Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared strategic direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers, staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new ones created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual Wikimedia CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for CEE.[3] Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for such a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_%E2%80%93_Movement_... [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared strategic direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers, staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new ones created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual Wikimedia CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for CEE.[3] Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for such a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on with how the foundations remain flawed.
Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but will never keep you there.
Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful improvements, please.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk" zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers, staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
_______________________________________________ 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
Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
Seddon
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on with how the foundations remain flawed.
Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but will never keep you there.
Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful improvements, please.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk" zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
movement/2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
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 _______________________________________________ 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
I don't read Ziko's concern as one that suggests to exclude developers or teachers.
I read it as a suggestion that "... and beyond" is too inclusive, and thus it doesn't mean much. This is a concern that I share myself. I'm all for being inclusive, but the whole point of defining something is that it should have _some_ limits.
If Ziko have meant something else, I'll be happy to know.
I'm assuming good faith on everybody's behalf. We come from different cultures, we have different ideas, and we have different native languages. That's precisely why we need clearer definitions, not fuzzier ones.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-10-02 17:12 GMT+03:00 Joseph Seddon josephseddon@gmail.com:
Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
Seddon
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on with how the foundations remain flawed.
Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
will
never keep you there.
Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful improvements, please.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk" zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
movement/2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
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 _______________________________________________ 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
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
All possible stakeholders and participants in our 'value chain' should be consulted and be part of developing strategy.
That does not make them all the same as the community that create our projects or sustain our content long term. It's a mime that has been pushed and stretched until the community of unpaid and "nonprofessional" volunteers feel like second class citizens without a vote when it ever matters.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 15:12, "Joseph Seddon" josephseddon@gmail.com wrote:
Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
Seddon
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on with how the foundations remain flawed.
Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
will
never keep you there.
Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful improvements, please.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk" zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
movement/2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
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 _______________________________________________ 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
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Hello Joseph,
We must distinguish between the community, the movement and partners of the movement.
The Wikimedia movement is not a community, it consists of several communities. Such as the community of Wikipedia in French, of Wikidata or of Mediawiki.org.
Staffers of the WMF are part of the movement, as the WMF is part of the movement, as a chapter is part of the movement. Individual staff members or chapter board members can belong to communities.
Donors can be part of the movement, if they like to see themselves as such. I doubt that many people who donate 10 euros think of themselves as "community".
Staff from our GLAM partners are partners, not community, not movement.
I wonder if the WMF will say in future "we asked the community and it approved it", what will be the meaning of "the community"?
Kind regards Ziko
2017-10-02 16:12 GMT+02:00 Joseph Seddon josephseddon@gmail.com:
Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
Seddon
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on with how the foundations remain flawed.
Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
will
never keep you there.
Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful improvements, please.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk" zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
movement/2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
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 _______________________________________________ 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
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On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Joseph,
We must distinguish between the community, the movement and partners of the movement.
The Wikimedia movement is not a community, it consists of several communities. Such as the community of Wikipedia in French, of Wikidata or of Mediawiki.org.
Staffers of the WMF are part of the movement, as the WMF is part of the movement, as a chapter is part of the movement. Individual staff members or chapter board members can belong to communities.
Donors can be part of the movement, if they like to see themselves as such. I doubt that many people who donate 10 euros think of themselves as "community".
Staff from our GLAM partners are partners, not community, not movement.
I wonder if the WMF will say in future "we asked the community and it approved it", what will be the meaning of "the community"?
Kind regards Ziko
Reading between the lines of statements like "Knowledge as a service", "essential infrastructure", "tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia", etc., my sense is that the document, without saying so explicitly, is very much written from the perspective that the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Bing (and anyone else developing digital assistants and other types of knowledge delivery platforms) should be viewed as key partners in the exchange of free knowledge, and served accordingly, through the development of interfaces that enable them to deliver Wikimedia content to the end user.
My problem with that is that those are all for-profit companies, while the volunteers that contribute the free content on which these companies' profit-making services are based are not only unpaid, but actually incur expenses in contributing (mostly related to source access).
Given that one of the documents' stated aims is social justice, I am always amazed that there seems to be a fairly large blind spot in the Wikimedia universe when it comes to the starkly exploitative element in the free knowledge economy. The assumption seems to be that volunteers can't help contributing, that they are adequately compensated by the personal satisfaction they derive from seeing their contributions shape the knowledge landscape, and thus do not need to be given any special consideration.
Given the Wikimedia Foundation's ever-increasing revenue, I'd like to see more emphasis on reducing the costs of participation and supporting the volunteer community, to create a little more social justice within the free knowledge economy, bearing in mind who does the work, and who profits financially from it.
Speaking about the future development of the knowledge landscape in general, I would not like to see Wikimedia become the default provider of knowledge, to the point where the origin of content is obscured and knowledge becomes synonymous with Wikimedia content. If that's what's being striven for, I don't like it – monopolies are inherently unhealthy, for reasons that should be obvious. I'd like to see a more diverse and less monolithic knowledge system in our future than that implied here. Part of that is that knowledge providers basing their products on Wikimedia content should always identify the relevant Wikimedia project as a source. Knowledge is only knowledge when it is traceable to its sources, rather than arriving "ex machina".
On a related issue, we discussed in early August the fact that Amazon's use of Wikipedia content in the Amazon Echo appears to be partly in breach of that principle (and indeed in breach of Wikipedia's Creative Commons licence). We were told that Amazon would be contacted, and that we would likely be given an update in September. But apart from a brief and inconsequential flurry of posts last month, we do not seem to have made any progress on this issue. Please step up your efforts in this regard: surely it cannot be too difficult to get Amazon to state their legal rationale.
Best, Andreas
On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 4:10 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Reading between the lines of statements like "Knowledge as a service", "essential infrastructure", "tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia", etc., my sense is that the document, without saying so explicitly, is very much written from the perspective that the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Bing (and anyone else developing digital assistants and other types of knowledge delivery platforms) should be viewed as key partners in the exchange of free knowledge, and served accordingly, through the development of interfaces that enable them to deliver Wikimedia content to the end user.
My problem with that is that those are all for-profit companies, while the volunteers that contribute the free content on which these companies' profit-making services are based are not only unpaid, but actually incur expenses in contributing (mostly related to source access).
This seems to be a somewhat prejudiced "reading between the lines". For-profits like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft will extract as much information as they can from as many sources as they can giving back as little as they have to (which includes some activity designed to maintain and increase goodwill, which itself has value), _regardless of what Wikimedia does or doesn't do_. They have built knowledge graphs without the use of Wikidata and without significant assistance from WMF, incorporating information from countless proprietary sources alongside free sources.
The power of an open, nonprofit approach to "knowledge as a service" is precisely to democratize access to knowledge graph information: to make it available to nonprofits, public institutions, communities, individuals. This includes projects like the "Structured Data for Wikimedia Commons" effort, which is a potential game-changer for institutions like galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
Nor is such an approach inherently monopolistic: quite the opposite. Wikidata is well-suited for a certain class of data-related problems but not so much for others. Everything around Wikidata is evolving in the direction of federation: federated queries across multiple open datasets, federated installations of the Wikibase software, and so on. If anything, it seems likely that a greater emphasis on "knowledge as a service" will unavoidably decentralize influence and control, and bring knowledge from other knowledge providers into the Wikimedia context.
I had no involvement with this document and don't know what focusing on "knowledge of a service" really will mean in practice. But if it means things like improving Wikidata, building better APIs and content formats, building better Labs^WCloud infrastructure, then the crucial point is not that companies may benefit from such work, but that _everybody else does, too_. And that is what distinguishes it from the prevailing extract-and-monetize paradigm. For-profits exploting free knowledge projects for commercial gain? That's the _current state_. To change it, we have to make it easier to replicate what they are doing: through open data, open APIs, open code.
Erik
Hi Erik,
Nice to hear from you.
On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 11:48 PM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
The power of an open, nonprofit approach to "knowledge as a service" is precisely to democratize access to knowledge graph information: to make it available to nonprofits, public institutions, communities, individuals. This includes projects like the "Structured Data for Wikimedia Commons" effort, which is a potential game-changer for institutions like galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
Nor is such an approach inherently monopolistic: quite the opposite. Wikidata is well-suited for a certain class of data-related problems but not so much for others. Everything around Wikidata is evolving in the direction of federation: federated queries across multiple open datasets, federated installations of the Wikibase software, and so on. If anything, it seems likely that a greater emphasis on "knowledge as a service" will unavoidably decentralize influence and control, and bring knowledge from other knowledge providers into the Wikimedia context.
... and it will all become one free mush everyone copies to make a buck. We are already in a situation today where anyone asking Siri, the Amazon Echo, Google or Bing about a topic is likely to get the same answer from all of them, because they all import Wikimedia content, which comes free of charge. I find that worrying, because as an information delivery system, it’s not robust. You change one source, and all the other sources change as well. That's a huge vulnerability. No one looking at the system as a whole would design it that way.
Internet manipulation is a big topic in the news these days. We have millions of people in the United States and UK wondering whether sophisticated, targeted online manipulation put Trump into the White House and took Britain out of the EU.[1] The same people that once expressed unadulterated optimism about the Internet’s effect on the world, believing it would democratise and decentralise everything (a related Berners-Lee statement is quoted approvingly in the draft Appendix[2]), are now sounding alarms that the Internet has opened new and far more insidious avenues of influence, among them targeted ads and viral lies.[3]
If Wikimedia content does come to play the essential role envisaged, anyone with a vested interest will have a powerful motive to try and subvert this knowledge base, using the most sophisticated SEO, AI, cyberattack and socio-political methods known today or yet to be imagined. Do we really expect that Wikimedia will somehow be immune to such attacks? Do we expect that volunteers will be able to keep up with this in real time?
The draft Appendix states that "In a world where some try to limit, control, or manipulate information, we seek to be a beacon of facts, openness, and good faith". No one can criticise such aspirations. But this upbeat and self-flattering message ignores that on its present scale, Wikimedia content has already been demonstrated to be politically corruptible, serving as a handy and welcome tool in the hands of precisely those who do seek to "limit, control or manipulate information."[4][5][6]
Even if we agree on nothing else, and you choose to be a blue-eyed optimist and I a jaundiced pessimist, we should be able to agree that an openly editable online database underpinning the content delivery of literally more AI tools and digital assistants than there are people on the planet[7] will be a sitting duck for bad-faith actors, from conflicted editors, political factions and SEO experts to government-sponsored hackers, and that there will be challenges to be faced and prepared for.
Speaking about AI development, Elon Musk warned earlier this year that people will sometimes "get so engrossed in their work that they don’t really realize the ramifications of what they’re doing"[8] and that even with the best intentions, it's perfectly possible to "produce something evil by accident."[9] He's right.
People get carried away by new technological possibilities, and fail to look at potential downsides of what they are doing. They’re not always obvious. I mean, take Facebook. Millions of people flocked to the free platform, using it as a welcome means to stay in touch with friends and family. Nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought that their participation in that trend, just so they could keep up with cousin Pete and reconnect with old school friends, might one day undermine democracy. Yet that is exactly what is being investigated now.[1] As we speak, Congress and the Senate Intelligence Committee are still trying to find out from Facebook, Twitter and Google exactly what happened.[10] Meanwhile, Trump is in power. Whatever the eventual findings, these very public discussions and worries should make clear that successful, well-timed manipulation of content delivered automatically by AI tools to vast numbers of people can have staggering global consequences that removal of corrupted content after the event won't undo.
Life teaches that every action has unforeseen consequences, and that the path to hell is paved with the best intentions. Free online services seemed like a wonderful thing. It’s taken us years to figure out that there are new and unexpected prices to be paid.
I would have loved to have seen a risk assessment attached to this strategic direction, along with an open discussion of potential negative impacts on humanity that might result from a system where one knowledge service provider has such a global impact. Knowing that monocultures are inherently more unstable and more easily corrupted than pluralist systems, what are the worst things that could happen? What sort of fail-safes and redundancies would make the overall system less vulnerable? There is still time to do that work, I guess, and I’d suggest it would be work worth doing and consulting a broad range of experts over.
