Thanks Marshall for your pointing out an official answer from the WMF,

Let me say that this is not only disappointing, you are also presenting a false dichotomy where we can only "save a kitten" OR "plant a tree", while we have budget, staff and enough talented volunteers to do both. The dichotomy is presented in a way that makes us think that an estimation of the cost of solving this problem has been done and it is out of all the possibilities, but we don't know what the estimation is. Is there an estimation of how much would this cost? If so, could you please share it so we know why this is out of our possibilities?

I say that this dichotomy is false and I will try to explain why:

When Maryana Iskander assumed her CEO role, she pointed that the way the annual plan is done should be changed, because the previous monolithic assumption that only things reflected in the annual plan can be done (and nothing else) was preventing us from going forward. You can read it the full reflection here:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Maryana%E2%80%99s_Listening_Tour/My_Incoming_Priorities. Claiming that a high priority problem can't be solved now because it wasn't planned one year ago is not the way it was supposed this to be done.
The message is not about the Graphs extension. It has some weight there, but reading this message about interactive content in terms of "if we solve the graphs issue, our job here is done" is also a wrong reduction. But let's think that, indeed, this was the only problem we should solve. Arguing that it is not in the Annual plan so it can't be solved is a fallacy, as explained above, but even then, the annual plan was done AFTER the graph extension was broken. Waiting two years for a high importance problem to be solved can't be the way to do things.
Two weeks after Iskander's message, Yael Weissburg wrote in Diff this post: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/28/what-does-the-world-need-from-us-now-external-trends-to-watch/. In this post Weissburg wrote about "trends that we should expect to accelerate in the years to come because they relate to key changes in how people access, interact with, and share knowledge". You can read the post by yourself, but there is an important takeaway: people is searching for content in another way, and we should give them "rich content". Whatever it takes.
One year after Iskander assumed she wrote an update. There we can read that the number 2 priority is "Re-centering the Foundation's responsibility in supporting the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement by understanding the needs of our contributor communities, as well as emerging topics like machine learning/artificial intelligence and innovations for new audiences." We should be doing that "innovations for new audiences", but from you message it seems that we still need "a conversation to happen" https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Updates/Year_One_Update
Later that year, Selena Deckelmann wrote that "The Foundation needs to exhibit better accountability in maintaining essential services (e.g. 2-factor authentication), and to be explicit about the technical tasks that it is definitely leaving for volunteers to own." (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Executive_and_Leadership_teams/Chief_Product_and_Technology_Officer/Selena%27s_Listening_Tour). Yes, I understand that the example given is another one, but the idea is there: "the foundation needs to exhibit better accountability in maintaining essential services". The message follows with an elephant in the room, but we are not going to talk again about the elephant, for sure.
Finally, last two years annual plans were said to be rooted in the 2030 Strategy (which talks about this issue) and, more specifically, on the 2019 Medium Term plan.https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019. This Medium Term plan (which, again, is the one used as a roadmap) has only two high priority topics, the second one being: "2. Modernize our product experience. We will make contributor and reader experiences useful and joyful; moving from viewing Wikipedia as solely a website, to developing, supporting, and maintaining the Wikimedia ecosystem as a collection of knowledge, information, and insights with infinite possible product experiences and applications.". Then, there's a priority named "Platform evolution" which says literally this: "The Platform Evolution priority encompasses improving and modernizing Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem to respond to a landscape where Artificial Intelligence is creating content, rich media dominates learning, content is structured, and collaboration tools work across multiple devices and have minimal technical requirements. (...)Addressing content gaps also includes making it easier to incorporate rich media, which requires more storage and server power, and better tooling for editing, uploading, and incorporating more types of media. On the engineering front, better automation of the software release process through continuous integration, and a more intentional focus on code quality and testing will allow for more innovative and faster experimentation". Again, this is not something new that happened two months ago, this was written in 2019 coming for an extremely long conversation that already happened between 2017-2019 and that is the guiding principle of our current Annual Plan, stated by the authors of the annual plan. If we are not moving in the way we decided, we are doing it wrong.

I could continue making a list of claims, but I think that is enough to understand that the conversation has happened, that we can save the kitten and plant the tree, that we already have decided that we need this and that it is already written in the annual plan. Claiming that there's no budget is also a bad move, because we don't know how much would this cost. In fact, knowing the cost would be the result of having a plan, but if there's no plan, we can't know if we can pay for it.

Let me end pointing again the big issue here: if we don't go forward with our top importance strategic goals because they are too complex to be solved, then every year will be more difficult to get there. The only way to solve complex issues is to start doing them. Postponing them while we try to take the low hanging fruits is a bad move; claiming that we are not working on them ("one that we have not yet started given the other priorities we’ve been working on") because we have been solving other issues is the worst news we can have.

Have a nice day

Galder

From: Butch Bustria <bustrias@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2024 5:19 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong

Hi Everyone,

My earnest hope that the Wikimedia Foundation on its 2024-2025 Annual Financial Plan prioritize and I mean put first among all is the technical infrastructure among all its budgetary items. We can scale down budgets to 3rd party organizations like the Knowledge Equity Fund, Movement Strategy Governance funding, campaign grants, and other "wants" to accomodate a highly technically reliable and stable Wikimedia online projects ("needs"), future proof, and user friendly experience which require investments on quality manpower, hardware, applications and the like. We love open source but we also be pragmatic and wise on selection of choices because we want our content be conveniently available and reliable to our readers, users, consumers and also editors.

A welcome development is the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, the successor to EMWCon.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_2024

The said conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, from April 17–19, 2024.

I also hope the Foundation invest in more technical gatherings, both onsite, hybrid or online to engage and reach out to more technical contributors, within and beyond the Wikimedia movement. I also hope WMF to start exploring eastward to Asia or elsewhere in the world as well fully diversify the technical community.

