Hello.
I happened to look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design earlier today and I noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design team is about 24 people these days. I found this very surprising, as that's quite a few people. And it's even more perplexing if you have visited Wikimedia wikis previously, as they're somewhat infamously not known for cutting-edge design. The vast majority of the content is very simple headings, body text, and sometimes thumbnails, all wrapped within a site skin that very infrequently changes.
If we assume that each design person's salary is $70,000/year USD, which I think is a very conservative estimate, that's about $1,680,000 of donor money spent per year on just design team salaries. Again, the actual figure is probably much higher.
When $1.68M of donor money is spent each year, what are we getting in return? Concretely and specifically, what is the return on this very large amount of money being spent every year? I see the various titles listed such as design researcher and user experience designer, but I can't wrap my head around what all of this money is being spent on, having personally used Wikimedia sites and services for more than 15 years.
MZMcBride
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
* Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers. * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends. * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too far the original intentions of donors and volunteers. * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the money can go to that effort. ________________________________ From: Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com Sent: Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
* Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers. * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends. * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too far the original intentions of donors and volunteers. * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM <tim.herb@gmx.demailto:tim.herb@gmx.de> wrote: The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, 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. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the money can go to that effort.
*From:* Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for
a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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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:VideoWiki 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 wrote:
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, 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. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the money can go to that effort.
*From:* Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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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 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:VideoWiki 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 wrote:
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, 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. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
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@gmail.com Sent: Sunday, June 19, 2022 1:42 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@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 behttp://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.commailto: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 declinedhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoWiki 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 sitehttps://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.commailto:meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote: We face the paradoxhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choicehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, 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. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 3:22 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
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
Galder - I wish I was optimistic that the WMF's strategy and actual performance will be responsive to your points. The consequences of the disconnect you describe (between the people whose labor feeds the organizations, and the paid staff of the various orgs) have been clear and tragic for many years.
The WMF spent half a billion in donor funds in the last five years (not including endowment contributions). Was it money well spent? What enormous accomplishments match that figure?
Is there no public notice or rationale given when grant applications are declined? The only update on the status of your grant that I can see was by you: < https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoW...
.
On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 6:37 PM James Heilman 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:VideoWiki 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 wrote:
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, 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. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the money can go to that effort.
*From:* Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
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The "decline" was via email, rather than publically. The concern was that VideoWiki supposedly lacks broad consultation, coordination, and research to provide an implementation framework. They suggested that rather than working to update the software to the new operating environment and adding improvements, that we conduct consultations within communities and gather further learnings from community members. They mention that there may also be other channels of funding.
Anyway instead we updated the software and moved it to new servers, plus made a number of improvements with the small amount of internal funds we raise directly ourselves. And then the programmer moved on as we were unable to offer him the amount of work they were looking for. The software still works and we are using it to make videos for MDWiki... https://mdwiki.org/wiki/Video:Abdominal_thrusts
James
On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 8:54 PM Benjamin Lees emufarmers@gmail.com wrote:
Is there no public notice or rationale given when grant applications are declined? The only update on the status of your grant that I can see was by you: < https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoW...
.
On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 6:37 PM James Heilman 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:VideoWiki 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 wrote:
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, 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. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the money can go to that effort.
*From:* Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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Hi Felipe,
Funding open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, or other altruistic projects that have nothing to do with Wikimedia at all (the Knowledge Equity Fund is a case in point, of course ...) doesn't seem right to me.
The WMF has been fundraising in India (as well as in Latin America and South Africa) this month, telling people there:
– that "a lot" of the money Wikimedia raises is flowing into the Global South[1] (according to the WMF tax return, it's about 2.5% of the money raised) – to donate because it will "keep Wikipedia online, ad-free and growing for years to come" (India emails) – "We request you to sustain Wikipedia's independence. 98% of our readers don't donate ..." (India fundraising banners)
Leaving aside what "keeping Wikipedia online" and "sustaining Wikipedia's independence" actually mean in this context, given that Wikimedia is richer than it has ever been and last year alone brought in about $90 million more than it spent – leaving that aside, you cannot beg a people earning a fraction of what you make on average for money as if Wikipedia's survival depended on it and then go and give their money away to some completely different cause.
Just for reference, according to the India FoodBanking Network[1],
– India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world – 189.2 million people i.e. 14% of India's population is undernourished – 20% of children under 5 are underweight – 34.7% of children under 5 years of age are stunted – 51.4% women in the reproductive age (15-49 years) are anaemic
Reading such statistics one wonders whether Wikipedia's Indian fundraising banners wouldn't be more appropriately used if they advertised some charities that will improve the quality of life of some of the most vulnerable people in India, instead of asking people there to send money to the US.
