Hi all,
Wikimania is well over, and now that everyone is slowly getting home, I'd like to touch on a hallway discussion that was going on during Wikimania. This was regarding the centralnotice banners advertizing a livestream of Katherine's and Christophe's presentation of the draft direction for the 2030 strategy.
First a few quick facts: The banners were on Fri 11 Aug shown for 1,5 hour in 'emergency mode' on all English language projects (including Commons, meta) to all logged in, anonimous and mobile visitors. The campaigns can be found here https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=WikimaniaLive, here https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=WikimaniaLiveLoggedinand here https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=WikimaniaLiveMobile, for reference. The text in the banner was "Where will Wikipedia and Wikimedia be in 2030? Find out LIVE from Montreal" with a link to a youtube page with a stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdr2F8aB9y0 .
I was quite taken by surprise with this, and taken aback. Here we were, the Wikimedia community telling all these visitors of Wikipedia and other projects that we are so important, that we should have them watch a presentation of a first draft of a direction of a strategy that still needs to be worked out. Not only was the text in the banner a bit misleading (I didn't see much crystal bowl gazing - but rather a statement of where we would like to go - but soit, I can overlook that), but it feels especially pretentious to me. Maybe this is a cultural matter, and in other cultures this kind of bragging (which is what it feels like to me) is normal.
I could have understood an advertizement of this and other sessions to our logged in community members - that would actually have been a nice way of engaging them in an expensive conference that we would like more online audience to be part of. But only this session, and then all visitors of Wikimedia projects? No, thanks.
Totally separate of the message displayed and whether we want to show it to this kind of large audience, I was surprised that this link was pointing to Youtube. This goes against our policies on Centralnotice https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Usage_guidelines, stating: "Wikimedia Owned - Banners must link to Wikimedia controlled domains (owned either by Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia affiliates or Wikimedia Volunteers identified to the Wikimedia Foundation)." I guess there is a very remote interpretation possible that the channel is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, and I did not see any indication that Youtube was running ads on that particular channel.
I was unable to locate any community discussions or consultation about this. Could someone at the WMF share where this was discussed prior to the decision, and could they explain their reasoning? I'm not looking to blame anyone for this - shit happens - but I would like to see some discussion on what we want and dont want to do in this field, so that we can actually learn from this exercise. I was told in (very rapid and somewhat unwilling) hallway discussions that this was signed off by multiple layers of management at the WMF, so I assume some documented reasoning and consultation is available.
Best, Lodewijk