us going, and provided fiscal sponsorship for us until our 501(c)3 status came through (and we could fundraise on our own). Today, we’re an independent organization, not funded by WMF, and we’ve scaled the impact of our programs incredibly. We’re supporting three times as many students, we’ve developed our own technology to support our programmatic work, and our students are busy addressing content gaps in academic areas on Wikipedia. So why are we so successful? There are a lot of factors, but there’s one I want to highlight here, because I think it’s a clear difference between when we were at WMF and our current work at Wiki Ed. We have one, very clear mission: We create mutually beneficial ties between Wikipedia and academia in the U.S. and Canada. The WMF mission is inspiring — but it’s really broad, just like our movement is. When we were doing this same project at WMF, I’d struggle to just focus on the Education Program and ignore the rest of the mission. Whenever I interacted with people outside the foundation (and I did so a lot), people would come to me with ideas to further WMF’s mission that weren’t in my program’s boundaries. I’d spend time trying to help, because I believed in the mission and wanted to help it along. I’m not the only one: I would see this idealism and commitment to the mission repeatedly among my colleagues at WMF. I still see it from the current WMF staff. They’re all there because they believe in the mission. They want to help, and it’s really hard to not try to help with everything, because you can see so many different facets of helping that mission. Essentially, with a mission as broad as WMF’s, it’s hard for staff to keep a narrow focus. *Everything* can seem mission-related. When your mission is as narrow as Wiki Ed’s, it’s easier to find your focus and keep your attention on developing one area well. This is a key strength of independent organizations — independent, narrower missions keep staff focused and more productive on achieving their small part of the overall Wikimedia mission. I strongly support more discussion about spinning off other parts of WMF into independent organizations. ----end quote---- == A "Movement Association"? == A more radical suggestion would be to spin off work on grantmaking and evaluation. This isn’t trivial -- there are legitimate arguments to keep this work close to other community-facing work WMF is doing. But there are undeniable benefits in greater separation. When it comes to large annual plan grants, much has been done to ensure that the FDC can operate as an independent body and evaluate each plan on its merits. Ultimately, however, the decision rests with the WMF, which has a much better understanding of its own programs (through the direct relationship with its ED) than of those of affiliates. Similarly, while WMF has done a fair bit to provide self-service evaluation tools to the movement at large, it’s not clear that its work is always held to the same standard as everyone else’s. A WMF grantee must very publicly report results and success metrics; WMF attempts to do so as a matter of course, but it is not accountable to another organization for failing to do so. Finally, as was discussed here a lot in recent weeks, WMF itself has no clear accountability to the movement. The Board elections are advisory in nature. There is no membership. Non-elected seats are filled by the Board with little visibility. There is a semi-permanent "Founder’s Seat". If grantmaking and evaluation responsibilities were increasingly shifted to a "Wikimedia Movement Association", this could gradually allow for true accountability to the movement in the form of membership and democratic, movement-wide decisions to make funding allocations on the basis of evaluation reports (through committees or otherwise). This may also make the endowment a more compelling proposition than it is today. Yes, keeping Wikimedia’s sites operational indefinitely is a very worthwhile goal. But what if the endowment ultimately also helped to support global, federated work towards Wikimedia’s vision? What if all affiliates -- indeed the whole movement -- were excited and motivated to help grow it? == Where to go from here? == There are lots of open questions in all of this. Should all site-wide fundraising remain inside WMF, for example, with funds being transferred to a movement entity? What’s the dividing line between "development for third parties" (MWF) and "development for Wikimedia" (WMF)? How would staff transition to new organizations? Where should those organizations be based? Should they be distributed, have offices? An important thing to remember here (a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully) is that big changes are best made in small steps, with room for trial and error. Implementing this strategy is, I think, a matter of first committing to it as an idea, and then creating coherent proposals for each step, publicly with broad input. First, if there is support for the general idea, I would recommend kicking it around: Are these the right kinds of spin-offs? What are the risks and how should existing affiliates be involved in the process? And so on. The fact that WMF has just experienced a major organizational crisis should not itself fill us with pessimism and despair. But we also shouldn’t ignore it. We must learn from it and do what reason tells us -- and in my view that is to build a more resilient _federation_ of organizations than what we have today. Warmly, Erik == Notes == [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-09/Op-ed [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:STAFF-COUNT [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [4] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-… [5] Our branding is confusing beyond repair. I don't think there's an easy fix here, and we should just embrace our nutty nomenclature (Wikimedia/MediaWiki/Wikipedia) at this point.

18 27

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiProject Accuracy
by James Salsman 28 Mar '16

28 Mar '16

Hi Olatunde, All the WikiProjects are individually responsible for accuracy, because of Good Article criteria 2 and 3 taken together. However, I agree with your sentiments. Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Update_Watch (inactive) https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/categorder.py?page=Category…

1 0

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WikiProject Accuracy
by Stephen Philbrick 28 Mar '16

