That is the point, James.
We know that using graphs is possible within the current system, we know that adding OWID
interactive content is possible, we know that adding interactive maps in Wikivoyage is
possible, and we even have examples of using full color 3D models. I understand that these
are not the only options for interactive content, and some other proposals (something like
brilliant.com) are way more complex. But, at least, ''some'' interactivity
is currently possible.
The problem is that Marshall says that adding interactive content is completely out of our
possibilities, and we don't know if this is because there's no will nor plan to do
it, or because it is extremely complex and expensive, as Gnangarra points out.
But, in order to know if this is actually extremely complex and expensive, we need a
roadmap. Marshall said that it is out of scope, but we don't know how than claim is
backed. Because, as far as we know, there's not even a roadmap. So, the claim of the
extreme complexity is not based on any actual idea of the process we need to achieve this.
With no roadmap ahead, everything is completely impossible. If we never start walking, we
surely won't move anywhere.
Galder
________________________________
From: James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2024 11:00 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong
But...
We have managed to put maps into Wikivoyage that are interactive
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Cranbrook They even have third party overlays for
topography and other features.
We at Wiki Project Med have added OWID interactive graphs to a mediawiki install of which
thousands of visualizations are available
https://mdwiki.org/wiki/WikiProjectMed:OWID#How_to_use
And we did the latter with a few thousand in funding and a bunch of volunteer time. We
need the will to do this and it could happen.
James
On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 10:41 PM Gnangarra
<gnangarra@gmail.com<mailto:gnangarra@gmail.com>> wrote:
Thats a fair question, but its not a simple answer, nor something that can be properly
assessed on short notice. I think one of the first issues I see is that the underlying
mediawiki coding would need to be completely overhauled to enable full interactive
architecture. That it would need to be done in a way that enable ease of interaction for
all contributors so that we dont lose a large portion of our existing community which
itself is already struggling to maintain currently levels. The next issue is bringing 25
years of accumulated content across to the new architecture while keeping all the history
of that in place.
I'd be more concerned if the WMF stumped up with a figure this quickly if they even
understood the question even though its our whole foundation. There has never been any big
picture architectural planning even the creation of WikiData infrastructure wasnt as big
as this will need to be. I know Marshall has just started asking questions about what
people are envisioning the future to look like, I'd expect that the Hackathon and
Wikimania will be where we start hearing more about what the future can look like and the
steps that will need to take place to achieve that.
Galder please keep on asking these questions, I suspect a lot of what we want is already
being done by many different sites in a multitude of ways. We just need to identify our
own needs and make sure that each step can be achieved without the negative impact that so
many past changes have had. This will take a multi year commitment in both funding and
support from the WMF and the Community the later of which is a lot harder to establish.
On Fri, 23 Feb 2024 at 21:58, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
<galder158@hotmail.com<mailto:galder158@hotmail.com>> wrote:
Two weeks have passed since we last heard about the WMF explaining why they renounce to
add interactive content and infrastructure, and the question remains unanswered: how much
would it cost this so it can't be done?
I really hope to have an answer, as we could know if what it is needed is totally out of
scope, or is something that could be payed for.
Thanks
Galder
________________________________
From: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
<galder158@hotmail.com<mailto:galder158@hotmail.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2024 9:09 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
<wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong
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_O….
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-…h/>.
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_Office…
*
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_Leadersh…).
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_…. 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<mailto:bustrias@gmail.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, February 7, 2024 5:19 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
<wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto: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_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!
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list --
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines
at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
To unsubscribe send an email to
wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list --
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines
at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
To unsubscribe send an email to
wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list --
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines
at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
To unsubscribe send an email to
wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org>
--
Boodarwun
Gnangarra
'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list --
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines
at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
To unsubscribe send an email to
wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org<mailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org>
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian