Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I
haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been
continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in
which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic
direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to
create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we
might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these
goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and
individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to
acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed
again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my
drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges
you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of
our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals
responding and will result in differences in implementation in each
community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of
source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But
regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich,
substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and
most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I
hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement
strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>rg>:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there is
too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take
away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free
knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't
expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that
our work is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical
assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but
it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the
contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive.
I do
think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination
for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially
in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our
brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most
valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to
build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and
much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to
provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and
visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present
in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct
interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have
on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring
a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is
unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's
about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a
utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content
in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not that
we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to
people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the
experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can
promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase are
already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn
enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we
do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for
the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is okay.
The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make sense
of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group can
only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to take
this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our
respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the
movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com>om>:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's
worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you
at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the
ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the
"essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components
maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be
controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but
advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a
world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or
ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the
impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made
great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction,
there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this
ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world
something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact,
sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV
content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The
drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier
versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire
movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com>om>:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of
truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers --
primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is
consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query
federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an
inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based
model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and
customization across the network while improving the resilience of the
whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political
influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts to
understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as a platform, we start to
really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and
attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well and
one that others in our ecosystem could benefit from. Today, on our newest
Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and
individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many
cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these
institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or
resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by
providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also
accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come
with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be
Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other
Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each
context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these
excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments
about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get
incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes
that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too
specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned
accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be
taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As
a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that
summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for
specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that
have triggered ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but
non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like
Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically
reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to
benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more
expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few
examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene
Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of
maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of
conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability
challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like
templates, which shift information out of the article space,
disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is
constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single
biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for
Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has
already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective
propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and
notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's
already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding
information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to
Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values
provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not
considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a
Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then
there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people
can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like
"Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I
certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice.
However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear
that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all
requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it
shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to
the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to
document best practices for re-use, ranging from local
community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the
"Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of
these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to
develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice
applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license
compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how
to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do"
from "here's what we recommend".
> Wikidata will often provide a shallow first
level of information about
> a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The
> more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in
> an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country
> population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate
> representation of the source material. Even when a large source
> dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say),
> you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of
> copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that
being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal
data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated
database reports as well as on-demand lookup via
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks
in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field,
or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources; see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_
Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a
highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at
under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is
often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the
available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists
to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so
far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized,
e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data
while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity
seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples
show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
> But the proprietary knowledge graphs are
valuable to users in ways
> that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting
> with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri,
> is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable,
> including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are
> not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find
> itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information
> from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will
make reading Wikipedia
articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling
has
dissuaded many people from sitting down and
reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning";
the
former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro
zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come
about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or
search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own
highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a
"bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in
Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views
were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely
transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens
it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's
intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make
both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the
"lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off
to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the
greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most
googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and
income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or
not:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-
fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
> The applications themselves are not the
problem; the centralized
> gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is
> actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and
> perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems
> to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all
> your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path
> to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given
the extent to which
Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources
it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would
suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any
such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers'
access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be
used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other
reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing
"Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home
it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge
contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects
like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and
private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may
take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it
has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing
public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit
from volunteer work, and
give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't
get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the
free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with
the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
1) Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions,
and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private
corporations.
2) Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to
go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair
use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
3) Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's
legally required, or by contributing directly (open source
development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services,
financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a
thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more
places use for more things.
4) Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary
knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the
solution, not the problem.
Cheers,
Erik
[1] See the getValue function in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its
"onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this
on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax
policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but
the other points need not be.
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