Hi Heather,
Thanks for commenting.
The theme of "facts matter" seems good to me, and I generally like Victor's
video. However, the way that this report comes across to me is that it
advocates for certain points of view on issues which, however important
they may be (I happen to think global warming is a very important issue),
are not integral to Wikipedia's mission. Also, I found it strange that the
"front page" of the report has a "Facts matter" section that leads off
with
information about refugees and the Earth's temperature trends. On the
whole, that section comes across to me as being off-message. I would
encourage revising the report so that it's more consistent with the themes
and tone of Victor's video.
Social impact in the form of informing public dialogue is a valuable
attribute to Wikipedia, and I would encourage a more neutral approach to
articulating that attribute as has been discussed in this thread. It's
possible to highlight social impact while remaining compatible with NPOV
and staying focused on mission.
Thanks for engaging here.
Pine
Pine
On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 4:50 PM, Heather Walls <hwalls(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello,
This has become an interesting and important conversation. First, many
thanks to everyone as they bring their intellect, experience, and
thoughtfulness to this topic. And thanks to Zack for many months of work
organizing a complex project, with a theme that became increasingly
sensitive due to external public discourse, and especially for making a
tremendous and honest effort to hear feedback and to respond quickly here.
I’d also like to thank all the people who helped read, write, edit, and
consider this report.
We chose this theme in October, and have used it successfully in messaging
since then. It was part of the December English-language fundraising
campaign, in emails and banners to donors, and received very positive
response. It was the theme of a video, shared in December,[1] that became a
featured video on Commons.[2] We also shared our work and development
process on this report publicly when we published the Communications
department’s check-in slides covering the 2nd fiscal quarter (Sep - Dec
2016).[3]
Social impact is a very important part of Wikimedia that is hard to
understand from the outside, but that impact is one of the things that
makes your work so meaningful, and helps us find contributors and partners
around the world. As Zack mentioned, our annual reports are created for an
audience that includes ongoing financial contributors and people new to us.
They are intended to be timely and relevant to the interests of people who
are not as deeply involved in Wikimedia as the rest of us. They tell the
story of what Wikimedians have achieved in the context of the world, and
are related to topics in international conversations. Some of those stories
are efforts supported by the Foundation, and many are celebrations of the
importance and timeliness of independent work of members of the movement.
Wikimedia is rich and complex, and we revise our theme each year to share
new facets. The Foundation has been making these since 2008.[4]
Yes, our report was meant to bring up relevant topics for a global
audience, and to tie important facts to the work of Wikimedians. It was
meant to focus on the range of things people can learn from Wikipedia, from
the historical to the social to the controversial. But it was not a
response to anything that occurred in recent weeks, or in any one country.
We debated the relationship between the theme and public discourse as that
discourse changed, but decided that Wikimedia’s relationship with facts
hadn’t changed. The report is not perfect, and many people have pointed out
excellent alternative directions we might have taken. We’re listening, and
we will learn from your suggestions and ideas in our continuing work.
I am proud of the intentions, hard work, experience, and many difficult
decisions my colleagues on the Communications team and our collaborators
across the Foundation and community make every day. I hope the abridged
timeline of events, below, will help make some our process more visible to
you as well.
-Heather
[1]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/12/27/not-post-fact-world/
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_-_
FactsMatter2016.webm
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%
3AWikimedia_Foundation_Communications_Q2_(Oct-Dec_
2016)_-_Jan_2017_quarterly_check-in.pdf&page=13
[4]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
*Our fact criteria:*
Global, relevant to general readers and to 2016, verifiable, related to the
work of Wikimedians, surprising or interesting
*2016*
13 Oct: Meeting where “Facts Matter” was established, our deadline for a
full draft was December 15
28 Oct: First design review of website mockups.
7 Nov: Design team meeting, notes include:
- “Reaffirm facts matter”
- “Reacting to present moment is antithetical to the WMF movement”
- “We care just as much about facts as we did a year ago, 10 years ago,
and will care in five years”
14 Dec: Facts final, content drafted
27 Dec: Facts matter video posted
*2017*
6 Jan: Site and content review with other departments (locked to major
changes)
17 Jan: Print layout of all content
27 Jan: Communications quarterly review[3] posted Feb 7
1 Mar: Sharing the Facts Matter site
On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Yair Rand <yyairrand(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Risker has outlined many of the issues with the
report much better than I
would have been able to. While I'm happy to hear there will be some
reordering and that one of the images will be replaced, the report still
has many very serious problems.
