Thats a fair question, but its not a simple answer,
nor something that can
be properly assessed on short notice. I think one of the first issues I
see is that the underlying mediawiki coding would need to be completely
overhauled to enable full interactive architecture. That it would need to
be done in a way that enable ease of interaction for all contributors so
that we dont lose a large portion of our existing community which itself is
already struggling to maintain currently levels. The next issue is
bringing 25 years of accumulated content across to the new architecture
while keeping all the history of that in place.
I'd be more concerned if the WMF stumped up with a figure this quickly if
they even understood the question even though its our whole foundation.
There has never been any big picture architectural planning even the
creation of WikiData infrastructure wasnt as big as this will need to be.
I know Marshall has just started asking questions about what people are
envisioning the future to look like, I'd expect that the Hackathon and
Wikimania will be where we start hearing more about what the future can
look like and the steps that will need to take place to achieve that.
Galder please keep on asking these questions, I suspect a lot of what we
want is already being done by many different sites in a multitude of ways.
We just need to identify our own needs and make sure that each step can be
achieved without the negative impact that so many past changes have had.
This will take a multi year commitment in both funding and support from the
WMF and the Community the later of which is a lot harder to establish.
On Fri, 23 Feb 2024 at 21:58, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Two weeks have passed since we last heard about
the WMF explaining why
they renounce to add interactive content and infrastructure, and the
question remains unanswered: how much would it cost this so it can't be
done?
I really hope to have an answer, as we could know if what it is needed is
totally out of scope, or is something that could be payed for.
Thanks
Galder
------------------------------
*From:* Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158(a)hotmail.com>
*Sent:* Wednesday, February 7, 2024 9:09 AM
*To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
*Subject:* Re: [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we
are doing it wrong
Thanks Marshall for your pointing out an official answer from the WMF,
Let me say that this is not only disappointing, you are also presenting a
false dichotomy where we can only "save a kitten" OR "plant a tree",
while
we have budget, staff and enough talented volunteers to do both. The
dichotomy is presented in a way that makes us think that an estimation of
the cost of solving this problem has been done and it is out of all the
possibilities, but we don't know what the estimation is. Is there an
estimation of how much would this cost? If so, could you please share it so
we know why this is out of our possibilities?
I say that this dichotomy is false and I will try to explain why:
- When Maryana Iskander assumed her CEO role, she pointed that the
way the annual plan is done should be changed, because the previous
monolithic assumption that only things reflected in the annual plan can be
done (and nothing else) was preventing us from going forward. You can read
it the full reflection here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Office….
Claiming that a high priority problem can't be solved now because it wasn't
planned one year ago is not the way it was supposed this to be done.
- The message is not about the Graphs extension. It has some weight
there, but reading this message about interactive content in terms of "if
we solve the graphs issue, our job here is done" is also a wrong reduction.
But let's think that, indeed, this was the only problem we should solve.
Arguing that it is not in the Annual plan so it can't be solved is a
fallacy, as explained above, but even then, the annual plan was done AFTER
the graph extension was broken. Waiting two years for a high importance
problem to be solved can't be the way to do things.
- Two weeks after Iskander's message, Yael Weissburg wrote in Diff
this post:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/28/what-does-the-world-need-from-us-now-…
<https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/28/what-does-the-world-need-from-us-now-external-trends-to-watch/>.
In this post Weissburg wrote about "trends that we should expect to
accelerate in the years to come because they relate to key changes in how
people access, interact with, and share knowledge". You can read the post
by yourself, but there is an important takeaway: people is searching for
content in another way, and we should give them "rich content". Whatever it
takes.
- One year after Iskander assumed she wrote an update. There we can
read that the number 2 priority is "Re-centering the Foundation's
responsibility in supporting the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement
by understanding the needs of our contributor communities, as well as
emerging topics like machine learning/artificial intelligence and
innovations for new audiences." We should be doing that "innovations for
new audiences", but from you message it seems that we still need "a
conversation to happen"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Office…
- Later that year, Selena Deckelmann wrote that "The Foundation needs
to exhibit better accountability in maintaining essential services (e.g.
2-factor authentication), and to be explicit about the technical tasks that
it is definitely leaving for volunteers to own." (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Executive_and_Leadersh…).
Yes, I understand that the example given is another one, but the idea is
there: "the foundation needs to exhibit better accountability in
maintaining essential services". The message follows with an elephant in
the room, but we are not going to talk again about the elephant, for sure.
