Thanks Felipe, that's a really great move. I looked to these examples a couple o years
ago, and this seems that a good option to add some interactive content. Anyway, I have
tried to replicate it and can't make it work
(
https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txantiloi:Vivarium). Is the documentation right?
Best
Galder
________________________________
From: Felipe Schenone <schenonef(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2024 10:39 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong
Hi everyone, good news!
Thanks to this humble
change<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Gadgets/+/1…
(deployed today) it is now possible to load a specific gadget when a specific template is
used in a page. This opens the door (or perhaps a window?) to interactive content using
JavaScript. See for example this article in the Spanish
Wikipedia<https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juego_de_la_vida> for an interactive
instance of Conway's Game of Life, and scroll down for more instances!
I started documenting the system at
MediaWiki.org, under the title template
gadgets<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template_gadgets>ts>, and included many working
examples. Check it out!
Perhaps the system isn't as friendly or powerful a solution as some might hope. But
it's very real, and it only depends on us now. Next week, when the documentation and
examples are a bit more cooked, I'll propose adding a few "template gadgets"
to the English Wikipedia, since my experience has taught me that when something hits the
English Wikipedia, it quickly spreads elsewhere. I'll link to the proposal when I do,
in case you want to participate.
There's so much more that could be said about this, but I'd rather keep it short.
If you have questions or ideas, feel free to write them here or at the relevant talk
page<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Template_gadgets>ts>.
Kind regards,
Felipe (User:Sophivorus)
On Thu, Feb 8, 2024 at 5:31 AM danboy12342 Mui
<danboy12342@gmail.com<mailto:danboy12342@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi everyone,
I agree that Wikipedia needs to spend a few quarters spending time on our main product.
The website is very impressively still the top result of a huge number of searches and in
this new AI age; despite the controversy around it, wikipedia is the top source for many
LLMs. Therefore while it doesn't need to be the only focus or even *the* focus most of
the time it does need to be kept working but not just kept as is, it needs to be
innovative and continue to meet the growing demands of a "modern" and
"useable" site that allow users to get the information they need as fast and
effectively as possible, these days that means interactivity.
I feel I'm repeating others but a quick burst of very serious investment into the site
and its many sister pages needs to happen sooner rather than later.
Finally I'd like to thank Marshall again for his remarkable comments. It's good to
see that this issue is clearly a priority that foundation staff are already looking at.
- Daniel.
---------------------
On Wed, Feb 7, 2024, 09:17 Gnangarra
<gnangarra@gmail.com<mailto:gnangarra@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi
I just like to highlight one point, that raises concerns;
perhaps enabling other platforms/apps to use our content to make interactive or video
materials there.
While this sounds like an easy solution we run into a number of hidden costs. These are
significant when we push for reusers to present what we are doing in better ways we lose
the movement's revenue stream as less people see our donation banners. With less
direct traffic we also sacrifice the ability to convert readers into contributors which
has always been our primary source of community sustainability and growth. I know other
providers will find different ways to present our efforts in part or in whole that is part
of our purpose, to do our mission and achieve our goals we need prioritise internal
solutions.
This also leads us to a related issue that our mission is to make the sum of all knowledge
freely available. When we look to outside parties to share our efforts we lose our ability
to ensure that the information is neutral, and that it's freely accessible. Butch is
right in noting that when we put funding into third party sites it is taking resources
away from the movement, yet those same funds were donated to us on the basis of
maintaining and building our infrastructure. It would be a wise investment to enable some
of those much needed interactive and video content here through purchasing rights.
On Wed, 7 Feb 2024 at 12:20, Butch Bustria
<bustrias@gmail.com<mailto:bustrias@gmail.com>> wrote:
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_20…
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<mailto: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<mailto: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#…
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/2023_Moderator_Tools_…!
[5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Watchlist#October_20…
[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_W…
[9]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences#Sign_up_to_participate!
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Gnangarra
'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'
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