How can we fix this? I can think of a few options:
* The report could be made open to edits from the community. (I was
hopeful
when the report was posted on Meta that it would
be editable, but it was
apparently posted primarily for translation purposes and is not
editable.)
Over the course of a few weeks much of the
content could be rewritten to
be
close enough to neutral.
* We could continue discussing specific problems in tone and focus,
errors,
and general issues with the report here on this
mailing list or on Meta
while the relevant people implement fixes and rewrites (hopefully in a
transparent manner), including the large content changes/replacements
required.
* The entire "Consider the facts" section could be removed/replaced. The
rest of the report probably could stand on its own, but that may not be
ideal. I don't know whether rewriting it from scratch is doable, or
whether
there may be relevant time constraints here.
I'd like to reiterate the seriousness of displaying non-Wikimedia-related
political advocacy over Wikimedia projects. Many editors work very hard
at
removing any biases in articles. To have a huge
banner placed over every
article on the whole project linking to 43px-font blatant political
advocacy which can't be reverted, is really damaging.
-- Yair Rand
On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 1:41 AM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, Erik...I really don't think my personal beliefs have a role in
this
> discussion, except as they very narrowly
apply to the Wikimedia
mission,
> vision and "values". That's
actually one of my issues with this report
-
it
reads as though it's been written by a bunch
of well-paid, talented
people
> who've been given rein to express personal and cultural beliefs
unrelated
> to Wikimedia. And my personal belief in
relation to that is that this
> annual report has positioned political advocacy far ahead of the
mission
and
vision of the movement, starting with the selection and ordering of
the
> "facts". Let's go through them one by one.
>
> The focus on the value of education is an entirely valid, even
necessary,
part of
the annual report; it is entirely central to our mission. The
focus on refugees is out of place, though. The fact that there is a
single
page on one WMF-hosted site that links to a
refugee handbook created by
other groups that include some Wikimedians (and the support of WMDE,
which
> we all know is NOT the same thing as the WMF) isn't justification for
> making "REFUGEES!1!!!11!" a big headline. It's peripheral to the
> educational activities of the WMF, and ignores or downplays many of the
> actual WMF-supported initiatives. There's something wrong when the WMF
is
> so busy touting someone else's project
that it forgets to talk about
its
own. But
why show a bunch of Uruguayan kids actually using Wikipedia,
when
> you can make a political statement using a photo of very adorable
refugee
children
who, generally speaking, aren't accessing any WMF projects?
Am I impressed by Andreas' images? of course! Look at the amazing
iceberg
images [featured image example at 1] - which
illustrate climate change
issues much better than the photo of a starving polar bear. We don't
actually know why that bear is dying - is he sick or injured, the most
common cause of wild animal deaths? Has he consumed (anthropogenic)
harmful
chemicals or materials such as plastic wastes -
increasingly common in
arctic animals? Or did he miss the ever-narrowing migration window to
the
prey-rich northern arctic ice fields (due to
climate change)? We can't
be
sure. But we can be a lot more sure that the
iceberg images are
illustrating something that can be linked more directly to climate
change.
Of course, nobody is getting a lump in their
throat by looking at
icebergs;
> it's not any where near as good an emotional button-presser that a
dying
> animal is. There's also the trick of
referring to "the hottest year
on
> record" instead of giving the *whole*
truth, which is it is the hottest
> year since these types of records started being kept beginning just a
few
hundred
years ago - and it's that long only if you count all types of
record keeping. Yes, it's much more impressive to imply that we're
talking
> about all of history rather than just the last few centuries. A lot of
> people reading this list have been creating articles for years; we know
> those tricks too. And none of this explains why climate change is even
a
> factor in the Wikimedia Foundation Annual
Report. It would be worth
> including if the WMF was a major contributor to anthropogenic climate
> change (I am quite sure it isn't!), or was taking major, active steps
to
> reduce its carbon footprint and talked about
that. But that's not
what's
in the
report.
A brief word about scientific consensus. In my lifetime, we have seen
plate tectonics go from being considered complete nonsense (the
scientific
consensus!) to being routinely taught in schools.