-
Finally, last two years annual plans were said to be rooted in the
2030 Strategy (which talks about this issue) and, more specifically, on the
2019 Medium Term plan.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019.
This Medium Term plan (which, again, is the one used as a roadmap) has only
two high priority topics, the second one being: "2. Modernize our product
experience. We will make contributor and reader experiences useful and
joyful; moving from viewing Wikipedia as solely a website, to developing,
supporting, and maintaining the Wikimedia ecosystem as a collection of
knowledge, information, and insights with infinite possible product
experiences and applications.". Then, there's a priority named
"Platform
evolution" which says literally this: "The Platform Evolution priority
encompasses improving and modernizing Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem to
respond to a landscape where Artificial Intelligence is creating content,
rich media dominates learning, content is structured, and collaboration
tools work across multiple devices and have minimal technical requirements.
(...)Addressing content gaps also includes making it easier to incorporate
rich media, which requires more storage and server power, and better
tooling for editing, uploading, and incorporating more types of media. On
the engineering front, better automation of the software release process
through continuous integration, and a more intentional focus on code
quality and testing will allow for more innovative and faster
experimentation". Again, this is not something new that happened two months
ago, this was written in 2019 coming for an extremely long conversation
that already happened between 2017-2019 and that is the guiding principle
of our current Annual Plan, stated by the authors of the annual plan. If we
are not moving in the way we decided, we are doing it wrong.
I could continue making a list of claims, but I think that is enough to
understand that the conversation has happened, that we can save the kitten
and plant the tree, that we already have decided that we need this and that
it is already written in the annual plan. Claiming that there's no budget
is also a bad move, because we don't know how much would this cost. In
fact, knowing the cost would be the result of having a plan, but if there's
no plan, we can't know if we can pay for it.
Let me end pointing again the big issue here: if we don't go forward with
our top importance strategic goals because they are too complex to be
solved, then every year will be more difficult to get there. The only way
to solve complex issues is to start doing them. Postponing them while we
try to take the low hanging fruits is a bad move; claiming that we are not
working on them ("one that we have not yet started given the other
priorities we’ve been working on") because we have been solving other
issues is the worst news we can have.
Have a nice day
Galder
-
------------------------------
*From:* Butch Bustria <bustrias(a)gmail.com>
*Sent:* Wednesday, February 7, 2024 5:19 AM
*To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
*Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are
doing it wrong
Hi Everyone,
My earnest hope that the Wikimedia Foundation on its 2024-2025 Annual
Financial Plan prioritize and I mean put first among all is the technical
infrastructure among all its budgetary items. We can scale down budgets to
3rd party organizations like the Knowledge Equity Fund, Movement Strategy
Governance funding, campaign grants, and other "wants" to accomodate a
highly technically reliable and stable Wikimedia online projects ("needs"),
future proof, and user friendly experience which require investments on
quality manpower, hardware, applications and the like. We love open source
but we also be pragmatic and wise on selection of choices because we want
our content be conveniently available and reliable to our readers, users,
consumers and also editors.
A welcome development is the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference,
the successor to EMWCon.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_20…
The said conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, from April 17–19,
2024.
I also hope the Foundation invest in more technical gatherings, both
onsite, hybrid or online to engage and reach out to more technical
contributors, within and beyond the Wikimedia movement. I also hope WMF to
start exploring eastward to Asia or elsewhere in the world as well fully
diversify the technical community.
Kind regards,
*Butch Bustria*
On Wed, Feb 7, 2024, 4:54 AM Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for weighing in, Marshall!
I agree wholeheartedly that we need to do a proper architecture for a
sandbox for interactive media, that will be safe (first and foremost),
perform well in the browser, work across device types (desktop web, mobile
web, mobile apps), and maintain our key requirements on editability and
reusability, balanced against the security and privacy needs of users if
we're going to invest the effort.
Backing up to do it right rather than patch up Graphs “one more time” is
the right thing, and I’m very happy to see a confluence of interest around
this now!
My hope is we can figure out how to make that architecture & testing work
happen in the near term until we collectively (inside WMF and out) can
wrangle resources to make the implementation production-ready.
Once we have a common infrastructure to build on, it’ll be easier for
work to progress on individual types of media (graphs, charts, maps,
animations, editable simulations, coding examples, etc, as well as classics
like panorama viewers and integrating the audio/video player into a sandbox
for heightened security).
My biggest hope is that we’ll enable more work from outside WMF to happen
– letting volunteers and other orgs who might have their own specialty
areas and work funding to progress without every change being a potential
new security risk.
When we have succeeded in the past, we have succeeded by making tools
that other people can use as their own basis to build their own works. I’m
confident we can get there on interactive media with some common focus.