I had no involvement with this document and don't know what focusing on "knowledge of a service" really will mean in practice. But if it means things like improving Wikidata, building better APIs and content formats, building better Labs^WCloud infrastructure, then the crucial point is not that companies may benefit from such work, but that _everybody else does, too_. And that is what distinguishes it from the prevailing extract-and-monetize paradigm. For-profits exploting free knowledge projects for commercial gain? That's the _current state_. To change it, we have to make it easier to replicate what they are doing: through open data, open APIs, open code.
You didn't really address my social justice argument. This is a much more parochial concern, and your perspective is bound to be different, as you personally have profited handsomely from your involvement in Wikimedia, but is it just that some of the world's most profitable companies earn billions from volunteers' work, gaining political power in the process, while volunteers actually pay to go online and access or purchase the sources they need to do their work? Yes or no?
As I've mentioned before, Google has a full digital copy somewhere on its servers of pretty much any source any Wikimedian might ever want to access. When the WMF talks to Google, I'd really like them to inquire, for once, what Google could do for volunteers, rather than what volunteers could do for Google.
Best,
Andreas
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/201... citing https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/25-years-of-t...
[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39246810
[4] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/croatian-wikipedia-fascist-takeover-controve...
[5] http://www.eurasianet.org/node/72831
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-10-07/Op-ed
[7] https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/digital-assistants-to-surpass-global-population...
[8] http://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-world-government-summit-556211
[9] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-...
[10] http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/01/media/facebook-russia-ads-congress/index.htm...
On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
... and it will all become one free mush everyone copies to make a buck. We are already in a situation today where anyone asking Siri, the Amazon Echo, Google or Bing about a topic is likely to get the same answer from all of them, because they all import Wikimedia content, which comes free of charge.
I wouldn't call information from Wikimedia projects a "mush", but I think it's a good term for the proprietary amalgamation of information and data from many sources, often without any regard for the reliability of the source. Google is the king of such gooey amalgamation. Its home assistant has been known to give answers like this, sourced to "secretsofthefed.com":
"According to details exposed in Western Center for Journalism's exclusive video, not only could Obama be in be in bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d'état at the end of his term in 2016."
See, e.g., this article
https://theoutline.com/post/1192/google-s-featured-snippets-are-worse-than-f...
for other egregious examples specifically from Google's featured responses.
It's certainly true that Wikipedia is an easy target for ingestion, not just because of its copyright status, but also because it is comprehensive, multilingual, unrestricted (as in, not behind a paywall or rate limit), and even fully available for download. But copyright status is not really a major barrier once you are talking about fact extraction and "fair use" snippets.
For Google, I suggest a query like "when was slavery abolished?" followed by exploring the auto-suggested questions. In my case, the first 10 questions point to snippets from:
- pbs.org (twice) - USA Today - Reuters - archives.gov - Wikipedia (twice) - infoplease.com - ourdocuments.gov - nationalarchives.gov.uk
Even for its fact boxes, where Wikipedia excerpts often feature prominently, Google does not exclusively rely on it; the tabular data contains information not found in any Wikimedia project. Even the textual blurbs often come from sources of unclear provenance; for example, country blurb text (try googling "France" or "Russia") is not from WP.
This amalgamation will get ever more sophisticated and more proprietary (specific to each of these corporations) as AI improves. That's because it lets companies pry apart "facts" and "expression": the former are uncopyrightable. As textual understanding of AIs improves, more information can be summarized and presented without even invoking "fair use", much in the same way as Wikipedia itself summarizes sources.
It's the universe of linked open data (Wikipedia/Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and other open datasets) that keeps the space at least somewhat competitive, by giving players without much of a foothold a starting point from which to build. If Wikimedia did not exist, a smaller number of commercial players would wield greater power, due to the higher relative payoff of large investments in data mining and AI.
I find that worrying, because as an information delivery system, it’s not robust. You change one source, and all the other sources change as well.
As noted above, this is not actually what is happening. Commercial players don't want to limit themselves to free/open data; they want to use AI to extract as much information about the world as possible so they can answer as many queries as possible.
And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making, transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups). But beyond that I think you're reading stuff into the statement that isn't there.
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
If we expose the history, provenance and structure of information, and the connections between sources, we can actually make the information more resilient against manipulation than if it is merely a piece of text in an article, some number in an {{infobox}} template or some "factoid" in a proprietary knowledge graph.
is it just that some of the world's most profitable companies earn billions from volunteers' work, gaining political power in the process, while volunteers actually pay to go online and access or purchase the sources they need to do their work? Yes or no?
I don't accept your framing. Search the way it used to be (with algorithms primarily tuned for relevance of results) was a fair deal for everyone involved: you put stuff on the web, it gets indexed and people are able to find it; the search engines make money by putting ads on the search result page. The amalgamation of information into knowledge graphs that deliver concise answers directly (however inadequate) changes the dynamic significantly.
It accords ever greater power to the maintainers of these proprietary graphs which, I hasten to repeat, incorporate information well beyond just Wikimedia's, and which frequently fail to indicate provenance in an adequate manner. And, as the example at the beginning of this message shows, it leads to "information pollution", with fake news, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience leaking into semi-authoritative instant answers.
I don't think the social justice problem here is that these companies make a profit, but that they function more and more as gatekeepers and curators of knowledge, a role for which they're ill-equipped and which civil society should be reluctant to give them.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
To be clear, I'm in favor of corporations giving more to the commons, though in my ideal world, that would happen through aggressive taxation and greater public investment (especially in schools, universities and GLAMs). I have every confidence that WMF does in fact ask for as much as it can be expected to in conversations with corporations, but it's not clear what you're suggesting should happen if the corporations say no.
Erik
Hi all,
This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea.
On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote: And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making, transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary service providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the Wikimedia content to include a statement if their reuse is from a "native version of live Wikimedia” and also this way tell that they do not?
