Hi everyone,
I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan for
FY18-19 is now on Meta[1].
This year, we have organized our efforts around three goals that focus on
making critical improvements to our systems and structures to ensure that
we’re better positioned for our coming work against the strategic
direction[2]. The Foundation’s goals for this year should not only move us
closer to knowledge equity and service, but will prepare us to execute
against the 3- to 5-year strategic plan which we intend to develop this
year in order to guide the Foundation’s work into the future.
As you’ll see, we’ve made some changes to the structure of this year’s
annual plan. This year’s plan is organized around three goals for the
Foundation’s work in the year to come. By restructuring the Annual Plan, we
have written a plan for the whole Foundation, rather than an aggregation
of plans from all of our departments and teams. In this sense, we’re
seeking to become a better-integrated institution, rather than a collection
of teams and departments with disparate goals.
We’ve also reduced the overall length of the published Annual Plan. We
wanted to make sure that the focus and goals of our work don’t get lost in
the details. Of course, we know that many community members enjoy reading
the particulars of our planned work, so you can still access the details of
departmental programs through links to their descriptions on Meta or
MediaWiki.org. These links will provide interested readers with detailed
departmental programs, which describe the specific and detailed program
goals, impact and outcomes. This change does not sacrifice the depth and
rigor of our planning process, but rather, it is meant to keep the Annual
Plan lean and focused while allowing interested readers to dive deep into
the details.
Finally, we’ve expanded the planning framework we instituted last year for
cross-departmental programs to all of our programs across the Foundation.
This allows us to clearly link a program’s resources to outcomes and
measures. As such, we’ve presented the Annual Plan budget in terms of our
investments in the three defined goals rather than in terms of our internal
organizational structure.
Thank you all for your support over the past year. I'm really looking
forward to your feedback on this year's proposed plan during the open
comment period -- a reminder it runs through May 15th.
Thanks!
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
Annual_Plan/2018-2019/Draft
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017
--
Katherine Maher
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885>
+1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873>
kmaher(a)wikimedia.org
https://annual.wikimedia.org
Hello everyone,
to better serve the technical communities that build free and open source software for the movement as well as the communities who use Wikimedia's APIs to interact with our projects, the Wikimedia Foundation is making some structural changes. The Technical Engagement team is a new team in the Technology department of the Wikimedia Foundation reporting to the Foundation's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Victoria Coleman. This new team has two sub-teams: the Wikimedia Cloud Services team and the Technical Advocacy team. Bryan Davis will manage the Technical Engagement teams. He will also lead the hiring process for a new Developer Advocacy Manager position, which will take over some of the management duties.
The Wikimedia Cloud Services team will continue to focus on maintaining the Wikimedia Cloud VPS infrastructure as a service <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Infrastructure_as_a_service_.…> platform, the Toolforge platform as a service <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service> project, and additional supporting technologies used in the Cloud Services environment such as the Wiki Replica databases and the hosting infrastructure for dumps.wikimedia.org <https://dumps.wikimedia.org/>. The existing team of Andrew Bogott, Arturo Borrero Gonzalez, Brooke Storm, and Chase Pettet will be joined by James Hare in the role of Product Manager. The team is also hiring for a fifth Operations Engineer and for a part-time technical support contractor.
The Technical Advocacy team will focus on creating improved documentation for Wikimedia APIs and services as well as providing support for technical contributors and API consumers. The new team is being formed by moving the Foundation's Developer Relations team to the Technology department, with the exception of Rachel Farrand who will remain in Community Engagement in close collaboration with other event organizers. Andre Klapper and Srishti Sethi are both taking the role of Developer Advocate in the new team. A developer advocate is someone whose primary responsibility is to make it easy for developers to use a platform. Typically they do this by producing example software, tutorials, and other documentation explaining how to use the platform's products and services. Sarah R. Rodlund will also be joining the team as a Technical Writer. Technical writing has many subspecialties. Sarah will be focusing on improving our existing documentation by helping create a style guide and editing existing documentation to fit with that guide. She will also be supporting volunteers who are interested in practicing their technical writing skills on Wikimedia documentation. The team will be hiring for a Developer Advocacy Manager role in July. This new person will help round out the skills of the team and will take the lead in developing their programs.
The Technical Engagement team will work with other teams inside the Wikimedia Foundation as well as groups at affiliate organizations and the larger Wikimedia volunteer community to provide technical outreach services and support. We hope to continue to grow the number of people involved in our programs until we can confidently say that we are providing the best help possible to the hundreds of volunteer developers, designers, technical writers, and end users of the Wikimedia movement's APIs and services. We will continue to be involved in existing programs to attract and support new technical contributors like the Wikimedia Hackathons, Outreachy, and Google Summer of Code. We also hope to find new ways to connect with new and existing technical contributors as we support the Wikimedia movement's 2030 strategic direction and the shared goals of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity.
Very excited to be getting started down the path of strengthening our developer advocacy program!
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org
My main worry, during my daily patrolling, is if we manage to neutralize
the bad editing (vandalism, POV pushing) or if the destructive editing
is slowly successfully degenerating the great content we have created in
our projects.
In todays Sign-post it indicates an accelerating rate of decrease of
admins on enwp, and some likewise tendency on dewp. Is this a sign that
the "good" powers are losing out to the "bad" ones?
I also seen a very passive response to two massPOV editing . One, on 35
versions, is related to Hans Asperger, to state he was a nazi doctor
(false, even if he was somewhat passive in some cases). Here dewp
reacted quickly and after a while enwp, so these articles are OK, but in
most of the other 35 this false info lies unchanged. Also I react to the
effort from GazProm promoting their propaganda article /Football for
Friendship / in up to 80 version, and where almost noone has neutralized it.
Are we slowly losing the battle against the "evil" forces? And if so,
is then our new strategy (being good in itself) and the plan to
implement it all too naive? For example I like very much the ambition
to help out on areas in the world where Wikipedia etc is not
established, but would it be more correct to put effort in regaining
control of the very many Wikipedia versions, that is definitely
degenerating and we are loosing what has been done on these. (as a test
look at "latest changes" on some of the versions with low editing, it is
depressing to see that there often are more vandal editing, not being
undone, then proper new material)
Would it be most appropriate if we all in a 2-3 years effort
concentrated on getting (back) control on our material in our projects,
before we start efforts in implementing the strategy we have agreed
upon. Perhaps a number of paid admins, vandal/pov fighters, about as
many as there are stewards today, would be necessary not to lose out.
Anders
//
Based on the limited information that I have, it seems to me that there are already numerous contribtors who are paid to engage in promotional activity on Wikipedia, whether declared or undeclared, and the community does not have adequate human resources to patrol and investigate all of these. I expect that the problem will continue to get worse unless WMF gets more energetic about investigating TOS violations involving undeclared COI and WMF becomes predictable about extracting financial penalties that are severe enough to deter most of the undeclared COI contributors. Unfortunately, as far as I know, WMF has been largely passive about the problem of undeclared COI and has not announced any plans to become more aggressive.
As nice as it would be if everyone could afford and was willing to work for free, this is not the case. If it was then we could safely eliminate the salaries of the entire WMF staff. However, I think that financial support makes sense for some paid staff to handle activities like network operations, interface design, legal defense, and responses to safety problems.
Some types of Wikimedia activities are better suited to volunteer work than others. I encourage volunteers to avoid burning themselves out; there are some activities that I did in the past that I would not do again as a volunteer. Better to be an occasional and long-term contributor than to get burned out.
I have some ideas about how to pay people to do certain types of work that, so far, WMF has not funded. Unfortunately these are merely ideas and not likely to become reality in the short term. Perhaps later this year or in the next few years I will have specific proposals with reasonable chances for sustainable success.
I share the concern that paid participants in the Wikiverse, like staff of WMF and affiliates, WMF grantees, and potentially like the paid contributors that I have in mind, may become so numerous that they can drown out the consensus of the volunteers. Unfortunately I do not have easy solutions for this issue. We could prohibit all paid contributors from participating in RFCs and related decision processes, but we would be largely relying on people to self-disclose their paid status, which seems unlikely to be adequate.
Perhaps the issues that we are discussing in this conversation should be included in the Structures and Systems prong of the WMF strategy process. I am pinging Nicole to ask for her input about that idea. However, keep in mind that the strategy process is financially sponsored by WMF, and it is not free of potential conflicts with the interests of WMF.
I wish that I could be more optimistic. These are difficult topics.
Regards,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
null
Another follow-up:
======
Benjamin Lees wrote: "No, French Christians are just tagged with
subcategories of Category:French Christians. The "requiring diffusion"
category that you complain of is in fact a way to tell editors that
pages in the category should really be in subcategories instead."
======
Aha! You're right, I had not realized that "diffuse" (disseminate/spread
widely) was being used as specialized en-wiki-jargon for
"subcategorize". It might be wise to give that hidden category a more
descriptive name.
I looked into one of the many BLP entries with an unscourced
Category:French Jews tag, and found a review of a book they wrote. In
that book, the person stated that while they had a Jewish mother, they
did not consider themselves Jewish.
Given that the category French Jews contains more members than the
category French Roman Catholics, and that there are living people
included in both categories... I seriously wonder what it is that
motivates folks to anonymously tag others in this way (i.e. whether they
want to be tagged or not).
