Ilana, restricting wishlist to non-Wikipedia this year is a very sad news.
For many years, wishlist survey was the best way for the community to talk back to the foundation, and to try to influence its direction. WMF mostly ignored these wishes, yet it was still a place to express, discuss, aggregate and vote on what community needed. Big thank-you is due to the tiny community tech team that tackled the top 10 items, but that's just ~3% of the foundation's employees.
WMF has been steadily separating itself from the community and loosing credibility as a guiding force. Take a look at the last election -- almost every candidate has said "no" to the question if WMF is capable of deciding/delivering on the direction [1]. In **every** single conversation I had with the community members, people expressed doubts with the movement strategy project, in some cases even treating it as a joke.
This is a huge problem, and restricting wishlist kills the last effective feedback mechanism community had. Now WMF is fully in control of itself, with nearly no checks & balances from the people who created it.
I still believe that if WMF makes it a priority to align most of its quarterly/yearly goals with the community wishlist (not just top 10 positions), we could return to the effective community-governance. Otherwise WMF is risking to mirror Red Cross Haiti story [2] -- hundreds of millions of $$ donated, and very few buildings actually built.
With great respect to all the people who made Wikis what they are today, --[[User:Yurik]]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019/Question...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross#Disaster_preparedness_and_r...
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 5:18 PM Ilana Fried ifried@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, everyone!
My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech team. We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist Survey https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020. This will be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people to write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and the Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most support votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll probably return to the traditional structure.
So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years — and, generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia). This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on non-Wikipedia projects.
Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken on larger wishes (like Global Preferences https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences or Who Wrote That https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Who_Wrote_That_tool), which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes. Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this reason, we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many wishes (new and remaining 2019 wishes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results) as possible.
Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020* related to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines for this new process, so *we want your feedback https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020* (on what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
Thanks,
Ilana Fried
Product Manager, Community Tech https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Thank you for writing this; I completely agree.
I've long thought the WMF should put more resources into community wishes, not less.
I do hope this will be reconsidered.
Perhaps there could be more wishes granted to non-Wikimedia projects, while maintaining the same number of wishes for Wikipedia?
On Oct 4, 2019, at 4:43 PM, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
Ilana, restricting wishlist to non-Wikipedia this year is a very sad news.
For many years, wishlist survey was the best way for the community to talk back to the foundation, and to try to influence its direction. WMF mostly ignored these wishes, yet it was still a place to express, discuss, aggregate and vote on what community needed. Big thank-you is due to the tiny community tech team that tackled the top 10 items, but that's just ~3% of the foundation's employees.
WMF has been steadily separating itself from the community and loosing credibility as a guiding force. Take a look at the last election -- almost every candidate has said "no" to the question if WMF is capable of deciding/delivering on the direction [1]. In **every** single conversation I had with the community members, people expressed doubts with the movement strategy project, in some cases even treating it as a joke.
This is a huge problem, and restricting wishlist kills the last effective feedback mechanism community had. Now WMF is fully in control of itself, with nearly no checks & balances from the people who created it.
I still believe that if WMF makes it a priority to align most of its quarterly/yearly goals with the community wishlist (not just top 10 positions), we could return to the effective community-governance. Otherwise WMF is risking to mirror Red Cross Haiti story [2] -- hundreds of millions of $$ donated, and very few buildings actually built.
With great respect to all the people who made Wikis what they are today, --[[User:Yurik]]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019/Question...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross#Disaster_preparedness_and_r...
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 5:18 PM Ilana Fried ifried@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, everyone!
My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech team. We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist Survey https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020. This will be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people to write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and the Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most support votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll probably return to the traditional structure.
So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years — and, generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia). This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on non-Wikipedia projects.
Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken on larger wishes (like Global Preferences https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences or Who Wrote That https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Who_Wrote_That_tool), which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes. Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this reason, we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many wishes (new and remaining 2019 wishes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results) as possible.
Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020* related to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines for this new process, so *we want your feedback https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020* (on what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
Thanks,
Ilana Fried
Product Manager, Community Tech https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hi Yuri,
I just wanted to respond to this as I think there are two levels of issue here, and on one level I agree and on another I disagree!
On the more immediate level about "ok, there's a technical wishlist, what should we do with it" - I think it's a reasonable decision for the WMF to opt to have a year where the wishlist focuses on non-Wikipedia projects. Certainly if you talk to people who are mainly active on Wikisource or Commons or somewhere else they feel Wikipedias get all of the attention, and it seems to me that this decision is based on people at the WMF hearing that and finding a way to act on it.
However I agree with most of the rest of your email, particularly the issue about overall alignment of priorities between the community and the WMF. I think your question about "what if all the WMF's efforts were focused on the results of the wishlist?" is quite thought-provoking. I imagine a large part of the reason this doesn't happen is that the wishlist only reflects the needs and perceptions of highly active contributors [at present I think it only accepts submissions in English ,which is another obstacle, but that could be addressed]. Of course highly active contributors are not the only audience the WMF is building products for, but "community input" isn't sought in prioritising projects that mainly affect e.g. reader experience.
Which poses some questions about what a more collaborative approach to setting priorities for product across the piece might look like - which is something you can see some of the strategy process recommendations moving towards. Probably a vote on a wishlist wouldn't be the right way to do it, because it's a challenging task to try to prioritise e.g. something that makes life easier for readers in Nigeria vs something that makes life easier for editors in Germany, and there probably isn't a really simple solution. However there is almost certainly a better solution than all of that prioritisation being done within the WMF staff, part for the certain amount of resource that gets dedicated to the wishlist...
Thanks
Chris
On Sat, Oct 5, 2019 at 12:44 AM Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
Ilana, restricting wishlist to non-Wikipedia this year is a very sad news.
For many years, wishlist survey was the best way for the community to talk back to the foundation, and to try to influence its direction. WMF mostly ignored these wishes, yet it was still a place to express, discuss, aggregate and vote on what community needed. Big thank-you is due to the tiny community tech team that tackled the top 10 items, but that's just ~3% of the foundation's employees.
WMF has been steadily separating itself from the community and loosing credibility as a guiding force. Take a look at the last election -- almost every candidate has said "no" to the question if WMF is capable of deciding/delivering on the direction [1]. In **every** single conversation I had with the community members, people expressed doubts with the movement strategy project, in some cases even treating it as a joke.
This is a huge problem, and restricting wishlist kills the last effective feedback mechanism community had. Now WMF is fully in control of itself, with nearly no checks & balances from the people who created it.
I still believe that if WMF makes it a priority to align most of its quarterly/yearly goals with the community wishlist (not just top 10 positions), we could return to the effective community-governance. Otherwise WMF is risking to mirror Red Cross Haiti story [2] -- hundreds of millions of $$ donated, and very few buildings actually built.
With great respect to all the people who made Wikis what they are today, --[[User:Yurik]]
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019/Question... ?
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross#Disaster_preparedness_and_r...
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 5:18 PM Ilana Fried ifried@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, everyone!
My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech
team.
We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist
Survey
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020. This will be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people
to
write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and
the
Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most
support
votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll probably return to the traditional structure.
So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years —
and,
generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia). This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on non-Wikipedia projects.
Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken
on
larger wishes (like Global Preferences https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences or
Who
Wrote That https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Who_Wrote_That_tool), which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes. Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this
reason,
we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many
wishes
(new and remaining 2019 wishes <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results ) as possible.
Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020* related to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines
for
this new process, so *we want your feedback https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020*
(on
what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
Thanks,
Ilana Fried
Product Manager, Community Tech https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hoi, The disappointing you show and the grotesque conclusions are imho based in a sense of entitlement. You had it your way for so long and they are now robbing you from your cookies... It is easy to "forget" that a program where a majority decides what is on a "community wish list" favours the biggest projects. It is easy to forget that the WMF has many projects and your Wikipedia is only one out of over 250 and, there are the "other" projects as well. So I understand your disappointment and let me give you, as a solace, my Wikipedia projects that are unlikely to be considered but will have a positive impact on the quality and usability of Wikipedias
- Wikidatification of blue red and black links [1] This will improve quality on the biggest projects by a 4 to 6% particularly in lists - Importing the uncontroversial data from DBpedia [2] This will have a quantitative and qualitative impact on the ability of Wikidata to serve - Improve the usability of the Wikidata UI [3] This will make Wikidata more friendly to other languages then English kick starting labelisation of items. - Research the effect of Listeria list as a tool to promote diversity of content [4] There is another project on Indian Wikipedias that works in a similar way but here having the same content in multiple Wikipedias is key. - Introduce the "one page wonder" [5] Citations are not read, provide a way to read more about subjects and particularly what we have not written at the WMF.
I do agree that a one off project is not the best of ideas. A cash rich organisation like the WMF can afford it to have both a non Wikipedia and a Wikipedia wish list project a continuous feature of its support. Thanks, GerardM
[1] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-lowest-hanging-fruit-... [2] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-lowest-hanging-fruit-in-dbp... [3] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/10/what-data-is-wrangled-is-obviou... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GerardM/Africa [5] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/08/there-is-much-more-to-read-intr...
On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 at 01:44, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
Ilana, restricting wishlist to non-Wikipedia this year is a very sad news.
For many years, wishlist survey was the best way for the community to talk back to the foundation, and to try to influence its direction. WMF mostly ignored these wishes, yet it was still a place to express, discuss, aggregate and vote on what community needed. Big thank-you is due to the tiny community tech team that tackled the top 10 items, but that's just ~3% of the foundation's employees.
WMF has been steadily separating itself from the community and loosing credibility as a guiding force. Take a look at the last election -- almost every candidate has said "no" to the question if WMF is capable of deciding/delivering on the direction [1]. In **every** single conversation I had with the community members, people expressed doubts with the movement strategy project, in some cases even treating it as a joke.
This is a huge problem, and restricting wishlist kills the last effective feedback mechanism community had. Now WMF is fully in control of itself, with nearly no checks & balances from the people who created it.
I still believe that if WMF makes it a priority to align most of its quarterly/yearly goals with the community wishlist (not just top 10 positions), we could return to the effective community-governance. Otherwise WMF is risking to mirror Red Cross Haiti story [2] -- hundreds of millions of $$ donated, and very few buildings actually built.
With great respect to all the people who made Wikis what they are today, --[[User:Yurik]]
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019/Question... ?
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross#Disaster_preparedness_and_r...
On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 5:18 PM Ilana Fried ifried@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello, everyone!
My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech
team.
We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist
Survey
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020. This will be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people
to
write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and
the
Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most
support
votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll probably return to the traditional structure.
So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years —
and,
generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia). This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on non-Wikipedia projects.
Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken
on
larger wishes (like Global Preferences https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences or
Who
Wrote That https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Who_Wrote_That_tool), which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes. Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this
reason,
we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many
wishes
(new and remaining 2019 wishes <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results ) as possible.
Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020* related to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines
for
this new process, so *we want your feedback https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2020*
(on
what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
Thanks,
Ilana Fried
Product Manager, Community Tech https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On Sun, 6 Oct 2019 at 05:50, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
The disappointing you show and the grotesque conclusions are imho based in a sense of entitlement.
I don't think calling Yuri's conclusions grotesque or saying he is entitled are particularly productive comments. Let's keep this list discussion calm, please?
Dan
Gerard, you assume that "my wikipedia" is the only project I participate in? Let me assure you this is not the case. On the contrary, the last few years I mostly contributed to Wikidata and recently - a massive Wiktionary lexeme import, and very little to Wikipedia.
