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
________________________________
From: Ciell Wikipedia <ciell.wikipedia(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2022 6:03 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review
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<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_communications_insights/Re…)r>).
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
Op zo 12 jun. 2022 11:34 schreef Quim Gil
<qgil@wikimedia.org<mailto:qgil@wikimedia.org>>:
Hi Mike,
Yes, on-wiki replies are fine and the organizers of the election will contact you to
clarify the details.
We will find a fix to the problem of the content license on the forum. Thank you for
pointing this out.
About features, this is what the election organizers want to try out:
* Let affiliates propose and select their questions by themselves. This is why we are
providing a private space for affiliate representatives to propose questions and vote for
them.
* Give all candidates three days to writel their replies before they can be read by
anyone. This allows all candidates to organize their time to respond, not taxing as much
those who have less free time or less flexible schedules. This is why we give access to
candidates to this private space at the same time, when the questions are ready, and then
make this space public at the date announced.
* Give everyone more time to read the candidates' answers in their preferred
languages, using automatic translation. We want to reduce the gap that non-English
speakers have to endure when texts are only available in English, and when translations
take extra days to arrive, if they arrive for their language at all. This is another
reason to use the forum.
On Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 11:09 PM Mike Peel
<email@mikepeel.net<mailto:email@mikepeel.net>> wrote:
On 11/6/22 05:10:51, Quim Gil wrote:
For context, the same email gives an option to
candidates to answer the
questions via email. In this case, the election organizers will post the
answers in the forum on their behalf.
Answering by email isn't a great solution. I'm hoping to be able to
reply on-wiki, which is the normal way of answering questions during
Wikimedia elections. However, since the forum doesn't seem to specify
copyright, I don't think CC-BY-SA responses on-wiki can be shared on the
forum.
This is the only point of the election process where
this forum is being
used. It allows affiliates to propose and prioritize their questions
quickly, and it allows to open the candidate replies to the public at
the same time, automatically translated to the preference to each
reader. Candidates can reply via email if they prefer. If a candidate
doesn't want to use the forum, they don't have to.
It's good to hear that it won't be used more than that. It shouldn't
even be used for this, though.
More context. This election process also includes an
option for voters
to use a voting advice tool that is off-wiki as well. This tool was used
in the last MCDC election and received wide support and positive
feedback. None of the candidates had any objections, and there were +70.
Here too the candidates don't have to use this tool directly if they
don't want to.
So because no-one objected before, my objections are clearly unreasonable?
These specialized tools are easy to use and they
provide a benefit to
users that right now we cannot replicate with wiki pages alone.
There is nothing on these forums that can't be replicated on-wiki, as
has been thoroughly demonstrated in this thread.
This is Wikimedia. Please keep things on-wiki.
Thanks,
Mike
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