The Library of Congress, the BNF, Wikidata, etc. don't label people
according to religion, unless their notability is due specifically to
their religion (e.g. Alfred Dreyfus, Maimonides, etc.). On en.wp people
being labeled as Jewish/Catholic, etc. tend to be industrialists,
politicians, journalists, bankers etc. I don't think this is "best
practice" and I'm afraid I do not agree that en.wp is mostly "getting it
right" with regard to this specific question. Fr.WP and Wikidata are
doing much better.
The relevant section on "data subject" privacy rights in the GDPR (in
English) is based on the 1978 French law I cited earlier (though it has
become more restrictive since -- see below). As David Gerard noted, it
is quite likely that this affects not only Wikipedians (who can petition
to have libel/slander concerning their *online identity* (cf. definition
of data subject) removed from (inter alia) block logs), but also the
*content* of biographies of living people in the encyclopedia.
== GDPR (Article 9)==
*Processing* of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin,
political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union
membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the
purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health
or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation
shall be prohibited.
======
As one who has contributed to the projects since 2006, I am posting this
here not because I wish to sow dissent, but because I think some quick
thinking and corrective action is needed.
sashi
Hello all,
The Wikimedia Foundation Anti-Harassment Tools team enlisted the assistance
of Alex Hollender, a User Experience designer at Wikimedia Foundation to
create wireframe designs of Special:Block with the Granular block feature
included.1
Our first wireframes are based on the discussions on the Granular block
talk page, the Wishlist proposal, and in Phabricator to date.
Because the Special:Block page is already at its limits with its current
layout, we would like to propose a new organized layout for Special:Block.
This will make it easier to add the granular blocking (page, category,
namespace, etc) and whatever is to come in the future. All of the same
functionality is available on this new layout, but in a more organized,
step-by-step process.
Take a look at the wireframes and leave us your feedback on Meta.2
Please spread the word and forward this email to others (especially
administrators) who might be interested in helping re-design
Special:Block's layout.
1
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/Per_user_page,_…
2
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative/Per_user_p…
For the Anti-Harassment Tools team,
Sydney Poore
--
Sydney Poore
Trust and Safety Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation
Trust and Safety team;
Anti-harassment tools team
Hi!
There's a little research project I've been working on in the last few
weeks: What are the articles that people are most often looking for in
their language, and *cannot* find?
I was doing this by looking at the logs of searches in the language search
box in the interlanguage links panel and counting the articles on which
searching for a language didn't yield any result.
This can be useful to the editors in different languages for understanding
which articles are in demand and should be created. This may also be useful
for considering how to reorganize existing articles. Of course, actually
doing this is up to the editing communities in each language; I'm just
trying to show where exactly does this happen.
My first attempt at producing a report about it can be found here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Most_wanted_articles_across_languages
This is my first attempt to make a public version of this report, so you
may find some issues there, for example contradicting or missing data.
Also, the tables could probably be more nicely designed. Bug reports,
suggestions for improvement, and all other feedback is obviously welcome.
However, I believe this is good enough for taking a first look and reaching
some conclusions.
The two immediate findings that I can see are that the most notable
articles that people cannot find fall into the following categories:
* Topics that are popular in the news: "Avengers: Infinity War", "General
Data Protection Regulation", "Avicii". In particular, I should note that
topics that are featured in Google Doodles [1] come up often: "Georges
Méliès", "Mahadevi Varma", etc.
* Topics that are covered in another language, but cannot be found because
of different organization of information. This often happens with articles
where there are cultural differences between languages, for example
"Football" in the English Wikipedia refers to several different games (I'd
guess that many people around the world are interested in "Association
Football"). This also often happens with articles about Biology and
species: "Homo Sapiens", "Blueberry", etc.; these are organized differently
in different Wikipedias.
[1] https://www.google.com/doodles/
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hello everyone,
The next Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting will take
place on Thursday, May 31, 2018 at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM PDT). The IRC channel
is #wikimedia-office on https://webchat.freenode.net, and the meeting will
be broadcast as a live YouTube stream.[1] We’ll post the video recording
publicly after the meeting.
During the May 2018 meeting, we will hear about languages across the
Wikimedia projects.
Meeting agenda:
* Welcome and introduction
* Movement update
* The Compact Language Links project
* Executive update
* Questions and discussion
* Wikilove
Please review the meeting's Meta-Wiki page for further information about
the meeting and how to participate:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_metrics_and_activities…
You can also sign up to participate in future meetings on Meta-Wiki:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_metrics_and_activities…
June 2018 Metrics & Activities meeting will take place on Thursday, 28
June, starting at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM Pacific Daylight Time).
Thank you,
Lena
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOaiU-v7PbE
Lena Traer
Project Coordinator // Communications // Advancement
Wikimedia Foundation