I think this can be compared to the consumer movement requiring that the origin of food products should be trackable all they way to the original producer (eg. farm).
I was thinking that if the service providers are taking data dumps of Wikimedia for their own use, today we do not know if they have made some edits in it.
- Teemu
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leinonen@aalto.fi wrote:
Hi all,
This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea.
On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote: And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making, transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary service providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the Wikimedia content to include a statement if their reuse is from a "native version of live Wikimedia” and also this way tell that they do not?
That is a fantastic idea! CC-BY-SA says, "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor."
Is there anything preventing us from specifying attribution in a manner that makes clear the revision date?
I would love to see the re-users have to do that. Are there any downsides?
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:43 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leinonen@aalto.fi wrote:
Hi all,
This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea.
On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote: And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making, transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary
service providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the Wikimedia content to include a statement if their reuse is from a "native version of live Wikimedia” and also this way tell that they do not?
That is a fantastic idea! CC-BY-SA says, "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor."
Is there anything preventing us from specifying attribution in a manner that makes clear the revision date?
Well, Wikidata was, after some to-and-fro and a little controversy, assigned the CC-0 licence, which does not require any attribution whatsoever from re-users. In my view, that was a really big mistake, because it obscures data provenance for the end user.
Given the amount of data Wikidata bots import from Wikipedia, is was also quite possibly a violation of Wikipedia's content licence.
The legal situation is admittedly complex, but don't let anyone tell you that "facts cannot be copyrighted, and that is the end of it." The WMF's own legal department disagreed with that view.[1]
I would love to see the re-users have to do that. Are there any downsides?
As for re-users of CC-BY-SA Wikipedia content, I refer you to the Amazon Echo discussion that started here on this list in July:
https://lists.gt.net/wiki/foundation/828583
In that discussion, concerns were expressed that the Amazon Echo's "Alexa" voice assistant reads snippets from Wikipedia in response to queries, without identifying Wikipedia as the source. Adele Vrana said she would inquire with Amazon and get back to us probably in September. Last I heard from her, she said she was continuing to ping Amazon, but hadn't heard anything. This month, Adele has been out of the office and will be for another week or so.
I think this is a fairly important matter, and I'm somewhat disappointed with the lack of progress to date. It's a potential thin-end-of-the-wedge thing: if the WMF lets Amazon get away with infringing the CC licence (if indeed it is an infringement – to determine that, we would first need to have a response and legal rationale from Amazon and have lawyers examine it), then others will follow.
My fear – largely based on the Wikidata decision – is that some within the WMF are not really interested in enforcing attribution, preferring to make things as convenient as possible for for-profit companies in order to maximise re-use. I'd find that repugnant, because transparent data provenance is important for a whole host of reasons. But I am not convinced WMF folks see it as important at all. The lack of response to date to the Echo question tends to reinforce my doubts in that regard.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 1:44 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
I wouldn't call information from Wikimedia projects a "mush", but I think it's a good term for the proprietary amalgamation of information and data from many sources, often without any regard for the reliability of the source....
Is there an award for the most intelligent and insightful contribution to this list all year? If so I would like to nominate this email. Thanks Erik!
Regards,
Chris
Hi Erik,
Really meaty post. Great stuff. Comments below.
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 1:44 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
... and it will all become one free mush everyone copies to make a buck.
We
are already in a situation today where anyone asking Siri, the Amazon
Echo,
Google or Bing about a topic is likely to get the same answer from all of them, because they all import Wikimedia content, which comes free of charge.
I wouldn't call information from Wikimedia projects a "mush", but I think it's a good term for the proprietary amalgamation of information and data from many sources, often without any regard for the reliability of the source.
In my view, whether it's a mush or not largely depends on how it is used, and to what extent it mixes solid and flaky, verifiable and non-verifiable content.
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1] Wikidata does not require users to cite sources. It contains millions of statements sourced only to some Wikipedia language version, without identification of the article, article version, or source originally cited in that Wikipedia (if any) at the time of import. It lacks effective Verifiability and BLP policies.
Google is the king of such gooey amalgamation. Its home assistant has been known to give answers like this, sourced to "secretsofthefed.com":
"According to details exposed in Western Center for Journalism's exclusive video, not only could Obama be in be in bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d'état at the end of his term in 2016."See, e.g., this article
https://theoutline.com/post/1192/google-s-featured-snippets-are-worse-than-fake-news
for other egregious examples specifically from Google's featured responses.
Thanks for the link to that article. Really important. I'm in complete agreement with you on that.
For Google, I suggest a query like "when was slavery abolished?" followed by exploring the auto-suggested questions. In my case, the first 10 questions point to snippets from:
- pbs.org (twice)
- USA Today
- Reuters
- archives.gov
- Wikipedia (twice)
- infoplease.com
- ourdocuments.gov
- nationalarchives.gov.uk
Being on the other side of the pond, I got slightly different results. Here they are, just for fun: Wikipedia is in the answer box, and 4 of the first 10 suggested questions link to Wikipedia:
– makewav.es – Reuters – archives.gov – Wikipedia – nationalarchives.gov.uk – Wikipedia – abolition.e2bn.org – Wikipedia – USA Today – Wikipedia
(The 11th linked to Wikibooks.)
It's the universe of linked open data (Wikipedia/Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and other open datasets) that keeps the space at least somewhat competitive, by giving players without much of a foothold a starting point from which to build. If Wikimedia did not exist, a smaller number of commercial players would wield greater power, due to the higher relative payoff of large investments in data mining and AI.
Yes, arguably so, although various ways remain in which Wikimedia might become a victim of its own success, depending on the amount of ubiquity its content achieves. The more ubiquitous it is, the higher the stakes, and the higher the pressure on volunteers will become.
I find that worrying, because as an information delivery system, it’s not robust. You change one source, and all the other sources change as well.
As noted above, this is not actually what is happening. Commercial players don't want to limit themselves to free/open data; they want to use AI to extract as much information about the world as possible so they can answer as many queries as possible.
To the far-from-negligible extent that they all do and will regurgitate Wikimedia content, it will happen.
By the same token, their drawing on alternative sources as well as Wikimedia content, even proprietary ones, is also potentially a good thing. It increases diversity.
And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making, transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
Indeed, but it helps if re-users indicate provenance. If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling users where it got its information from, then there is not even a feedback form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
This is similar to the problem of vandalised Wikidata descriptions being displayed in Wikipedia mobile views: people can't figure out where the nonsense comes from, and where to change it.
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups). But beyond that I think you're reading stuff into the statement that isn't there.
I'm not sure I read much more into it than that – you've summarised my main concern.
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
As Wikidata imports all that material, however, there is a risk that re-users (answer engines, digital assistants) will simply focus on mining Wikidata.
There is also the risk of circular relationships – Wikidata importing content from databases that in turn import some of their own content from Wikidata. You can end up with databases all agreeing with each other, and all being wrong. :/
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
If we expose the history, provenance and structure of information, and the connections between sources, we can actually make the information more resilient against manipulation than if it is merely a piece of text in an article, some number in an {{infobox}} template or some "factoid" in a proprietary knowledge graph.
Yes, provenance – traceability – is key. But as things stand, I have seen no evidence that WMF has a strong desire to encourage or force re-users to provide it.
is it just that some of the world's most profitable companies earn
billions
from volunteers' work, gaining political power in the process, while volunteers actually pay to go online and access or purchase the sources they need to do their work? Yes or no?
I don't accept your framing. Search the way it used to be (with algorithms primarily tuned for relevance of results) was a fair deal for everyone involved: you put stuff on the web, it gets indexed and people are able to find it; the search engines make money by putting ads on the search result page. The amalgamation of information into knowledge graphs that deliver concise answers directly (however inadequate) changes the dynamic significantly.
It accords ever greater power to the maintainers of these proprietary graphs which, I hasten to repeat, incorporate information well beyond just Wikimedia's, and which frequently fail to indicate provenance in an adequate manner. And, as the example at the beginning of this message shows, it leads to "information pollution", with fake news, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience leaking into semi-authoritative instant answers.
I don't think the social justice problem here is that these companies make a profit, but that they function more and more as gatekeepers and curators of knowledge, a role for which they're ill-equipped and which civil society should be reluctant to give them.
I'm in violent agreement with you on that one. :)
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling has dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book. All the more so if these applications fail to make their users aware that the information comes from Wikimedia projects.
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
To be clear, I'm in favor of corporations giving more to the commons, though in my ideal world, that would happen through aggressive taxation and greater public investment (especially in schools, universities and GLAMs). I have every confidence that WMF does in fact ask for as much as it can be expected to in conversations with corporations, but it's not clear what you're suggesting should happen if the corporations say no.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work, and give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/22/you-dont-kno...
I once did a very rough back-of-an-envelope calculation based on Google's staggering quarterly profits and its large reliance on Wikimedia content for many of its search engine's most attractive features driving its ad revenue. I estimated that the average Wikipedia edit (in any namespace) brings Google something in the order of 10 cents of revenue.[2]
Again, thanks for an engaging and thought-provoking post.
Best, Andreas
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikidata/2017_State_of_affairs (including its copious archives) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-07-22/I...
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition - Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums - Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling users where it got its information from, then there is not even a feedback form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources; see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_Extensions#Special_Page_Cros...
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling has dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-fewer-americans-are...
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work, and give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/22/you-dont-kno...
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
1) Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2] sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
2) Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
3) Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
4) Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
Erik,
Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the transluded content is derived?
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling users where it got its information from, then there is not even a feedback form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources; see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_Extensions#Special_Page_Cros...
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling has dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly-fewer-americans-are...
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work, and give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/22/you-dont-kno...
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 12:51 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Erik,
Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the transluded content is derived?
James -
I don't think there's a sufficiently strong justification for modifying the manner of attribution specified in the "Terms of Use", which in any case would only apply to re-use of future revisions of CC-BY-SA/CC-BY content that's not also exempted by "fair use".
As a best practice, I do believe including timestamp or version information is helpful both for re-users themselves and for end users. [[Progressive disclosure]] keeps such information manageable. In my own re-use of CC-0 data from Wikidata, Open Library and similar sources, I do include timestamp information along with the source. Example re-use from Wikidata: https://lib.reviews/static/uploads/last-sync.png
Erik
On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 4:11 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 12:51 AM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the transluded content is derived?
I don't think there's a sufficiently strong justification for modifying the manner of attribution specified in the "Terms of Use",
If the requirement to attribute "Through a list of all authors" when hyperlinking isn't possible, such as with read-only displays or audio output, were replaced with requiring to say that the content is from a Wikipedia article with a given title and date, that would certainly give more information about the actual authorship than a list of mostly pseudonyms.
which in any case would only apply to re-use of future revisions of CC-BY-SA/CC-BY content that's not also exempted by "fair use".
I don't think it would be difficult to convince content reusers to go along with that. It would protect them against liability from hoaxes, provide actual attribution information for those who want or need it, and 30 years down the road when free license grants start expiring....
As a best practice, I do believe including timestamp or version information is helpful both for re-users themselves and for end users. [[Progressive disclosure]] keeps such information manageable. In my own re-use of CC-0 data from Wikidata, Open Library and similar sources, I do include timestamp information along with the source. Example re-use from Wikidata: https://lib.reviews/static/uploads/last-sync.png
If only our brand ambassadors were as interested in best practices! I know they are, and once fundraising season rolls around there's going to be the usual press barrage of interviews. Let's give them something good to say so that would-be editors know we're the kind of people who want to protect them from unattributed hoaxes.
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals responding and will result in differences in implementation in each community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich, substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there is too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that our work is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not that we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase are already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is okay. The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make sense of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group can only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to take this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction, there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact, sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and customization across the network while improving the resilience of the whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts to understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as a platform, we start to really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well and one that others in our ecosystem could benefit from. Today, on our newest Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene
Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources; see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_ Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling
has
dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work, and give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little concerned that we can have such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get some Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a consistent direction from those.
