Dear All,
I thought I would just let it go, but I do not think the discussion currently runs in a good direction.
I do not think it is useful to advocate that Meta is a good discussion platform. It is not. It is dead. At best, there are some announcements posted there, and there is a small group of people who monitor and comment on them. If there is something really outrageous going on, such as the recent rebranding attempt, users can be mobilized from the projects to leave their opinion. This is done by the project users who care, it is done inside the projects or using some extra-Wikimedia means, and it can only happen occasionally. If this does not happen, Meta discussions attract at best a dozen commenters, some of whom are just negative towards everything.
We tried to do something about this for at least 15 years (I myself was around and have been an active Meta user since 2007-2008). Things are not getting better, they are getting worse.
It might be a matter of funding, may be a radically new interface could be build on Meta to replace the existing one. But I am afraid this is more a matter of attitude. Discussions were happening on IRC, then most of them migrated to Facebook , then to Discord or Telegram, but nobody ever considered discussing things on Meta.
Obviously there are a lot of boundary conditions, I fully buy the argument that discussion should happen in the space owned by the WMF (though a lot of discussions are happening right now on spaces not owned by the WMF, and partially just because they are not owned by the WMF), licensed appropriately etc. But saying we should go to Meta to discuss there and shooting off all attempts of doing something else is a dead end.
(I must say I did not even log in to the Movement Stategy Forum and I am not registered there, I am not prepared to endorse or criticize it, and I do not have any specific suggestions for improvement. I did participate in Space when it was up, and I recognize all the problems which were there, though).
Best
Yaroslav
Bon dia a tothom/Hi everyone,
It's really difficult not to agree with Galder here. Happy to still read these persistent colleagues with key arguments.
The same people that committed the big mistakes and failure with Wikimedia Space (that should have never existed and that even combined discussions with Facebook groups as a "revolution" of communication) is now trying to tell us that they "learnt from those mistakes" and that they have full commitment in finishing this new forum. I still look back at
this graph of 2019 and wonder how things can rapidly age that badly and with worse leadership.
Imho this is quite informative of the lack of sustained chain of command (not community-need driven anymore). And the worst part of it, this is coming from the same people that is parallelly trying to blame those volunteers who strongly disagree with very legit discourses on the constant externalization of features and the lack of renewed wiki tech. I've read so far too many fallacies ("this platform must be good because we are 67 staff people behind", etc) instead of a critical recognition that our default, wiki one is obsolete and must be urgently supported with staff and resources.
There is no way to justify new forums in other interfaces rather than the aim or the apathy of the WMF to disengage actively involved wikipedians in favor of more empty infrastructures (that benefits the institution rather the direct interaction within the knowledge projects). Truly sad, especially when some of us feel obliged to explain this to kind donors that truly believe that their 5$ are going to fund Wikipedia's servers and functionalities as they are mostly told in the funding banners.
Xavier Dengra
------- Original Message -------
El dilluns, 13 de juny 2022 a les 10:19 AM, Matej Grochal <
matej.grochal@wikimedia.sk> va escriure:
Dear all
I quite agree with Galder here. We should focus on making our own spaces more inclusive and easier to use rather than jumping to various external providers for this and that. Let's not forget that existing volunteers and staff also have to learn to use the new platform. The other issue is the continued splitting of content and esp. volunteers have to find extra time to check those other platforms to stay in touch with the movement.
Be well and healthy
Matej
On Sunday, June 12, 2022, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Ceill,
I am a big fan of having 'one front door' for people that are trying to find answers to questions. Having the front door in another building, with another technology, and once they are in we say them that our building is the other one, the one that is falling
down (but don't visit the basement, please, is full of money) is the worst of the strategies.
Best,
Galder
Hi,
First: I am a big fan of having 'one front door' for people that are trying to find answers to questions they do not know where to ask (
last year's
movement communications insights on this). I think a forum, actively moderated by people helping and pointing users to the right places, would be a huge improvement for community questions and input. Especially the one-click translation service is imho
a big plus in service in comparison to Meta.
It does however worry me that when I joined the forum last weekend to take a peek, I stumbled on a thread with a very specific question about Commons and giving permission via VRT. The thread had multiple replies, but no one had a real substantial
answer. Well, replies were along the lines of 'No, there is no template for this' and 'This should be discussed on Commons'. While the answers were somewhat correct, they were obviously not helpful for the person asking this specific question and, as far as
I could tell, none of the respondents were a member of our VRT teams. So this user was effectively not helped by posting the question on the forum.
Even more so, because the question on the forum was not noticed by VRT agents (most of us working on the permissions queues and Commons will have the /Noticeboard on Commons on our watch list and can be pinged if country or language specific
knowledge or advise is needed for a question), and secondly it will be more difficult for the people working from our end that will have to follow up if the person does decide to bring the question to Commons or VRT after all.
Besides that, with my MCDC hat on, I hope after this trial period we'll get to see the data on how many people interacted about the Movement Strategy that we have not heard from in the previous 5 years through any of the other platforms that
are in use to gather feedback. Already trying to watch several channels with Strategy discussions, I count on the MSG team to bring back these numbers and a summary of what is being discussed on the forum back to Meta. Even in a virtual world there is a limit
on how many channels a Wikimedian can watch.
NB: I see Sj's response crossed mine while I was writing, but let my example underline the issue of 'no unified notifications' and a possible problem with 'coherent archiving'.
Please also be aware G-translate does not know all languages we have projects in, some of which are however supported by Yandex that is an option to choose for the Wikipedia article translation tool already.
Best,
Ciell
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