Hi Yaroslav,
Meta already exists, it is included in Single User login and cross wiki notifications. It uses the same software as the talkpages on our various projects on Wikipedia, Commons, WikiVoyage etc. The cross wiki notifications in particular mean that everyone active in Wikipedia, Commons or any other wiki in the movement could be pinged about a discussion there.
It is available for use by anyone who wants a dialogue with the volunteer community, or who wants cross wiki discussion. So I was going to describe it as dormant rather than dead. Then I looked at recent changes, and the last 50 edits went back less than an hour, that's very quiet compared to The English Language version of Wikipedia, but way less dead than quite a few of the movement's thousand wikis.
WSC
On Mon, 13 Jun 2022 at 11:05, wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review (F. Xavier Dengra i Grau)
- Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review (Yaroslav Blanter)
Message: 2 Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2022 12:04:42 +0200 From: Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CAM-kgDNj-XWCLgKmhWjphKGnYEkEZY7zEVdjumK= FA2QO5gK6Q@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0000000000005fa9f405e1516b9a"
Dear All,
I thought I would just let it go, but I do not think the discussion currently runs in a good direction.
I do not think it is useful to advocate that Meta is a good discussion platform. It is not. It is dead. At best, there are some announcements posted there, and there is a small group of people who monitor and comment on them. If there is something really outrageous going on, such as the recent rebranding attempt, users can be mobilized from the projects to leave their opinion. This is done by the project users who care, it is done inside the projects or using some extra-Wikimedia means, and it can only happen occasionally. If this does not happen, Meta discussions attract at best a dozen commenters, some of whom are just negative towards everything.
We tried to do something about this for at least 15 years (I myself was around and have been an active Meta user since 2007-2008). Things are not getting better, they are getting worse.
It might be a matter of funding, may be a radically new interface could be build on Meta to replace the existing one. But I am afraid this is more a matter of attitude. Discussions were happening on IRC, then most of them migrated to Facebook , then to Discord or Telegram, but nobody ever considered discussing things on Meta.
Obviously there are a lot of boundary conditions, I fully buy the argument that discussion should happen in the space owned by the WMF (though a lot of discussions are happening right now on spaces not owned by the WMF, and partially just because they are not owned by the WMF), licensed appropriately etc. But saying we should go to Meta to discuss there and shooting off all attempts of doing something else is a dead end.
(I must say I did not even log in to the Movement Stategy Forum and I am not registered there, I am not prepared to endorse or criticize it, and I do not have any specific suggestions for improvement. I did participate in Space when it was up, and I recognize all the problems which were there, though).
Best Yaroslav
On Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 11:09 AM F. Xavier Dengra i Grau via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Bon dia a tothom/Hi everyone,
It's really difficult not to agree with Galder here. Happy to still read these persistent colleagues with key arguments.
The same people that committed the big mistakes and failure with
Wikimedia
Space (that should have never existed and that even combined discussions with Facebook groups as a "revolution" of communication) is now trying to tell us that they "learnt from those mistakes" and that they have full commitment in finishing this new forum. I still look back at this graph of 2019 <
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2019/06/25/introducing-wikimedia-space-a-platform...
and wonder how things can rapidly age that badly and with worse
leadership.
Imho this is quite informative of the lack of sustained chain of command (not community-need driven anymore). And the worst part of it, this is coming from the same people that is parallelly trying to blame those volunteers who strongly disagree with very legit discourses on the
constant
externalization of features and the lack of renewed wiki tech. I've read
so
far too many fallacies ("this platform must be good because we are 67
staff
people behind", etc) instead of a critical recognition that our default, wiki one is obsolete and must be urgently supported with staff and resources.
There is no way to justify new forums in other interfaces rather than the aim or the apathy of the WMF to disengage actively involved wikipedians
in
favor of more empty infrastructures (that benefits the institution rather the direct interaction within the knowledge projects). Truly sad, especially when some of us feel obliged to explain this to kind donors
that
truly believe that their 5$ are going to fund Wikipedia's servers and functionalities as they are mostly told in the funding banners.
Xavier Dengra ------- Original Message ------- El dilluns, 13 de juny 2022 a les 10:19 AM, Matej Grochal < matej.grochal@wikimedia.sk> va escriure:
Dear all
I quite agree with Galder here. We should focus on making our own spaces more inclusive and easier to use rather than jumping to various external providers for this and that. Let's not forget that existing volunteers
and
staff also have to learn to use the new platform. The other issue is the continued splitting of content and esp. volunteers have to find extra
time
to check those other platforms to stay in touch with the movement.
Be well and healthy
Matej
On Sunday, June 12, 2022, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158@hotmail.com>
wrote:
Ceill, I am a big fan of having 'one front door' for people that are trying to find answers to questions. Having the front door in another building,
with
another technology, and once they are in we say them that our building
is
the other one, the one that is falling down (but don't visit the
basement,
please, is full of money) is the worst of the strategies.
Best, Galder
*From:* Ciell Wikipedia ciell.wikipedia@gmail.com *Sent:* Sunday, June 12, 2022 6:03 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review 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 <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_communications_insights/Report/Fron...
).
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.
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.
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.
*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. *
Best, Ciell
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