What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would be doing more of the same, and more.
This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the direction is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics open is only natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to take the next steps.
Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not to do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.
Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text. It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate with my ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I don't feel it provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing a direction, which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.
I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may very well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you (plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let them summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you have not done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an indicator that unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we can enter the next round. Given all effort and resources that have been invested in this process, such sanity check may be worth while.
Warmly,
Lodewijk
ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm always feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on the strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process - such rebut would be totally fair :).
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals responding and will result in differences in implementation in each community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich, substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
is
too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that our work is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not that we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase are already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is okay. The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make sense of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group can only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to take this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction, there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact, sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and customization across the network while improving the resilience of the whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts to understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as a platform, we start to really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well and one that others in our ecosystem could benefit from. Today, on our newest Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered
ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo
competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene
Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources;
see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_ Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling
has
dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work,
and
give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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Hello Lodewijk,
no, you are certainly not alone in your concerns. It looks like at this stage there is little we can do, and the only option left is to not endorse the document.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little concerned that we can have such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get some Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a consistent direction from those.
What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would be doing more of the same, and more.
This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the direction is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics open is only natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to take the next steps.
Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not to do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.
Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text. It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate with my ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I don't feel it provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing a direction, which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.
I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may very well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you (plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let them summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you have not done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an indicator that unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we can enter the next round. Given all effort and resources that have been invested in this process, such sanity check may be worth while.
Warmly,
Lodewijk
ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm always feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on the strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process - such rebut would be totally fair :).
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while
I
haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity
to
create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted
to
acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap
my
drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the
challenges
you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some
of
our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and
individuals
responding and will result in differences in implementation in each community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a
rich,
substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
is
too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I
take
away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want
that
our work is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here,
but
it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I
do
think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness,
especially
in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known.
Our
brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not
to
build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this,
*and
much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want
to
provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be
present
in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we
have
on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about
ensuring
a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek
is
unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors,
it's
about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not
that
we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase
are
already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is
okay.
The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make
sense
of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group
can
only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to
take
this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would
be
controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is
"a
world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've
made
great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the
direction,
there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer
matter-of-fact,
sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for
NPOV
content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts.
The
drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and customization across the network while improving the resilience of the whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts
to
understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as a platform, we start to really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem
overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well
and
one that others in our ecosystem could benefit from. Today, on our newest Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the
processes
that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers.
As
a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel
that
summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com
wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered
ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo
competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and
museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or
Gene
Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the
source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information
about
a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information.
The
more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate
in
an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization,
say),
you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources;
see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_ Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who
are
not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever
find
itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of
Googling
has
dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique
seems
to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the
path
to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work,
and
give very little back. The world could do with more articles like
this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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I feel much the same as Lodewijk, though it is possible that we differ in detail. As he says the document is rather vague and open to divergent interpretation after the fact. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Lodewijk Sent: Friday, 20 October 2017 7:51 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little concerned that we can have such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get some Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a consistent direction from those.
What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would be doing more of the same, and more.
This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the direction is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics open is only natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to take the next steps.
Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not to do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.
Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text. It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate with my ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I don't feel it provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing a direction, which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.
I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may very well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you (plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let them summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you have not done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an indicator that unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we can enter the next round. Given all effort and resources that have been invested in this process, such sanity check may be worth while.
Warmly,
Lodewijk
ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm always feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on the strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process - such rebut would be totally fair :).
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals responding and will result in differences in implementation in each community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich, substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
is
too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that our work is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not that we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase are already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is okay. The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make sense of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group can only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to take this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction, there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact, sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and customization across the network while improving the resilience of the whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts to understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as a platform, we start to really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well and one that others in our ecosystem could benefit from. Today, on our newest Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered
ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo
competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and
museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or
Gene Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources;
see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_ Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling
has
dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work,
and
give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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Hi Katherine,
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
Indeed, Wikipedia has become more influential than anyone thought likely ten years ago.
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction, there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact, sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire movement actors and external partners.
I understand the psychology of stretch goals, but I'd still say that some goals are not worth aspiring towards.
It's in the nature of the human mind to be vulnerable to ambitions for world domination. That vulnerability is well encapsulated in the jocular saying "Power corrupts, but absolute power is kinda cool."
Ultimately, whenever idealists have achieved such absolute domination, the systems they established were eventually used to some ends that were anything but cool. Checks and balances are key to a healthy system.
Best, Andreas
Hi everybody --
I just wanted to follow up quickly that this report has been published and is available here:
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
The PDF version is at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Movement_ Strategy_2017_-_2017_Features_and_programs_(cycle_1).pdf
and the wiki version of the report is at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2017/Reports/ Features_and_Programs_report_summary
The Audiences team will be using this report as an input into future product discussions and annual planning.
-Toby
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals responding and will result in differences in implementation in each community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich, substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement strategy process.
A few more responses inline:
2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
is
too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that our work is being put to good use.
It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to build on them for long-term planning.
When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.
We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not that we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase are already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we do if we supported openness more systemically?
I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is okay. The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make sense of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group can only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to take this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the movement discussions.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components maintained by different groups).
There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction, there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact, sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire movement actors and external partners.
2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:
Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers -- primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query federation.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I see federated structured data as an inevitable (and very favorable) outcome of the concept of a service-based model. Distribution enables greater flexibility in implementation and customization across the network while improving the resilience of the whole system. This is true in terms of technical stability, political influence or censorship, and breadth and depth of content. If one starts to understand Wikidata as a project, and Wikibase as a platform, we start to really be able to see how a broader adoption of open structures and attribution models can only enrich and increase the open ecosystem overall.
I also think the Wikidata model is one that has been working very well and one that others in our ecosystem could benefit from. Today, on our newest Wikimedia project, we work with governments, the private sector, and individual community members, in largely constructive ways. And in many cases, the very existence of Wikidata makes it possible for these institutions to be open, when they would otherwise lack the expertise or resources to build their own open data infrastructure.
