New subject: We need more video: doing it right

23 Jan 2024

Dear wikimedians,
Nearly one year ago, the Graphs extension was disabled from all wikis, because there was a
security issue that should be solved (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940). A wide
team from the WMF worked on a solution for some weeks, but after Northern Hemisphere
spring ended, summer came, then the monsoon season, and now it is again summer in the
Southern Hemisphere... and Graphs are still disabled. All the solutions proposed have been
dismissed, but every two months there's a proposal to make a new roadmap to solve the
issue. We have plenty of roadmaps, but no vehicle to reach our destination.

Seven years ago, we were discussing our Strategy for 2030. We used thousands of volunteer
hours, thousands of staff hours and millions of dollars to build a really well-balanced
strategy. There we concluded that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential
infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". We also made some recommendations
to improve the User Experience
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Improve_U…)
and claimed that we wanted to Innovate in Free Knowledge
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Innovate_…).
Well, the situation is now worse than it was seven years ago, let me give some examples:

  *   Graph extension is used in thousands of pages, some of them highly relevant, as
COVID or Climate Change information. There are thousands of graphs broken now, and the
only partial solution give is loading these graphs as images, instead of promoting an
interactive solution.
  *
Meanwhile, a place like Our World in Data has been publishing data and interactive content
with a compatible license for years. (Remember, "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the
essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge"). Trying to add this
data and graphs to Wikimedia projects has been done by WikiMed, and it is technically
possible, but still blocked to deploy (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T303853).
  *   Wolfram Alpha is like a light year ahead us on giving interactive solutions to
knowledge questions, even the silliest ones
(https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=how+many+oranges+fit+in+the+Earth%3F). We have good
technical articles about a lot of things, but sometimes "becoming the essential
infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge" needs to provide solutions to
exact problems, like the answer to an equation, and how to solve it. That's also
"free knowledge".
  *
Brilliant (https://brilliant.org/) is brilliant if you want to learn lots of things, like
geometry or programming. Way better than Wikipedia. But... you need to pay for it. How
could we even try if we can't add anything interactive to our platforms?
  *   We can build interactive timelines using Wikidata, but we can't embed them at
Wikipedia. Weird, because I can do it in any external page. Hopefully, Histropedia will do
it better. http://histropedia.com/<http://histropedia.com/>
  *   We could have something very special: inline links in video and audio subtitles. We
used to have them, but the new video infrastructure doesn't allow it. Imagine a world
where you can watch a video and link a link in the subtitles just to know more about
that.
  *   ...

The list can go on an on ("which phase the moon is today?"), but I think that
the idea is clear. We could have interactive content, but we are going in the opposite
direction, and every year we are further from our goal, because other platforms are doing
it better, way better. And this seems like some wild ideas, but then I read the 2023-2024
annual plan section called "Wiki Experiences"
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/…)
and it looks like we should be going there. But we aren't.

I'm sorry if this e-mail feels bitter. My experience in the last years is that we are
now further of what we need that we were before, even if many chapters and volunteers are
trying to overturn it.

Thank to everyone who have been trying.

Galder

We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong