Dear all,
It’s my pleasure to be writing to you about the Movement Strategy. We have come together over the past 3 years to develop our Strategic Direction [1] and then the recommendations [2] to guide our collaborations and future. So many of you contributed to the process — some for only a part, and others throughout the entire process. With the recommendations complete, our focus now shifts to implementing the recommendations in a collaborative, open, and transparent way.
Transition To make the transition from the publication of the recommendations to their implementation, we need to do some planning. It’s a 10-year strategy, with dozens of initiatives, dependencies, and connected goals, to be delivered in a more distributed, deliberative, and open collaborative model than ever before. We’ll need to work together to define how we prioritize, sequence, resource, and support each initiative.
So much of our work is done online, but a lot of strategic work also happens in person. We can’t do that now, and so we’ve had to adapt to engage broadly, and in inclusive ways. To create this plan, movement-wide virtual events will kick off in September. We will use the Movement Strategy principles [3] as a guiding framework to ensure the planning will be inclusive and empowering for our diverse range of communities, without leaving anyone behind.
As a result of the pandemic, we lost the chance to work together in-person on the transition to implementation at the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin [4]. Yet we gained an opportunity to include a higher number and a more diverse profile of participants. Engaging with online contributors, technical developer communities, and smaller user groups throughout the process will be a key priority.
Successful virtual engagements with a high number of diverse participants are difficult to do well. Therefore, a Design Group will collaborate to prepare for the virtual transition discussions. This group will consist of community members reflecting different parts and perspectives of the movement, including representatives of regional collaboratives (CEE, ESEAP, Indaba, Iberocoop, North America, South Asia, WikiArabia, WikiFranca), the EDs and chairpersons groups, and WMF staff.
Anyone who is interested can contribute. Regular summaries of the preparation work and design discussions will be published on meta so that anyone interested will be able to share insights and help improve the process, even if not part of the Design Group itself.
Participation I look forward to: Working with many of you at the virtual transition events. Ways to participate and the schedule of events will be determined by the Design Group. The current plan is to start the virtual transition discussions with the movement in September. The virtual events is where major discussions will take place on sequencing, prioritizing, and resourcing the recommendations across the movement. Seeing those of you interested participate in the open review of the transition preparations. The task will be to review the work of the Design Group and share your perspective, enriching the thinking to improve the events. Open review will happen in parallel to the work of the Design Group from the end of June to the end of July / beginning of August. Having nominations from different movement groups and collaboratives (mentioned above) for the Design Group. The task will be to design as a group how the transition process of online events will be set up.
Want to know more? We have put together a placeholder meta page [5] and will keep updating it as more information becomes available. Join office hours with the Movement Strategy core team on Wednesday. June 10 @ 17:00 UTC (Google Meet http://meet.google.com/uun-pzmb-kti) [6] or Thursday. June 11 @ 08:00 UTC (Google Meet http://meet.google.com/rva-yqaq-zdk) [7] to share any comments and ask questions. Our email channel is always open: strategy2030@wikimedia.org mailto:strategy2030@wikimedia.org.
Best, Ryan Merkley Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommen... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Movement_Strategy_Principles [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Summit_2020/Report https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Summit_2020/Report [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2030 [6] https://meet.google.com/uun-pzmb-kti https://meet.google.com/uun-pzmb-kti[7] https://meet.google.com/rva-yqaq-zdk https://meet.google.com/rva-yqaq-zdk
_____________________________
Ryan Merkley (he/him) Chief of Staff, Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org/
rmerkley@wikimedia.org mailto:rmerkley@wikimedia.org @ryanmerkley https://twitter.com/ryanmerkley
Hoi,
The biggest problem of this strategy document that I see is that it is oriented towards our own internals. This is best understood from the first sentence: *People-centeredness means that every aspect of our Movement must address the needs and challenges of the people who power it and whom it serves, so that each one can contribute in their best way to the sum of human knowledge.*
It does not mention what we do and why we do it. It follows that based on this we cannot give priority to our biggest bias; what we do first and foremost is service wants in English. This bias is huge and when we were a company, we would recognise that around 50% of Wikipedia traffic is in English. We would realise the extend that scholarly publications are in English studying aspects of English Wikipedia. We would know that we do not have much data on everything else. We would be aware of our other products and strategise how to improve their market value. For our movement, market value is in the number of people it serves. We would for instance know that Wikisource books are marketed in India external to us and we would consider what it takes to provide a proper interface so that people find what is available to them thanks to a non-English community. A community we do not notice nor respect.
We are so happy with American students (doing good work) on English Wikipedia but we do not engage high school students, even primary school students who could write in their language expanding Wikipedias often with less than 10.000 articles.
We have an opportunity to turn this around. We have this notion that we are going to do things differently in this strategy. We have the papers that for many are too long to read and we have the Special:MediaSearch (publicly available for two weeks now) that enables search in Commons in all our languages. When we support it in the Wikiway, we will allow for it not to be perfect. We will find that as we add items to pictures that we will find more results or even only results.. Try to find هيلين كوبر using text based search in Commons and compare the results.
As a product, Commons only serves our own needs. We do not know the number of downloads of pictures we do not know the extend Commons has been searched in other languages. This is true for Wikidata as well. We may know the volume of queries it serves but in what language and how do we extend the usefulness of Wikidata in languages other than English? What strategies are in place is this a key performance indicator? How can we show that we care?
With Commons enabled for search in any language thanks to the Special:MediaSearch, we have the perfect tool to start address this bias. We can measure in what language Commons is searched. We can measure the number of labels added to Wikidata that help people find images. We can measure the number of downloads from Commons that happen as a result. We can then demonstrate the pent up need there is.
This will likely be very much driven by the Wikimedia Foundation itself. There will be outcries from vested interests that it detracts from other/their priorities. People will state that they are disgusted with us giving priority in this way. But do realise, white black of yellow, when your language is English you are well served and others are not. English is only about 50% of our traffic and you would not say so from what we advertise we do.
Thanks,
GerardM
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org