Let's all try to capture some of this momentum while we've got it and set
ourselves up for success down the road.
– b
On Tue, Feb 6, 2024, 12:27 PM <mmiller(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone – My name is Marshall Miller, I am a Senior Director of
Product at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I work with many of the teams that
are involved with the user experience of our websites and apps, such as the
Editing, Web, Growth, and Mobile Apps teams (among others) [1]. I’m part of
the leadership group that makes decisions about how the WMF teams approach
things like graphs, interactive content, and video. Thank you all for
having this in-depth and important discussion.
I know that issues with graphs [2] are what started this discussion, but
I agree that it makes sense to think about this in terms of the broader
category of “interactive content”, because other kinds of interactive
content, such as maps or timelines, would share architecture with what is
needed for graphs (video is a different and more complicated content
type). I wrote a lot in this email, but here are a couple of the main
points up front: to support graphs and other interactive content, we would
need to take a step back and make a substantial investment in sustainable
architecture to do it – so that it works well, safely, and is built to
last. And because that’s a substantial investment, we need to weigh it
against other important investments in order to decide whether and when to
do it.
I know that it is very frustrating that the Graph extension has not been
operational for many months – it means readers haven’t been seeing graphs
in articles, and editors haven’t been able to use graphs to do things like
monitor backlogs in WikiProjects. Over the months of trying to find a way
to turn graphs back on, it has become clear that there isn’t a safe
shortcut here and that the path forward will require a substantial
investment – one that we have not yet started given the other priorities
we’ve been working on. Every year we have to make difficult tradeoffs
around what areas of our technical infrastructure we can and cannot take
on. In the current fiscal year, the Product and Technology department has
made experienced editors a priority [3], and many things that volunteers
have asked for are either accomplished or in flight:
Improvements to PageTriage (complete) [4]
Watchlist in the iOS app (complete) [5]
Patrolling in the Android app (in progress) [6]
Dark mode (in progress) [7]
Improvements to the Commons Upload Wizard (in progress) [8]
…and other projects.
But I know this conversation isn’t as much about what editors need as
what current and future readers need. Between talking about interactive
content and talking about video, it sounds like we’re having the larger
conversation of what we should be offering today’s and tomorrow’s readers
to help them learn from encyclopedic content – whether we need to be
offering interactivity, or video, or perhaps enabling other platforms/apps
to use our content to make interactive or video materials there. This is a
really important conversation, because even working together we probably
will not be able to build all of it – we’ll have to make hard choices about
where to invest. One place where this broader conversation is happening is
called “Future Audiences”, which does experiments on how to reach newer
generations who use the internet differently than previous generations –
and thinking particularly about video. Future Audiences has regular calls
with community members to shape the direction of those experiments, which
in turn inform how the broader Foundation prioritizes. I hope many of you
will get involved in those conversations – you can sign up here. [9]
Focusing back on graphs, since that’s what kicked this thread off, the
several approaches we’ve attempted for quickly re-enabling the extension
have ended up having security or performance problems. Therefore, we think
that if we were to support graphs and other interactive content, we would
need to plan substantial investment in sustainable architecture. This way,
our approach would work securely and stably for the longer term. But that
would take significant resources, and we’ll need to weigh it against many
other important priorities, like tools for functionaries, improvements to
the editing experience, automated ways to stop vandals, etc.
To be clear, if we do assign resources to the planning and building of an
architecture for graphs (and other interactive content), it means that we
are still at least several more months away from having a working
Foundation-supported architecture. Therefore, I think we should also be
having the additional conversation that many others have brought up about
what volunteers can do in these intervening months to make graphs somewhat
available to users. I know people are talking about that concretely on the
Phabricator task, and I will join that conversation as well.
For the bigger question, I would like to start with some more learning
about which kinds of interactive content are important for our
encyclopedia, and how our community members see the evolution of the
reading experience on our projects. I’d like to have some small
conversations with many of you so that we can get into the details and
ideas, joined by some of my colleagues. I’ll start reaching out to see who
is interested in talking – and please let me know directly if you’d like to
talk.
Thank you for weighing in so far, and let’s keep talking and planning
together.
Marshall
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MMiller_(WMF)
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024#…
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Page_Curation/2023_Moderator_Tools_…
!
[5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/iOS/Watchlist#October_20…
[6]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/Anti_Vandalism
[7]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Accessibility_for_reading
[8]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:WMF_support_for_Commons/Upload_W…
[9]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences#Sign_up_to_participate!
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