28 Mar '16

Improved accuracy is like motherhood and apple pie — I trust no one will be opposed to the goal. However the initial proposal to achieve that goal needs a fair amount of work. *Clarify scope* – the page WikiProject_Accuracy is in the English Wikipedia, so implicitly, the initial scope is the English Wikipedia. I note that page has a scope section with no content as yet. However, I think taking on the entire English Wikipedia is biting off too much initially. Projects such as this work best if started as a pilot project. While someone may envision this eventually applying to all languages and treat English as the pilot, there is no way in which a project who scope is over 5 million articles can meaningfully be described as a pilot. Consider a much more limited scope pilot. For example all articles within the purview of wiki project medicine might be a good start, primarily because of the importance of that subject matter and partly because of the strong initiatives of editors in that area. *Clarify ownership* – the seal of approval appears to be granted by a group called the Project Accuracy's Editorial Review Board (PAERB). Are these WMF employees? Editors who meet some criteria? Who establishes the criteria? *Clarify mechanics* – unless there is a fundamental change to the way Wikipedia works, it will be meaningless to slap a seal of approval on any particular article, as that article could change literally seconds later. I see two possible options although there may be more. The first and most likely option is that the seal of approval appears on the article itself but is actually a permanent link to a reviewed version. This concept has been discussed by wiki project medicine I believe. A second option is to add the seal to the article but then invoke pending changes protection. It would probably have to be a new level of protection allowing only qualified editors, either members of the PAERB, or vetted by the PAERB to make changes. The second option will require a whole new level of bureaucracy. *Eventual scope* – the current Wikiproject Accuracy page suggests that RAAFA is a level beyond GA & FA. I don’t think anyone reasonably expects that all articles in the English Wikipedia will eventually become FA, so that implies that it is unreasonable to assume that all, or even any meaningfully significant proportion of all articles reach the level of RAAFA. Is it intended to limit this to some subset such as vital articles? Sphilbrick

5 5

The English Wikipedia and the mind of its search engine.
by Gordon Joly 27 Mar '16

27 Mar '16

Try "unlock the funk" and see how helpful the search engine is.... Gordo

3 3

Wikimania 2016 submissions deadline
by Ginevra 26 Mar '16

26 Mar '16

Hi everyone, this is just a friendly reminder about the deadline for submitting posters, discussions and trainings for Wikimania 2016. You have time until March 30, so if you haven't yet uploaded your proposal it is time to hurry up! The page is always the same: https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions Best, Ginevra Wikimania Programme Committee

1 0

Community Tech survey on watchlist use
by Danny Horn 26 Mar '16

26 Mar '16

Hi everyone, WMF's Community Tech team is starting to work on a Cross-wiki watchlist, one of the top 10 wishes in the Community Wishlist Survey that we conducted at the end of last year. [1] We're running a survey on how people use their watchlists, to help inform our work. If you've got a minute and want to share your thoughts, here's the survey link: https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1BRVhdayaTyuGJ7 The survey's hosted on a third-party service. We'll be running the survey for about a week, and once it's closed, we'll publish aggregated results on Meta.[2] Feel free to pass the link on, if you'd like to. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks! Danny Horn Product Manager, WMF Community Tech [1] Info on the Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey Info on the Cross-wiki watchlist project: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Cross-wiki_watchlist [2] Survey Privacy Statement: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Survey_Privacy_Statement_for_March_201…

1 0

Reading Team Q4 (April-Jun) Goals
by Jon Katz 26 Mar '16

26 Mar '16

Hi Folks, The Reading team's Q4 goals for 2015-16 are posted on Media Wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q4_Goals#Readi…. We arrived at these goals by taking the results of the Q4 brainstorming <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Quarterly_planning/Q4> and matching them against our strategy, speed and strengths. Below is a summary of what we aim to do in the April-June Quarter with more context than what you see on our goals page. You will notice a lot of cross-platform migration. That is no accident: we learn faster by launching on one platform and then migrating the idea to others. The goals are broken out by team or strategic theme. *Community Tech: Community Wishlist items* Ship features and fixes related to three wishes in the Wishlist Survey top 10 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey#The_top_10_w…> *Infrastructure: two-factor authentication*The infrastructure team will enable two-factor authentication <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_authentication> via AuthManager on the Wikimedia cluster. The goal here is to add another layer of security for accounts with important privileges. *New Readers (was: "reach new users in the global south")* *Web: decrease load time and cost for low-resource environments on mobile*This will be accomplished through lazy loading <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_loading> of images, and cutting default html size. This is in beta mobile channel by the end of this quarter and we plan to measure results and roll out to all users over the course of Q4. *Make a better encyclopedia experience* *Web: hovercards*Specifically, enable hovercards <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Hovercards> as default for logged-out desktop users on more than one wiki (this one is dependent on community approval). Hovercards represent a faster way of browsing Wikipedia that most readers prefer (as indicated by this survey <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Hovercards#Qualtrics_Survey_Re…>). It has been in beta for more than a year and the mobile version was recently launched to all users on our Android app. This is not as simple as turning on a switch, there are several improvements that will have to be made. One reason we are launching this is to clean up our beta site before picking up any new work. This is arguably "New Readers" as well, due to the performance gains from loading fewer pages. A community initiated proposal is being discussed to enable this on English Wikipedia. Please chime in! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal:_… *Android: launch the feed*This quarter, the iOS team launched a feed on the app home screen and it looks great and early results suggest users are responding well to it. The goal is to drive user retention by giving readers a reason to open up Wikipedia even if they don't have a specific query in mind. The Android team will also be implementing backend services to support the feed across platforms. *iOS: Universal links*"Universal Links" (aka deep links) provide convenient re-entry to the app from links and OS search, but do not advertise or promote the app. This is something that is already live on Android and partially supported on iOS. It allows users who prefer the app to open it from links or an OS query, since that is how most users get to Wikipedia. *A Community of Readers (interactive Wikipedia)* This is the third pillar that came out of our strategy process. No active development work is planned here. Future direction for this part of our strategy is currently being explored via a community consultation here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Interaction_Consultation Your feedback or questions are welcome. Thanks, J

1 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

Wikimedia-l March 2016