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.
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(a)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(a)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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