Thanks Samuel and James for the constructive approach in your messages.
I know that I have said this before, but there's a huge problem with accountability
here. We have money to become a great platform and we have staff to do it, but there's
no way to go forward, and that problem is seen clearly at every opportunity: migrating to
Discourse because we don't have "good enough" discussing software, not
having centralized templates or the completely broken wishlist survey (where only 1/4 of
the projects voted by the community are done, and some of them in a sub-optimal and
non-usable way).
James points out the integration of data from OurWorldInData. This is so impressive and
useful that is hard to think how the WMF can't afford to expend staff time (or give
1.000 USD to someone) to do that. Instead, Wiki Project Med has to ask for it outside. The
Basque Wikimedians User Group is funding this effort, and is doing it with its own funds.
Do you know how we get these funds? Well, sometimes they call us for a lecture somewhere
about free knowledge, copyright or whatever, and the money they usually give the speaker
goes to a fund. Whenever we have a good amount of money there (like 1.000USD), we invest
in free knowledge projects. So, at the end of the day, is volunteer's time, expressed
as money, and re-invested in things that will make our experience better. Of course, we
are happy to help with this project, but the question is why the WMF, with 400.000.000 USD
a year, can't afford to do this. And the answer is that no one cares, and those who
should care about that are not accountable.
Indeed, there's quite a big group of workers thinking in design, and they work to do
some things, like the new Vector (but not only, they have a bunch of projects open). But
every time they get a critic about the approach by a volunteer, there's an attack to
the volunteer. Let's take some examples: here's a Phab ticket
(
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T293405) with a proposal to build a Main Page that will
easily be copied by every project. You can read the answers and the attitude towards the
proposal. Or this one, when they decided to move the interwiki links to the bottom of the
main page because they didn't think that Main Pages where relevant
(
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290480). Or here, when a bug report is closed because
someone thinks that breaking things is not a bug:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289212.
And I could continue, but the reality shows us that sub-optimal solutions are our way of
finishing projects. The same teams that are moving things around in the Vector-2022, for
example, decided to break the PDF creator (still has many issues) and decided that
creating books wasn't relevant, so they broke it on purpose. No one cares, and if you
do, you shouldn't: no one is going to fix it. No accountability. The same team has
decided that hiding our sister projects from the main page, something that goes against
the Strategic Direction, is a good idea at all
(
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287609). And there we are, some volunteers, trying to
make any sense of all of this, and trying to point that the Strategic Direction is
something that should be granted at every decision. But, again, if there's no
accountability, then every team will make what they think is better, they won't accept
any proposal from volunteers, and our years-long strategy discussions will be a completely
loss of time and donor's money, because no one is implementing what it was decided
there.
Things are broken, and we could still be here discussing about that for ages. We have
money and staff to fix this. Who is going to fix it? This is the great question.
Sincerely,
Galder
________________________________
From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 19, 2022 1:42 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?
James! Thanks for this case in point.
The free knowledge ecosystem includes hundreds of thousands of devs around the world.
Most don't think to collaborate with us or through our codebases, most who do bounce
off of current systems, and those who stay still have a hard time getting code reviewed or
fit into a roadmap, or small grants.
But W also have more genuine, unqualified goodwill than any technical project I know. Few
doors for technical collaboration or future-creation would be closed if we only learn how
to ask and welcome the result.
So instead of asking "which tools should we try to test + implement, if we can figure
out how to configure it" or "which of these independent proposals seems worthy
of a one-time grant" (like any startup or website or grantor out there, limited by
the time of the few people setting it up), we should Be Bolder.
Sketch in broad strokes what we need and want to see, commit to working together to make
it so, look for partners who want to collaborate with us in making the best ecosystem on
the planet. E.g.
— what open graph database will scale to support general knowledge graphs 10 and 100x our
current size? The whole planet needs one. Whatever we migrate to next should
be<http://should.be/> a community that joins us to reach that goal.
— what discourse tools can support our wide ranging and intense discussions, constantly
tested by our active (once rare, but increasingly possible and important in a networked
world) collabs and consensus-building across language divides?
There are So. Many. Other areas where the ecosystem of open tools is scattered, loving,
and small, and focus by and with us could elevate the possible into the commonplace.
— embedded annotation, like Hypothesis
— simultaneous editing, like Etherpad
— embedded synchronous discussion, like IRC or Brave Talk
— content translation flows
— visualizations w embedded data, like OWID
— media editing, like videowiki
— format conversion + transcoding
— working with file formats of existing and emerging fields of knowledge-worl
— book creation
— course creation
— script creation
— data reconciliation, like OpenRefine
Most of these ideas have approaches (open tickets in Phab) with some depth, with internal
and external champions, and with potentially modest implementations that could be
distributed if that ever became a burden. But these opportunities are sitting unresolved
because a) they don't fall under the goals of any existing initiatives, and b)
we've built anti-infrastructure: a system that makes contribution from the edges hard
or risky. Lots of tickets opened by people offering to do the work note that they want
some sort of confirmation that the result could be adopted or implemented, before they
commit months of effort to it.
Our internal models for priority and focus need to consider the broader picture of the
technical ecosystem we could empower and uplift, and need to register the value of working
with and committing to other entire networks (including having many times more people
solving these issues alongside us). Otherwise we are not providing the infrastructure
needed by our own editing networks, not to mention the rest of th free knowledge
ecosystem.
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Sat., Jun. 18, 2022, 6:37 p.m. James Heilman,
<jmh649@gmail.com<mailto:jmh649@gmail.com>> wrote:
I have not found getting funding from the WMF for projects easy. VideoWiki for example has
mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally funded. Our first grant application
since fully taking on the effort was
declined<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoW… and our
programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has been similar
regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have gotten the interactive graphs
working on our own
site<https://mdwiki.org/wiki/WikiProjectMed:OWID> and offered to
work on doing the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping through
hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD. WikiProjectMed has
never received funding from the WMF and as a much much smaller NGO cannot cover these
programming expenses for the movement.
James
On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 3:49 PM Samuel Klein
<meta.sj@gmail.com<mailto:meta.sj@gmail.com>> wrote:
We face the
paradox<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox> of
choice<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>ce>, the lull of peace, and the fog of
distributed bureaucracy.
~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing over small
changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose
derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to an end.
~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to baffle everyone
involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by some other part of the system,
outside of their or their org's control.
Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at scale, we
should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the world's best free,
mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit, experience, and budget.
[Discourse raised a total of $20M over its lifetime. we could support + spin out
free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that can change
not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and aggressively shedding
anything we are doing that others are alreay doing almost as well.
SJ
^ Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into otherwise continuous
processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if one includes opportunity cost, or
funded work that displaces or drives out comparable voluntary work; or that demands
thousands of hours of input for little result.
🌍🌏🌎🌑