For me, “Knowledge as a service” means supporting those institutions by providing the infrastructure that they can use for this purpose, and also accompanying them through the social and institutional changes that come with opening data and freeing knowledge. That infrastructure could be Wikidata, it could be other Wikimedia projects, or it could be other Wikibase instances, depending on what makes the most sense for each context.
Anyway, there's a lot more to discuss, and thank you all again for these excellent conversations!
I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.
See you soon with the next strategy update.
Katherine
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
wrote:
Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered
ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
Tensions between different communities with overlapping but non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few examples include:
- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo
competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene
Wiki
This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like templates, which shift information out of the article space, disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is constructed from its parts.
I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and notifications. Much more will need to follow.
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate representation of the source material. Even when a large source dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say), you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of copies.
Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated database reports as well as on-demand lookup via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field, or mark a country as female.
There is a project underway to also validate against external sources;
see:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_ Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases
Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is often included only for a single point in time, or for a subset of the available data. The relatively new "Data:" namespace on Commons exists to store raw datasets; this is only used to a very limited extent so far, but there are some examples of how such data can be visualized, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Graph:Population_history
Giving volunteers more powerful tools to select and visualize data while automating much of the effort of maintaining data integrity seems like an achievable and strategic goal, and as these examples show, some building blocks for this are already in place.
But the proprietary knowledge graphs are valuable to users in ways that the previous generation of search engines was not. Interacting with a device like you would with a human being ("Alexa/Google/Siri, is yarrow edible?") makes knowledge more accessible and usable, including to people who have difficulty reading long texts, or who are not literate at all. In this sense I don't think WMF should ever find itself in the position to argue _against_ inclusion of information from Wikimedia projects in these applications.
There is a distinct likelihood that they will make reading Wikipedia articles progressively obsolete, just like the availability of Googling
has
dissuaded many people from sitting down and reading a book.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
The applications themselves are not the problem; the centralized gatekeeper control is. Knowledge as an open service (and network) is actually the solution to that root problem. It's how we weaken and perhaps even break the control of the gatekeepers. Your critique seems to boil down to "Let's ask Google for more crumbs". In spite of all your anti-corporate social justice rhetoric, that seems to be the path to developing a one-sided dependency relationship.
I considered that, but in the end felt that given the extent to which Google profited from volunteers' work, it wasn't an unfair ask.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work,
and
give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them. My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
Cheers, Erik
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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Hi Erik,
More good points here.
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:01 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
That is useful.
If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
telling
users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
feedback
form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice. However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at all, was raised on this list in July for example.
We were promised an update here on this list months ago, but no such update has come to date. If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.
Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.: https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
I agree: Bing's solution is excellent. It provides attribution and indicates provenance, in a manner that is reasonable based on the medium, means and context in which the licensed material is shared, which is literally all the licence requires.
I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to document best practices for re-use, ranging from local community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice applications, tabular data, and so on.
Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do" from "here's what we recommend".
Agreed. Ideally this should be complemented by a public list indicating which providers are following the recommendations.
There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a "bookshelf".
An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information overload).
Even today, political commentators are deploring that people are making decisions on the basis of gut reactions and snippets – isolated bits of information that have an emotional hook, but are stripped of wider context. There seems to be fairly wide agreement that there is at least a potential for negative consequences, as well as positive ones.
The growth in digital assistants could conceivably have a large impact here, because a digital assistant can only answer the questions people ask – and sometimes more background knowledge is needed to actually know what questions to ask.
All of these effects are hard to predict, but it seems safe to say that, as with any other structural change of this sort, there will be upsides and downsides.
In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens it.
Absolutely true, and judging by myself – most of my own journeys on Wikipedia.org are transactional – the number of page views corresponding to someone actually reading a Wikipedia article from beginning to end is probably tiny. (Oddly enough, I am more likely to read a Wikipedia article from beginning to end if I'm looking something up on the Kindle, while I'm reading a book.)
I don't think Wikimedia should fight the gravity of a user's intentions out of its own pedagogical motives. Rather, it should make both lookup and learning as appealing as possible. Doing well in the "lookup" category is important to avoid handing too much control off to gatekeepers, and being good in the "learning" category holds the greatest promise for lasting positive impact.
As for the larger social issue, at least in the US, the youngest (most googley) generation is the one that reads the most books, and income/education are very strong predictors of whether people do or not: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/19/slightly- fewer-americans-are-reading-print-books-new-survey-finds/
Interesting. I'm wondering whether those are primarily fiction or non-fiction – unfortunately, the report remains silent on that.
While I think your proposal to ask Google to share access to resources it already has digitized or licensed is worth considering, I would suggest being very careful about the long term implications of any such agreements. Having a single corporation control volunteers' access to proprietary resources means that such access can also be used as leverage down the road, or abruptly be taken away for other reasons.
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources, and pursuing public and private funding of its own. The development of many relationships may take longer, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Moreover, it has the potential to lead to powerful collaborations with existing public/nonprofit digitization and preservation efforts.
I think that's a really excellent idea. I'd love to see that go further than this mailing list discussion.
Publicise the fact that Google and others profit from volunteer work, and give very little back. The world could do with more articles like this:
2015/07/22/you-dont-know-it-but-youre-working-for-facebook-for-free/
I have plenty of criticisms of Facebook, but the fact that users don't get paid for posting selfies isn't one of them.
While the headline focused on Facebook, a large part of the article was about Wikipedia, and expressed a worthwhile perspective.
My thoughts on how the free culture movement (not limited to Wikipedia) should interface with the for-profit sector are as follows, FWIW:
- Demand appropriate levels of taxation on private profits, [2]
sufficient investments in public education and cultural institutions, and "open licensing" requirements on government contracts with private corporations.
- Require compliance with free licenses, first gently, then more
firmly. This is a game of diminishing returns, and it's most useful to go after the most blatant and problematic cases. As noted above, "fair use" limits should be understood and taken into consideration.