That said, I think removing the last actionable and visible community check on WMF is a mistake for the reasons I outlined before. We the community (people who contribute to the open knowledge, who actually created the knowledge that now generates all those donations) should have at least some measurable input into how WMF spends those resources and priorities its projects. WMF can say "we believe that free knowledge means we must spend 99% of the donations towards global warming, because one cannot have free knowledge without the planet on which to live" (a bit of a straw man argument, but it illustrates my point) -- and there is no community input short of a Global protect or a Spanish-wiki-style revolt where the whole community decides to move to a different platform for the feedback to get across.
My point is -- in a democracy, if a large crowd is on the streets, the government has already messed up. And the way to avoid it is to have a well functioning feedback mechanism that can early-on tell WMF what the "constituents" would like it to do. We currently do NOT have any way for donators to say what they want the money to be spend on. We currently do NOT have any way for community to do the same. Thus, its a self-driving ship -- the inmates are running the asylum.
On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 12:50 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
The disappointing you show and the grotesque conclusions are imho based in a sense of entitlement. You had it your way for so long and they are now robbing you from your cookies... It is easy to "forget" that a program where a majority decides what is on a "community wish list" favours the biggest projects. It is easy to forget that the WMF has many projects and your Wikipedia is only one out of over 250 and, there are the "other" projects as well.
Hoi, You are entitled to an opinion and you may voice it and so am I. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a democracy and neither is our movement. This was done with deliberation. At best our movement is represented in the board and through its chapters. In essence the main function of the WMF is to ensure that the servers serve. That they serve optimally. As a consequence they maintain the code base of MediaWiki and associated software. As a result there have been several improvements in the responsiveness of the software. There have been improvements in the amount of energy our servers use. And frankly, that is their business and it is none of the business of the community. It is their business because it translates in the amount the servers take to serve, in the amount it takes to transport the data and in the amount of energy to display it on a screen. This reduces costs and it is a good investment as improvements will serve us well as we move forward. It is also a fiduciary duty of the Foundation to use the monies it gets well
Given that our movement is not a democracy, I find it operates very much in a democratic way. At that it functions remarkably well representing the needs of our communities particularly when you compare it with some nation states. The Foundation serves its purpose well and even though I am well known to be critical, if you care to, you will find that I am supportive of what the Foundation does in the big picture. It is impossible to make everybody happy and, it does imho a good job within the parameters of what is possible to them. That includes people in a community who feel abandoned when they are told to share "their" toys. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 at 00:36, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
Gerard, you assume that "my wikipedia" is the only project I participate in? Let me assure you this is not the case. On the contrary, the last few years I mostly contributed to Wikidata and recently - a massive Wiktionary lexeme import, and very little to Wikipedia.
That said, I think removing the last actionable and visible community check on WMF is a mistake for the reasons I outlined before. We the community (people who contribute to the open knowledge, who actually created the knowledge that now generates all those donations) should have at least some measurable input into how WMF spends those resources and priorities its projects. WMF can say "we believe that free knowledge means we must spend 99% of the donations towards global warming, because one cannot have free knowledge without the planet on which to live" (a bit of a straw man argument, but it illustrates my point) -- and there is no community input short of a Global protect or a Spanish-wiki-style revolt where the whole community decides to move to a different platform for the feedback to get across.
My point is -- in a democracy, if a large crowd is on the streets, the government has already messed up. And the way to avoid it is to have a well functioning feedback mechanism that can early-on tell WMF what the "constituents" would like it to do. We currently do NOT have any way for donators to say what they want the money to be spend on. We currently do NOT have any way for community to do the same. Thus, its a self-driving ship -- the inmates are running the asylum.
On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 12:50 AM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
The disappointing you show and the grotesque conclusions are imho based
in
a sense of entitlement. You had it your way for so long and they are now robbing you from your cookies... It is easy to "forget" that a program where a majority decides what is on a "community wish list" favours the biggest projects. It is easy to forget that the WMF has many projects and your Wikipedia is only one out of over 250 and, there are the "other" projects as well.
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