We have seen the
scientific consensus that stomach ulcers were caused by stress and
dietary
habits deprecated by the evidence that most
gastrointestinal ulcers are
caused by Helicobacter pylori; the theory that micro-organisms could
cause
stomach ulcers was long derided as being promoted
only by those paid by
the
pharmaceutical industry. (Oops!) There was a
mercifully short-lived
consensus that AIDS was caused by the lifestyle habits of gay men. And
even
as I write, the long-held scientific consensus
that has led to the
recommended dietary intake in western countries is coming into serious
question, at least in part because of the discovery that the baseline
research was funded by an industry that greatly benefited from these
guidelines - although it has taken researchers years to make headway
against a theory so ingrained. I have no doubt that the scientific
consensus that cigarette smoking is directly linked to lung cancer is
going
to hold, and I am certain that the scientific
consensus that asbestosis
is
caused by inhaling asbestos fibers will outlive
me by many generations.
But, just like on Wikipedia, consensus can, and does, change - and it
should be routinely re-examined and reconsidered. (Incidentally, the
climate change topic on English Wikipedia has historically been one of
the
> most contentious, resulting in several Arbcom cases, removal of
advanced
privileges, blocks, bans, sockpuppetry and trolling, mass violations of
the
> Biography of Living Persons policy, and the largest number of
rangeblocks
on any
Wikimedia project before 2010 - at one point about a quarter of
all
California IPs were blocked from account
creation. It's not a good
example
> of how to deal with a contentious subject.)
>
> I like that a "fact" was included about the rate of edits on Wikipedia,
> although it would be helpful to provide a bit more context to explain
why
> the Paris attack was the article
highlighted. My gut instinct is that
it
> was the current event that had the most
edits on the largest number of
> Wikimedia projects - in which case it was a great choice to feature,
and
> these would be really interesting facts to
have included. (If another
> article met that definition, I'd hope it would have been the one
> featured.) I'm a lot less comfortable with the "fake news" part of
this
particular "fact" - it lists media that have reported "major" stories
that
turned out to be flat-out wrong in just the last
two months, which
doesn't
support the case being made. It would probably
be more useful to point
out
the methods by which editors keep fake news out
of our projects rather
than
> giving the appearance of lauding specific media organizations. (And
yes,
> the selection of the media organizations
identified is politicized,
too.
Why the
Washington Post (perceived to be "liberal") instead of the more
editorially conservative Wall Street Journal ?)
The "Fact" about Indic languages is really good. My first thought was
that
it might have been an opportunity to talk about
how new Wikipedias come
to
> be, but on reflection that would have been a distraction. Perhaps
editors
> from the Indian subcontinent might find some
level of politicization,
but
> it's not visible to me with my limited
cultural knowledge.
>
> Similarly, the "fact" about biographies of women is good, too. I think
> there's perhaps an over-emphasis on the low percentage - a pretty
> significant percentage of biographical articles are of men who became
> notable at a time when women were much more socially restrained (if
not
physically prevented) from making the same mark as men - but I believe
that the focus on our outstanding contributors in this area, and their
excellent work, makes this a really important addition to the report.
There is a political element to this issue, but its exploration is
entirely
tied to the content, the activities of the
editing community, and the
seeking out and sharing of knowledge - all within scope.
I am rather ashamed that the "fact" about photos starts off with a
grammatical error. (It's the NUMBER of photos, not the AMOUNT of
photos.)
Otherwise this is an on-topic section worthy of
highlighting in the
Annual
report. Missing a lot of information though -
such as how many photos
come
from mobile phones and similar platforms, which
are the focus of the
first
paragraph. Given that focus, including a
smartphone photo of something
more
historic, or at least an image that was actually
used in an article,
might
> have been a better choice.
>
> The languages "Fact" is well written and informative, and highlights
some
really
important means of knowledge sharing, enabled by the WMF.
Entirely
> on-topic and mission-related.
>
> I can't see any reason at all why the "Travel" fact was included. It
does
not
include, for example, a link to Wikivoyage, the logical link to
include
> when talking about travel. There's no reasonable explanation why
there's
a
> link to Wikimania 2016, which isn't even vaguely referred to in the
text.
But we do
have a very big political statement with the image - one that
was
> actually quite off-topic; in fact, the photo shows a bunch of people
> actively seeking to disrupt travel, which is the opposite of the
written
message.
We have thousands of photos on Commons that could have
illustrated
this theme better, if we had to include it at
all. Even a shot of a
bunch
of people hiking with backpacks would have been
more appropriate.
The harassment fact ("OK")...very important message. I think the WMF
could
> have done much better in labeling this fact; this title is almost
> deceptive, because it doesn't actually talk about "OK" or common words
-
> the subject isn't what the title
implies. This kind of deception is
part
of
> the "fake news" motif, and it's unfortunate to use when just a few
facts
before
the same report is decrying fake facts and fake news.
(Incidentally,
> the claim that OK is the most widely understood word, globally, is
> referenced in English Wikipedia to a personal opinion piece. Just as
well
there's no link to the article.)
The new internet users fact is really good, highlighting important work
by
the WMF, filled with facts, and sharing the
longer-range vision with
readers. But this is one area where the WMF could have done some
political
> advocacy that was entirely within scope; shame to have missed this
> opportunity.
>
>
> So....I disagree with what Anna said (that "3/11 fact stories are about
> issues that have become politicized"). I count 6/11 facts that are
> politicized (refugees, climate change, the selection of media outlets
on
> the "rate of edits" fact,
biographies of women, travel, and the "OK"
fact
with the
misleading fake-news style title that was actually about
harassment), only one of which logically links the politicization
effectively with both the topic of the fact (biographies of women) and
the
WMF mission. And starting off with two of the
three most politicized
facts
> skews the entire presentation. The strain to include this political
> advocacy cluttered the useful and informative discussion and links to
WMF
> activities. It took the focus away from the
Wikimedia Foundation and
its
projects,
omitting obvious connections. If the WMF wanted to be more
political in its annual report, there were opportunities that were
actually
> mission-focused. To be honest, given the level of politicization of
other
peripheral topics, the absence of an effort to really increase focus on
the
> lack of online accessibility - something that dovetails strongly with
our
> mission - is a glaring omission. On this
point, I agree with John
> Vandenberg. And I'm sorry, Zack, but given the fact that so many of
these
> issues are directly linked to real-world
activities that have happened
in
just the
last few weeks, I'm not buying that this was more or less laid
out
back in late 2016.
Risker/Anne
[1]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_look_inside_an_
iceberg_(2),_Liefdefjord,_Svalbard.jpg.
On 2 March 2017 at 19:12, Erik Moeller <eloquence(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 12:26 PM, Stuart Prior
> <stuart.prior(a)wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > As an example, anthropogenic climate change is a politically
sensitive
> > > issue, but how can a consensus-driven movement not take into
account
> that
> > > 97% of climate scientists acknowledge its existence
> > > ?
> > > [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate
> _change>
> > > Accepting a scientific consensus just isn’t a political position.
> >
> > It isn't, but I think it's still worth thinking about context and
> > presentation. There are organizations whose job it is to directly
> > communicate facts, both journalistic orgs like ProPublica and
> > fact-checkers like Snopes/Politifact. In contrast, WMF's job is to
> > enable many communities to collect and develop educational content.
> >
> > If the scientific consensus on climate change suddenly starts to
> > shift, we expect our projects to reflect that, and we expect that the
> > organization doesn't get involved in those community processes to
> > promote a specific outcome. The more WMF directly communicates facts
> > about the world (especially politicized ones), rather than
> > communicating _about_ facts, the more people (editors and readers
> > alike) may question whether the organization is appropriately
> > conservative about its own role.
> >
> > I haven't done an extensive survey, but I suspect all the major
> > Wikipedia languages largely agree in their presentation on climate
> > change. If so, that is itself a notable fact, given the amount of
> > politicization of the topic. Many readers/donors may be curious how
> > such agreement comes about in the absence of top-down editorial
> > control. Speaking about the remarkable process by which Wikipedia
> > tackles contentious topics may be a less potentially divisive way for
> > WMF to speak about what's happening in the real world.
> >
> > I do think stories like the refugee phrasebook and Andreas' arctic
> > photography are amazing and worth telling. I'm curious whether folks
> > like Risker, George, Pine, Chris, and others who've expressed concern
> > about the report agree with that. If so, how would you tell those
> > stories in the context of, e.g., an Annual Report?
> >
> > Erik
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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