Kind regards,

Butch Bustria

On Wed, Feb 7, 2024, 4:54 AM Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Thanks for weighing in, Marshall!

I agree wholeheartedly that we need to do a proper architecture for a sandbox for interactive media, that will be safe (first and foremost), perform well in the browser, work across device types (desktop web, mobile web, mobile apps), and maintain our key requirements on editability and reusability, balanced against the security and privacy needs of users if we're going to invest the effort.

Backing up to do it right rather than patch up Graphs “one more time” is the right thing, and I’m very happy to see a confluence of interest around this now!

My hope is we can figure out how to make that architecture & testing work happen in the near term until we collectively (inside WMF and out) can wrangle resources to make the implementation production-ready.

Once we have a common infrastructure to build on, it’ll be easier for work to progress on individual types of media (graphs, charts, maps, animations, editable simulations, coding examples, etc, as well as classics like panorama viewers and integrating the audio/video player into a sandbox for heightened security).

My biggest hope is that we’ll enable more work from outside WMF to happen – letting volunteers and other orgs who might have their own specialty areas and work funding to progress without every change being a potential new security risk.

When we have succeeded in the past, we have succeeded by making tools that other people can use as their own basis to build their own works. I’m confident we can get there on interactive media with some common focus.

Let's all try to capture some of this momentum while we've got it and set ourselves up for success down the road.

– b

On Tue, Feb 6, 2024, 12:27 PM <mmiller@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi everyone – My name is Marshall Miller, I am a Senior Director of Product at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I work with many of the teams that are involved with the user experience of our websites and apps, such as the Editing, Web, Growth, and Mobile Apps teams (among others) [1]. I’m part of the leadership group that makes decisions about how the WMF teams approach things like graphs, interactive content, and video. Thank you all for having this in-depth and important discussion.

I know that issues with graphs [2] are what started this discussion, but I agree that it makes sense to think about this in terms of the broader category of “interactive content”, because other kinds of interactive content, such as maps or timelines, would share architecture with what is needed for graphs (video is a different and more complicated content type). I wrote a lot in this email, but here are a couple of the main points up front: to support graphs and other interactive content, we would need to take a step back and make a substantial investment in sustainable architecture to do it – so that it works well, safely, and is built to last. And because that’s a substantial investment, we need to weigh it against other important investments in order to decide whether and when to do it.

I know that it is very frustrating that the Graph extension has not been operational for many months – it means readers haven’t been seeing graphs in articles, and editors haven’t been able to use graphs to do things like monitor backlogs in WikiProjects. Over the months of trying to find a way to turn graphs back on, it has become clear that there isn’t a safe shortcut here and that the path forward will require a substantial investment – one that we have not yet started given the other priorities we’ve been working on. Every year we have to make difficult tradeoffs around what areas of our technical infrastructure we can and cannot take on. In the current fiscal year, the Product and Technology department has made experienced editors a priority [3], and many things that volunteers have asked for are either accomplished or in flight:

Improvements to PageTriage (complete) [4]
Watchlist in the iOS app (complete) [5]
Patrolling in the Android app (in progress) [6]
Dark mode (in progress) [7]
Improvements to the Commons Upload Wizard (in progress) [8]
…and other projects.

But I know this conversation isn’t as much about what editors need as what current and future readers need. Between talking about interactive content and talking about video, it sounds like we’re having the larger conversation of what we should be offering today’s and tomorrow’s readers to help them learn from encyclopedic content – whether we need to be offering interactivity, or video, or perhaps enabling other platforms/apps to use our content to make interactive or video materials there. This is a really important conversation, because even working together we probably will not be able to build all of it – we’ll have to make hard choices about where to invest. One place where this broader conversation is happening is called “Future Audiences”, which does experiments on how to reach newer generations who use the internet differently than previous generations – and thinking particularly about video. Future Audiences has regular calls with community members to shape the direction of those experiments, which in turn inform how the broader Foundation prioritizes. I hope many of you will get involved in those conversations – you can sign up here. [9]

Focusing back on graphs, since that’s what kicked this thread off, the several approaches we’ve attempted for quickly re-enabling the extension have ended up having security or performance problems. Therefore, we think that if we were to support graphs and other interactive content, we would need to plan substantial investment in sustainable architecture. This way, our approach would work securely and stably for the longer term. But that would take significant resources, and we’ll need to weigh it against many other important priorities, like tools for functionaries, improvements to the editing experience, automated ways to stop vandals, etc.

To be clear, if we do assign resources to the planning and building of an architecture for graphs (and other interactive content), it means that we are still at least several more months away from having a working Foundation-supported architecture. Therefore, I think we should also be having the additional conversation that many others have brought up about what volunteers can do in these intervening months to make graphs somewhat available to users. I know people are talking about that concretely on the Phabricator task, and I will join that conversation as well.
For the bigger question, I would like to start with some more learning about which kinds of interactive content are important for our encyclopedia, and how our community members see the evolution of the reading experience on our projects. I’d like to have some small conversations with many of you so that we can get into the details and ideas, joined by some of my colleagues. I’ll start reaching out to see who is interested in talking – and please let me know directly if you’d like to talk.

Thank you for weighing in so far, and let’s keep talking and planning together.

Marshall

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MMiller_(WMF)
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024#Our_approach_for_the_future
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/2023_Moderator_Tools_project#October_20,_2023:_Final_update!
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Watchlist#October_2023
[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Anti_Vandalism
[7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Accessibility_for_reading
[8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:WMF_support_for_Commons/Upload_Wizard_Improvements
[9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences#Sign_up_to_participate!
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