Hi Maryana,

On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 9:04 AM Maryana Iskander <miskander@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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Hi everyone, 

Since joining the Foundation I have tried to regularly write to you here and elsewhere, and I wanted to share a few updates since my last letter. In October 2023, I reflected that we were in a period of compounded challenges across the world with escalating wars, conflict, and climate reminding us each week that global volatility and uncertainty was on the rise. That feels even more true now.  My instinct then was to ask us to make more time to talk to each other and to try and pull closer together. This feels even more needed now. 

[...]

Finally, our human-led values came up in several conversations about Wikimedia’s role in shaping the next generation of artificial intelligence, a topic of ongoing discussion in the world, in our communities, and at the Foundation. This is complemented by ongoing discussions about the role of AI-generated content on our platform by various project communities. A recent effort to contribute to a shared research agenda on AI can be found here – including the need for more research to understand human motivation to contribute to the knowledge commons – it was created by a small group working in the open who rushed to publish a ‘bad first draft’ that will benefit from more input. 


Thank you for acknowledging the limitations of this document. As we also noted in the Signpost at the time, there was indeed some consternation about the lack of involvement of the volunteer community:
"While the announcement appears to be speaking on behalf of 'volunteer contributors', the 'Wikimedians' involved in drafting the document appears to have consisted exclusively of Wikimedia Foundation staff (largely from its Research department), according to the attendee list."

I have to ask though, are there still plans to solicit wider input on this draft agenda, or at least incorporate more from the numerous related discussions on AI that have been happening across the movement over the last several years? (At https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence , some editors including myself have been trying to keep a list of relevant links, but it's surely not complete.) Again, I appreciate that your post here invited "more input" on the agenda's talk page. But it seems that only a single topic was added there afterwards, and in any case no content updates have been made to that "bad first draft" since February 2024.

Relatedly, given that the document states that "Our hope is that many researchers across industry, government, and nonprofit organizations will adopt the final research agenda to help support and guide their own research":
Are there plans to solicit input from such external researchers on the draft? And once this research agenda is finalized, does the Foundation plan to bring it to their attention? It doesn't seem to have made such efforts yet, e.g. I can't find any mention of it on the Wiki-research-l mailing list (CCing it now).

I thought that maybe this Bellagio document had been a tangential one-off to make use of an external funding opportunity, and had been abandoned afterwards. But then I saw that more recently Selena highlighted it in the "Reflections on 2025 from the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Team" (as the only concrete outcome regarding AI mentioned in this entire overview of WMF accomplishments "Over the past year").

Regards, Tilman ([[User:HaeB]])
 

[...]

Maryana


Maryana Iskander, Wikimedia Foundation CEO