Hi Quim,

I have tried it out and created a calendar entry for the London meetup.

A few comments.

It isn't in the Single User Login (SUL). If I was there I wouldn't be getting notifications from Wikimedia wikis, and if someone pinged me or edited something I was interested in I wouldn't get pinged if I was on another wiki.

It isn't in MediaWiki, the interface is unfamiliar and different. That probably counts as an advantage for a small proportion of geeky types who tend to be over-represented in software departments. But for most people it is a disadvantage, I suspect for non English speakers the barrier is greater, one of the reasons why I am comfortable doing the occasional edit in many non English Wikipedias is that the look and feel of the site is very familiar even if I don't speak the language.

At a time when the WMF and the volunteer community seem to be drifting ever further apart, it seems perverse to replicate a whole bunch of stuff that belongs on the meta and outreach wikis and put it somewhere outside SUL.

The wisdom of crowds is vulnerable to subdivision of those crowds. Any crowd ceases to be a crowd after a certain amount of subdivision. With the community now broadly stable, a more sensible strategy would be to consolidate some things together such as outreach, meta, phabricator and various chapter wikis, not to further divide.

At a time when at least one chapter has realised that having its own wiki outside of SUL is a de facto barrier between them and the community that they aspire to serve, Creating non wiki rivals to meta and outreach looks to me as big a mistake as the WMF decision to communicate with the community through blogs rather than the Signpost and to hive off the interface with IT to phabricator..

There is never enough IT resource to do all the things that the community thinks it needs. But WMF projects like this just feed the perception that there is always budget for WMF initiatives, rarely if ever for community ones. I'm sure the effort that went into this could have been used to change mediawiki to reduce edit conflicts or to give the Georgian Wikipedia an interface that allows those with Latin keyboards to type in Georgian.

Apologies if that comes across as negative, I'm sure the intention is sensible, just that the direction of travel is illadvised.

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Introducing Wikimedia Space: A space for movement news and conversations (Quim Gil)

Message: 1 Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2019 18:46:27 +0200 From: Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Introducing Wikimedia Space: A space for movement news and conversations Message-ID: <CACxLwRkaAngXYFbD0sPjEf= kKt__7R389G6NzLn2Bs-OM3c_mQ@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Hi, thank you for your feedback about Wikimedia Space.

So far, there have been many comments focusing on _who_ has released _what_ and _how_. Let me tell you _why_ we are proposing Wikimedia Space. People agreeing on _why_ can agree on the rest way easier.

Wikimedia Space is all about Wikimedia growth. If you are supporting newcomers or you are contributing to the growth of the Wikimedia movement in other ways, we are very interested in your opinions, your suggestions, your needs. And we are especially interested in hearing from you if you are a promoter of movement diversity and/or part of any kind of group underrepresented in Wikimedia.

Why Wikimedia Space, in more detail:

...

From the Wikimedia movement strategic direction -

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20

• Knowledge equity

...

From the Wikimedia Foundation medium-term plan -

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019

• Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets
• Thriving movement
• Support to newcomers
• Strong, diverse, and innovative communities that represent the World
• Strong and empowered movement leaders and affiliates
• Safe, secure spaces and equitable, efficient processes for all

participants

I hope this explains our _why_. About some of the points mentioned...

Wikimedia Space is a proposal to the movement in the form of a prototype https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/what-do-mean-here-by-prototype/188/4. We believe it will generate interest, feedback, criticism and contributions in a number of ways that a text-only proposal in (say) Meta Wiki wouldn't achieve.

For instance, while we discuss here in a black & white and text-only environment, more than 60 colorful users have signed up already and Wikimedia Space and are getting their own impressions about it. https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/u .

Or for instance, several event organizers just signed up and added their event to the Wikimedia Space map, which, if you ask me, after just one day already looks fresh, beautiful and interesting: https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/events/l/map

We are happy to discuss possibilities for connection / integration / migration between Wikimedia Space and existing community channels. As a matter of fact, wikimedia-l could potentially benefit from the features offered by Wikimedia Space (a conversation started in this list by volunteers years ago):

https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/integrating-mailing-lists-to-wikimedia-s...

Wikimedia Space doesn't prevent improvements in Meta or other places. If anything, we believe it will become an incentive for improvements in all community channels willing to keep up. In our opinion, potential improvements in Meta shouldn't prevent the release of Wikimedia Space. What you see today is the result of about three weeks of part time work by four people. Now consider how much time would it take to discuss, agree, resource and implement an equivalent feature set in MediaWiki, and (just as important) equivalent social expectations and norms in the Meta community.

We are just starting to promote Wikimedia Space. Yesterday we did an initial announcement to get a first wave of users, see how the prototype would take hold, and gauge the initial response. We plan to continue promoting Wikimedia Space in more channels. In fact, you can help. If there is a channel missing, please point to its URL, or (even better) feel free to forward the announcement yourself.

If you have found an actionable problem, we welcome bug reports and feature requests: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/space/

We encourage you to give Wikimedia Space a try. Even if today someone remains unconvinced, signing up won't hurt them. Then give it a week, and let us know. We really mean it! Prototypes always contribute to better discussions.

Best regards,

Quim Gil Senior Manager of Community Relations @ Wikimedia Foundation