Wait, wait... what?

With a Movement Strategy landing place that is newcomer friendly and multilingual, we can also tackle a historical problem of the Movement Strategy process: outreach to volunteers in all the wiki projects. We can also invite our partners in the ecosystem of free knowledge and offer them cozy and well-equipped rooms to work together.

So, this is not a forum, but a "landing place"? How did it change from a forum to discuss the strategy to a "landing place". And why is the "landing place" outside of the ecosystem that is discussed? Why is not Meta the landing place anymore. Is there or have there been any rejected plan to implement Meta as a landing place? And if not, why hasn't it been discussed if this was one of the outcomes from most of the discussions done in the (now called ) Wikimedia Summit in Berlin (you can check the minutes).

The second part is quite strange: isn't it MediaWiki multilingual? You can translate things; you can even use the ContentTranslation (and soon the great SectionTranslation). We have technology for automatic translation of paragraphs into lots of languages (more than those at Google Translate) and we can even use our own community to make those translation forever, and not automatic. Where was it decided that "multilingual" equals "Google" and where can I read how much does it cost to adapt our own tools to our own ecosystem to make "multilingual" discussion happen?

I also read with perplexity that an external forum is giving volunteers in all the wiki projects a place for outreach. This may be a good salesperson point when trying to sell a product, but this has been done with Meta (and other projects) without any integration problem. Is something that is built in the core of our technology. If there's something missing there: why hasn't it been solved in the last 5 years of discussion? Did we notice now that we can have an external system to out(???)reach our own volunteers? I can't continue reading this without a real sense of strangeness.

And the last sentence is the best part: inviting partners to discuss about my home, in another home that is better equipped. We surely will drive our partners in the free knowledge ecosystem to donate more time, resources and even money to Discourse, that is what we are showing. This message is proposing exactly to drive out of our ecosystem to those that we need more, telling them that our place is not worthy. How did the Communications Team allow something like this? Or didn't they know? Furthermore, this idea is contradicting with the Wikimedia Strategy itself. The Wikimedia Movement 2018-2020 strategy says (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20):

By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.

And then we can read these extracts from the the Improve User Experience section (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Improve_User_Experience):

Improving the experience of users on our platforms will allow more people to join projects, access information, and contribute. This is a shared responsibility between developers, designers, and communities and requires collective action throughout the Wikimedia ecosystem. 
(...) * Spaces that allow finding peers with specific interests, roles, and objectives along with communication channels to interact, collaborate and mentor each other.
(...) * Tools to connect cross-project and cross-language functionalities to provide an enhanced experience of the knowledge contained in the Wikimedia ecosystem for a particular interest, informational need, or inquiry.

We can also read the recommendations at Ensure Equity in Decision-Making (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Ensure_Equity_in_Decision-making):
How is that in 2022 (2 years after this discussion was closed and 5 years after it started) we are doing just the opposite of what the Movement decided to do? How is that we spent years of discussion, volunteer's time and resources discussing something and the forum to continue discussing about it goes against all of the decided?

Sincerely, it would be great to discuss these things seriously, because we are already volunteering here, no one needs to buy another hair-growing formula.

Hoping that we can talk about what we need, and not what we have,
Galder

From: Quim Gil <qgil@wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 4:17 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review
 
Hi, 

I wanted to bring you a bit of Movement Strategy Forum flair, in case you haven't tasted it yet.

Oby_Ezeilo said:
 

I prefer this

  1. You can communicate in your Language
  2. There are quick responses from members
  3. There is cross knowledge sharing from every angle
  4. Nke a bụ ebe mmụta pụrụ iche
(Automatic translation from Igbo: This is a special place)

Andy_Inácio said:

I agree with other opinions stating Meta should remain the central place of gathering. But I must say: This forum feels so much more welcoming to newcomers. I speak for myself.

So from where I stand, if Meta is hard enough, here the participation can be significantly easier. The interface walk us through it. (snip) Plus, when the established alternatives so far are Telegram and similar, closed channels, I believe forums are much more useful to the goal.

Long live this forum! :partying_face:

***

Beyond the messages, you can sense the feelings of the persons sharing them. Movement Strategy implementation can only succeed if people feel safe, feel connected, and feel productive. We need a community of Movement Strategy implementors that is inviting to new ideas and experimentation, to success, and to failures met with encouragement and pride.

For cross-project collaboration we have Meta, we have social media, and we have events. It is not enough, and it is not working. What is to be done?


## Meta continues to be an official Movement Strategy channel

I want to clarify that we have no plans to abandon Meta. Movement Strategy relies on Meta for documentation, announcements, and calls to action. There isn't much discussion or collaboration happening there. This is where the Forum, a tool designed specifically for discussion and collaboration, can play an important role. We will continue doing the same work on Meta, and we plan to complement this work with the Forum.

With a Movement Strategy landing place that is newcomer friendly and multilingual, we can also tackle a historical problem of the Movement Strategy process: outreach to volunteers in all the wiki projects. We can also invite our partners in the ecosystem of free knowledge and offer them cozy and well-equipped rooms to work together.

Those preferring to contribute to the Movement Strategy implementation on Meta will continue finding us there too, and all the documentation will continue to be published and maintained there.

Ciell made some interesting points:

On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 6:04 PM Ciell Wikipedia <ciell.wikipedia@gmail.com> wrote:

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). 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.

Just to be clear, this is not what the Movement Strategy Forum is trying to accomplish.
 
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.

If someone asks a question about Commons processes in the forum, a good answer is to point them where to ask on Commons. At most, we can encourage them to convert the question into an idea connected to any of the MS recommendations. But still for that it would be useful to share that idea on Commons. This is what we did, and I think it is correct. The forum doesn't aim to become a Q&A place for all things Wikimedia. 
 
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.

Yes, we plan to produce data about this community review period of two months. We are already producing weekly reports and we welcome feedback about which data would be interesting to catch. There is also a community review discussion about Goals (that I will mention again when responding to Deskana).

Some thoughts about people we have not heard from before:
  • 3,5 weeks ago nobody had heard about this forum. We are doing targeted outreach step by step. Comparing participants between a 2-month community review period and 5 years of Movement Strategy discussions is useful, when put into perspective.
  • Even people falling in love with something need some time to adopt it. Among those who see something new as positive, many will wait to see how it goes before adopting it. 2 months is a good period to gather feedback. One year is a more reasonable period to assess adoption and impact.
  • People also need interesting topics to join, stick around and participate. We'll see how interesting is the MS agenda in these two months. The MCDC process looks promising as a project open to many conversations where diversity of participants and good coverage of multiple projects, languages and backgrounds is especially welcome.
  • Movement Strategy participation is in general lower than it was years ago. Seeing in the forum old participants coming back would be a success.
  • Among current and past participants, many don't share common places and, in practice, don't join common conversations except perhaps for the Global Conversations. Seeing known participants discussing together in a common space would also be a success.
About how many channels a Wikimedian can watch yes, this is absolutely true. One interesting feature about the forum is that users can watch / mute the categories, tags or topics that they care / not care about. Another nice feature is that users get an automatic digest with popular topics after not logging during 7 days (the periodicity can be changed). 

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.

There is a discussion about supporting automatic translation of languages not supported by Google. If anyone finds more languages that should be covered, please let us know. Currently the plugin only accepts on engine at a time. If it is agreed that this is an important feature, then we can check what would it take to improve the plugin to accept more engines.

Sorry, this email is already too long. I'll review the rest of the thread and reply another day.

--
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF