Hello Lodewijk,
no, you are certainly not alone in your concerns. It looks like at this
stage there is little we can do, and the only option left is to not endorse
the document.
Cheers
Yaroslav
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
wrote:
Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little
concerned that we can have
such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get
some Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a
consistent direction from those.
What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would
be doing more of the same, and more.
This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the
direction is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics
open is only natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to
take the next steps.
Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't
really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not
to do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at
Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.
Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text.
It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate
with my ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I
don't feel it provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing
a direction, which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.
I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may
very well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you
(plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately
involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let
them summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you
have not done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an
indicator that unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we
can enter the next round. Given all effort and resources that have been
invested in this process, such sanity check may be worth while.
Warmly,
Lodewijk
ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that
went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I
appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm
always feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on
the strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process -
such rebut would be totally fair :).
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher <kmaher(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while
I
haven't made a public update about strategy
in a while, work has been
continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in
which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic
direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity
to
create greater clarity about how we each
understand the direction, how we
might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these
goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and
individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted
to
acknowledge the contributions in this thread
first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed
again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap
my
drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with
Erik, I dig the
challenges
you all have put forward and appreciate the
diversity of opinions. Some
of
our differences stem from the unique contexts of
the groups and
individuals
responding and will result in differences in
implementation in each
community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of
source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But
regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a
rich,
substantive conversation. This has been one of
the best, and
most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I
hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement
strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>rg>:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
is
> too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I
take
> away though, is that we won't place
ourselves at the center of the free
> knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't
> expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want
that
our work
is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical
assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here,
but
it is vastly different than how I interpret from
this statement. To the
contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually
exclusive. I
do
think that Wikimedia should want to continue to
be known as a destination
for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness,
especially
in areas and contexts where we are not yet well
(or not at all) known.
Our
brand (including our communities) and visibility
are some of our most
valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not
to
build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this,
*and
much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we
are today, *and* we want
to
provide a service to other institutions. We want
to use that brand and
visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be
present
in new experiences and delivery channels, in
order to preserve the direct
interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we
have
on the web. I see this as essential - for our
readers, it's about
ensuring
a core promise: that the chain of evidence for
the information they seek
is
unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit.
For our contributors,
it's
about extending ways to contribute as our digital
interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a
utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content
in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not
that
we vanish into the background, but that we become
ever more essential to
people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the
experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can
promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase
are
already infrastructures that serve other free
knowledge projects, in turn
enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we
do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for
the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is
okay.
The direction comes from a small-ish group of
drafters trying to make
sense
of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that
sense, a small group
can
only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as
movement actors, to
take
this direction and interpret it in our respective
contexts, based on our
respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the
movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com>om>:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's
worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you
at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the
ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the
"essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components
maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would
be
controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit
in drafting, but
advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is
"a
world in which every single human can freely
share in the sum of all
knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or
ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the
impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've
made
great strides toward a project that is
"impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the
direction,
there was another who wanted us to be more bold
and recapture this
ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world
something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer
matter-of-fact,
sometimes plain and noncommittal statements.
While that works well for
NPOV
content, a strategic direction also seeks to
inspire ambitious efforts.
The
drafting group removed much of the flowery
language from the earlier
versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire
movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com>om>:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of
truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers --
primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is
consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query
federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an
inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based
model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and
customization across the network while improving the resilience of the
whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political
influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts
to
understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as
a platform, we start to
really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and
attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem
overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well
and
one that others in our ecosystem could benefit
from. Today, on our newest
Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and
individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many
cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these
institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or
resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by
providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also
accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come
with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be
Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other
Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each
context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these
excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments
about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get
incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the
processes
that we'd certainly get quite a few of these
requests that were too
specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned
accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be
taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers.
As
a result, we're publishing a “Features
report” written by Suzie Nussel
that
summarizes these requests, and should be a useful
starting point for
specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered
ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but
non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like
Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically
reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to
benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more
expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few
examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo
competition
> - Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and
museums
> - Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's
"Everypolitician" project or
Gene
> Wiki
>
> This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of
> maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of
> conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability
> challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like
> templates, which shift information out of the article space,
> disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is
> constructed from its parts.
>
> I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single
> biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for
> Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has
> already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective
> propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and
> notifications. Much more will need to follow.
>
> With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's
> already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding
> information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to
> Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values
> provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not
> considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
>
> > If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
> telling
> > users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
> feedback
> > form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the
source.
>
> I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like
> "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I
> certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice.
> However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear
> that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all
> requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
>
> Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it
> shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to
> the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.:
>
https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
>
> I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to
> document best practices for re-use, ranging from local
> community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the
> "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of
> these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to
> develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice
> applications, tabular data, and so on.
>
> Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license
> compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how
> to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do"
> from "here's what we recommend".
>
> >> Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information
about
> >> a subject, while other linked
sources provide deeper information.
The
> >> more structured the information,
the easier it becomes to validate
in
> >> an automatic fashion that, for
example, the subset of country
> >> population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate
> >> representation of the source material. Even when a large source
> >> dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization,
say),
> you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict
modifiability of
> copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that
being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal
data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated
database reports as well as on-demand lookup via
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks
in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field,
or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources;
see:
>
>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_
> Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
>
> Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a
> highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at
> under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is
> often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the
> available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists
> to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so
> far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized,
> e.g.:
>
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
>
> Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data
> while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity
> seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples
> show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
>
> >> But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways
> >> that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting
> >> with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri,
> >> is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable,
> >> including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who
are
> >> not literate at all. In this sense
I don't think WMF should ever
find
> >> itself in the position to argue
_against_ inclusion of information
> >> from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
>
> > There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia
> > articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of
Googling
> has
> > dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
>
> There is an important distinction between "lookup" and
"learning"; the
> former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro
> zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come
> about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or
> search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own
> highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a
> "bookshelf".
>
> In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in
> Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views
> were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely
> transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens
> it.
>
> I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's
> intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make
> both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the
> "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off
> to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the
> greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
>
> As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most
> googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and
> income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or
> not:
>
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-
> fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
>
> >> The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized
> >> gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is
> >> actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and
> >> perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique
seems
> >> to boil down to "Let's ask
Google for more crumbs". In spite of all
> >> your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the
path
> to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given
the extent to which
Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources
it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would
suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any
such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers'
access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be
used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other
reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing
"Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home
it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge
contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects
like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and
private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may
take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it
has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing
public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
> Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work,
and
> > give very little back. The world could do with more articles like
this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't
get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the
free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with
the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
1) Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions,
and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private
corporations.
2) Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to
go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair
use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
3) Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's
legally required, or by contributing directly (open source
development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services,
financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a
thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more
places use for more things.
4) Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary
knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the
solution, not the problem.
Cheers,
Erik
[1] See the getValue function in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its
"onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this
on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax
policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but
the other points need not be.
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