Should the WMF still find itself saddled with an embarrassment of riches: I recall that the other day we were encouraged here on this list to endorse a Discourse forum for Wikimedia strategy discussions – because it has good machine translation capabilities that MediaWiki lacks. If there is such a big surplus, wouldn't it be better to use it to incorporate similar translation capabilities in MediaWiki? MediaWiki is woefully obsolete in this respect, and in Wikimedia's case international communication across language barriers is arguably more important than it is in the case of sites like Facebook, which incorporated automatic translation a fair while ago.
This still wouldn't be about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" or "sustaining Wikipedia's independence", but at least it would help the volunteers who actually write Wikipedia.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://www.indiafoodbanking.org/hunger
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 1:18 PM Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for
a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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Hi Andreas, fair points!
Just to clarify, my suggestion is a community process to decide how to allocate the extra resources. I do agree with you and Galder that not nearly enough resources are spent on MediaWiki, automatic translation tools being one of many weak points. Another one that to my mind is unforgivable is that after 10+ years of needing and requesting, there's still no centralized system for templates, or even Lua modules.
However, we could argue or even agree all day about this and other worthy causes (within or beyond Wikimedia, within or beyond open-knowledge), but in the end I think nothing will change unless a big community process happens (perhaps something similar to the Movement Strategy one).
Lastly, MZMcBride, for what it's worth, the design team seems to at least be working actively in the Vector skin, but you may not have noticed if you haven't enabled the Vector 2022 skin in your preferences.
Cheers, Felipe User:Sophivorus
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 9:36 PM Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Felipe,
Funding open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, or other altruistic projects that have nothing to do with Wikimedia at all (the Knowledge Equity Fund is a case in point, of course ...) doesn't seem right to me.
The WMF has been fundraising in India (as well as in Latin America and South Africa) this month, telling people there:
– that "a lot" of the money Wikimedia raises is flowing into the Global South[1] (according to the WMF tax return, it's about 2.5% of the money raised) – to donate because it will "keep Wikipedia online, ad-free and growing for years to come" (India emails) – "We request you to sustain Wikipedia's independence. 98% of our readers don't donate ..." (India fundraising banners)
Leaving aside what "keeping Wikipedia online" and "sustaining Wikipedia's independence" actually mean in this context, given that Wikimedia is richer than it has ever been and last year alone brought in about $90 million more than it spent – leaving that aside, you cannot beg a people earning a fraction of what you make on average for money as if Wikipedia's survival depended on it and then go and give their money away to some completely different cause.
Just for reference, according to the India FoodBanking Network[1],
– India is home to the largest undernourished population in the world – 189.2 million people i.e. 14% of India's population is undernourished – 20% of children under 5 are underweight – 34.7% of children under 5 years of age are stunted – 51.4% women in the reproductive age (15-49 years) are anaemic
Reading such statistics one wonders whether Wikipedia's Indian fundraising banners wouldn't be more appropriately used if they advertised some charities that will improve the quality of life of some of the most vulnerable people in India, instead of asking people there to send money to the US.
Should the WMF still find itself saddled with an embarrassment of riches: I recall that the other day we were encouraged here on this list to endorse a Discourse forum for Wikimedia strategy discussions – because it has good machine translation capabilities that MediaWiki lacks. If there is such a big surplus, wouldn't it be better to use it to incorporate similar translation capabilities in MediaWiki? MediaWiki is woefully obsolete in this respect, and in Wikimedia's case international communication across language barriers is arguably more important than it is in the case of sites like Facebook, which incorporated automatic translation a fair while ago.
This still wouldn't be about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" or "sustaining Wikipedia's independence", but at least it would help the volunteers who actually write Wikipedia.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://www.indiafoodbanking.org/hunger
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 1:18 PM Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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How would you propose to measure 'output' in a somewhat objective way? It is of course easy to identify that our own pet projects don't get the attention we feel they deserve, but given that the priorities of the WMF are so much broader than those of you and me personally, that may not be entirely fair. Especially if you consider that the changes that the WMF comes up with often meet a lot of pushback from the community. It might be nice though to make a little more explicit someplace how our environment is changing over time, because I am sure that there's a lot of things that we almost don't notice, but make life better, or forget quickly because it's such a logical improvement. Not so much from accountability perspective, but more from a historical lens.
(as a sidenote: it turns out that the team has been roughly this big for a while now)
If your question is asking about 'what are you working on' (which is related to but different from 'what have you seen as output'), you could take a peek at their phabricator board https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/design/.
Best, Lodewijk
On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 3:06 PM MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hello.
I happened to look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design earlier today and I noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design team is about 24 people these days. I found this very surprising, as that's quite a few people. And it's even more perplexing if you have visited Wikimedia wikis previously, as they're somewhat infamously not known for cutting-edge design. The vast majority of the content is very simple headings, body text, and sometimes thumbnails, all wrapped within a site skin that very infrequently changes.
If we assume that each design person's salary is $70,000/year USD, which I think is a very conservative estimate, that's about $1,680,000 of donor money spent per year on just design team salaries. Again, the actual figure is probably much higher.
When $1.68M of donor money is spent each year, what are we getting in return? Concretely and specifically, what is the return on this very large amount of money being spent every year? I see the various titles listed such as design researcher and user experience designer, but I can't wrap my head around what all of this money is being spent on, having personally used Wikimedia sites and services for more than 15 years.
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On Jun 17, 2022, at 9:08 AM, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
How would you propose to measure 'output' in a somewhat objective way? It is of course easy to identify that our own pet projects don't get the attention we feel they deserve, but given that the priorities of the WMF are so much broader than those of you and me personally, that may not be entirely fair.
I'm not sure we need an objective measure of output, per se. Lots of measures could be sufficient. If "pet" projects—by which I assume you mean projects that community members are interested in—are not being worked on, then what is being worked on instead? That's essentially my question. (The Phabricator link you provided shows a massive backlog and maybe three or four tasks currently in development.)
I'm developing a thesis that Wikimedia Foundation Inc., with a budget of over $150,000,000 USD per year, "has bloated to become unwieldy, unaccountable, and it has little to show for the hundreds of millions of dollars it has wasted and continues to waste." I think the design team is potentially a good case study for this, but first I need to better understand the inputs versus the outputs. I can see the inputs pretty clearly, about 25 staff members and a couple million dollars of donor money being spent per year. What are the outputs for this recurring investment? Is the site user experience improving due to this investment? Are we publishing a lot of useful design research due to this investment?
Especially if you consider that the changes that the WMF comes up with often meet a lot of pushback from the community.
This framing suggests that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be pursuing its own agenda and priorities that may not align with the needs or wants of the Wikimedia community. I think that's entirely the wrong framing. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be serving the community's needs and we seem to have drifted, over many years, very far from what was an established truth. This is partially what I mean by a lack of accountability.
(as a sidenote: it turns out that the team has been roughly this big for a while now)
Sure, though if we conclude that too much donor money is being spent per year on, for example, design resources, it just means the problem has compounded over the course of many years to be even larger. We could be talking about $6M or $8M or more. That's a lot of money to spend and I'm struggling to understand what the return on investment is.
MZMcBride
I see, it sounds like you're less genuinely interested in what this team is doing, but rather trying to look for arguments why WMF would be wasting money. I'm not sure if that is a terribly constructive approach to start a conversation. Thanks for being open about it at least. Given this, and the fact that you're not interested in thinking about what good metrics would be to make such determination, before jumping to conclusions - I don't think I'll be a good conversation partner for you, and I'll let this thread be.
Lodewijk
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 1:36 PM MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
On Jun 17, 2022, at 9:08 AM, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
How would you propose to measure 'output' in a somewhat objective way?
It is of course easy to identify that our own pet projects don't get the attention we feel they deserve, but given that the priorities of the WMF are so much broader than those of you and me personally, that may not be entirely fair.
I'm not sure we need an objective measure of output, per se. Lots of measures could be sufficient. If "pet" projects—by which I assume you mean projects that community members are interested in—are not being worked on, then what is being worked on instead? That's essentially my question. (The Phabricator link you provided shows a massive backlog and maybe three or four tasks currently in development.)
I'm developing a thesis that Wikimedia Foundation Inc., with a budget of over $150,000,000 USD per year, "has bloated to become unwieldy, unaccountable, and it has little to show for the hundreds of millions of dollars it has wasted and continues to waste." I think the design team is potentially a good case study for this, but first I need to better understand the inputs versus the outputs. I can see the inputs pretty clearly, about 25 staff members and a couple million dollars of donor money being spent per year. What are the outputs for this recurring investment? Is the site user experience improving due to this investment? Are we publishing a lot of useful design research due to this investment?
Especially if you consider that the changes that the WMF comes up with
often meet a lot of pushback from the community.
This framing suggests that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be pursuing its own agenda and priorities that may not align with the needs or wants of the Wikimedia community. I think that's entirely the wrong framing. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. should be serving the community's needs and we seem to have drifted, over many years, very far from what was an established truth. This is partially what I mean by a lack of accountability.
(as a sidenote: it turns out that the team has been roughly this big for
a while now)
Sure, though if we conclude that too much donor money is being spent per year on, for example, design resources, it just means the problem has compounded over the course of many years to be even larger. We could be talking about $6M or $8M or more. That's a lot of money to spend and I'm struggling to understand what the return on investment is.
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