Hi all,
I'll try to be brief. At an intuitive level I'm against implementing this particular proposal: Use Wikipedia as the central movement brand rather than Wikimedia. After reading this thread and having conversations related to the subject with others this are my thoughts around it:
- Timing for reaching proposals: The proposals seems like things that should arise from a strategy and not things that shape or embed on a strategy. Taking this decision, or any decision as a matter of fact, before a strategy is defined seems odd to me, independently of the strategy result itself. To others in this thread, it also seems like an outdated proposal. Shouldn't the strategy shed light onto these matters, and not the proposals shed light upon the strategy?
- Implications: It seems that the subject of awareness is approached from a linear perspective, just the perception of a brand (If I'm wrong I apologize beforehand). Again, at an intuitive level, the costs and risks of such an implementation seem huge: Some raised legal concerns, in some particular countries or regions, some people could be more exposed, even put in danger, being directly associated with Wikipedia, while under the Wikimedia umbrella, those people might have some degree of separation that also brings a layer of protection; Some raised costs concerns: Rebranding could carry thousands of hours of work from volunteers, maybe a lot of the material provided might need to be re-written, re-adjusted. Most of this work seems that it would need to be carried out by volunteers; Will a decision like this undermine the morale of the movement as a whole? And on top of it, if we add a layer of financial costs, like changing agreements, domains, banners, cards, printed material, videos, etc., a modification based on this proposal seems like it has to be well thought out, and definitely not improvise, before is taken into consideration, and again, the same question than before comes to mind, that a decision like this, in this particular moment, should come from the strategy and not the opposite.
- Coordination: To me, the lunch of the proposal also seems more like an independent approach than a coordinated effort towards a higher goal, since a strategy for the whole movement is being discussed at the same time, and the proposals seem to entangle the discussion at some level, as proved at least by this particular thread. I'm not trying to underestimate the difficulties of coordination but to highlight that we should try our best to be as coordinated as possible, our limited energy will be driven more effectively, and if we do so, hopefully, we might generate a bigger impact as a whole.
I believe that some proposals from the study are very valuable, I just really don't think this is the right timing for proposing changes, that timing has to do, at least at some level, with coordination (which should never be underestimated as a difficult and consuming task), and that some changes need to be analyzed from a multi-layered, and multi-location perspective, to be able to make a decision as informed as we could be, and risk or not into implementing changes based on that information.
If could make a suggestion, is to embrace all the information that came from the study to enrich the discussion about strategy at large, but refrain to implement any proposals until a wider strategy is defined.
Cheers,
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 3:37 AM Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
Andrew Lih provided a couple of days ago a link to his excellent analysis of ten years ago, but in short - Wikinews has a very different nature that all other Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia, or say Wikivoyage or Commons are incremental - you can add a paragraph of text or an image, walk away, come back in a week and continue. A new item for Wikinews should be written quickly - one day old news are not really news - and published in a form which is digestable from the very beginning. It is not incremental, and there is very little room for collaborative writing.
And competition for news items is of course way stronger than for wikipedia articles.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 8:52 AM Jennifer Pryor-Summers < jennifer.pryorsummers@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 3:49 AM Paulo Santos Perneta < paulosperneta@gmail.com> wrote:
I wouldn't describe Wikinews as a success case, though.
Paulo
Compared to Wikitribune it is! But more importantly, if Wikinews is not thriving, then why not? Does it lack resources? What could or should
the
WMF do to revive it? Perhaps some of the money spent on rebranding would be better spent on the projects that are not doing so well as the big Wikipedias -- or perhaps the WMF should cut its losses and close them
down,
on the principle of reinforcing success instead. These are the big questions it should be asking itself.
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