- Encourage corporations to be "good citizens" of the free culture
world, whether it's through indicating provenance beyond what's legally required, or by contributing directly (open source development, knowledge/data donations, in-kind goods/services, financial contributions). The payoff for them is goodwill and a thriving (i.e. also profitable) open Internet that more people in more places use for more things.
- Build community-driven, open, nonprofit alternatives to
out-of-control corporate quasi-monopolies. As far as proprietary knowledge graphs are concerned, I will reiterate: open data is the solution, not the problem.
I entirely agree with points 1 to 3 – though getting the likes of Google to pay more taxes may not be very realistic, as they have lots of money (a good chunk of it earned through Wikimedia content ...) to spend on lobbying against such changes.[1] For point 4 I would add the caveat that open data can both be a solution and create its own specific kind of problems.
Since we last discussed this, I've come across a great research paper on Meta, "Considering 2030: Future technology trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement", prepared for WMF by independent consultants Dot Connector Studio (Philadelphia) and Lutman & Associates (St Paul):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Sources/Con...
The sections "Things to keep in mind" and "Questions for the Wikimedia movement to consider" most closely reflect my own concerns.
Unfortunately, little or none of that has made it into the Direction statement, as risks to guard against. An attempt was made to include some of these caveats in the Direction's Appendix (Pattern 19), but that work wasn't completed, and the Appendix now seems to have been abandoned (it hasn't been edited by WMF staff in months).
Is the Appendix even still part of the Direction?
Best, Andreas
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/30/google-silicon-valley-cor...
[1] See the getValue function in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:WikidataIB , specifically its "onlysourced" parameter. The module also adds a convenient "Edit this on Wikidata" link to each claim included from there.
[2] As far as Wikimedia organizations are concerned, specific tax policy will likely always be out of scope of political advocacy, but the other points need not be.
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On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at all, was raised on this list in July for example.
There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):
I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.
If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.
Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing providence/citations is a good idea.
An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information overload).
It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if [[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over that edge. :P
That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community, etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for knowledge or our need to develop new skills.
I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that keep you coming back.
In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain. While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.
I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask whether it results in people getting better learning experiences, through WMF's sites or through affiliates and partners. Personally, I think the long term focus on "knowledge as a service" and "knowledge equity" is right on target, but it's also useful to explicitly think about good old Wikipedia and how it might benefit directly. Here are some things that I think might help develop better learning experiences on Wikipedia:
- a next generation templating system optimized for data exploration, timelines, etc., with greater separation of design, code, data and text - better support for writing/finding articles that target different audiences (beginners/experts) - tech standards and requirements for embedding rich, interactive "explorable explanations" beyond what any template system can do - commissioned illustrations or animations for highly complex topics (possibly organized through another nonprofit) - assessment partnerships with external groups to verify that learners get what they need from a given resource
In practice, this could translate to:
- beautiful animations illustrating concepts like the immune system, the Big Bang, or the inner workings of different engine types - custom interactive explanations for concepts in statistics or mathematics, such as the ones in http://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory/ - code that you can interact with in articles _about_ code like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort - highly visual explorables for topics that benefit from it -- Thedore Grey's award-winning "Elements" app is a nice example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FesjAdIWBk - better ways to go from one article to the next: data visualizations, topic maps, dynamic lists, etc.
The reason I think this matches well with what's stated in the strategy is that it's clear that Wikimedia cannot do it alone. Many interactive applications will require the kind of open data platform that Wikidata will hopefully become. Revision metadata APIs (with some form of write access) may make it easier for folks to help with the assessment of content quality.
The international education space (schools, colleges, unis) may often seem intractable and difficult to navigate. But from what I can tell, there's been a slow and steady shift away from crappy Flash/Java applets to more reusable HTML5 components and open repositories. The value of open licensing has become increasingly apparent to countless public institutions.
By sharpening their own role in these networks, WMF and other movement organizations may be able to positively influence decisions on questions like licensing, internationalization, and technology choice.
Since we last discussed this, I've come across a great research paper on Meta, "Considering 2030: Future technology trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement", prepared for WMF by independent consultants Dot Connector Studio (Philadelphia) and Lutman & Associates (St Paul):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Sources/Con...
The sections "Things to keep in mind" and "Questions for the Wikimedia movement to consider" most closely reflect my own concerns.
I agree with the authors of this paper that WMF should carefully position itself between early adopter and "laggard" when it comes to new tech. Finding ways how tech can aid learning/collaboration, and become part of the commons, turns WMF into a leader from the perspective of many other organizations that are concerned with delivering knowledge and learning, and a follower from the perspective of tech companies. It's a special place to be. :)
Erik
Hi Erik,
I get the feeling you would question my identity if I didn't follow up by asking you whether they asked you to endorse the possibility that Mandarin could eclipse English?
Best regards, James
On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at all, was raised on this list in July for example.
There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):
I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.
If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.
Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing providence/citations is a good idea.
An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information overload).
It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if [[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over that edge. :P
That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community, etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for knowledge or our need to develop new skills.
I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that keep you coming back.
In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain. While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.
I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask whether it results in people getting better learning experiences, through WMF's sites or through affiliates and partners. Personally, I think the long term focus on "knowledge as a service" and "knowledge equity" is right on target, but it's also useful to explicitly think about good old Wikipedia and how it might benefit directly. Here are some things that I think might help develop better learning experiences on Wikipedia:
- a next generation templating system optimized for data exploration,
timelines, etc., with greater separation of design, code, data and text
- better support for writing/finding articles that target different
audiences (beginners/experts)
- tech standards and requirements for embedding rich, interactive
"explorable explanations" beyond what any template system can do
- commissioned illustrations or animations for highly complex topics
(possibly organized through another nonprofit)
- assessment partnerships with external groups to verify that learners
get what they need from a given resource
In practice, this could translate to:
- beautiful animations illustrating concepts like the immune system,
the Big Bang, or the inner workings of different engine types
- custom interactive explanations for concepts in statistics or
mathematics, such as the ones in http://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory/
- code that you can interact with in articles _about_ code like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort
- highly visual explorables for topics that benefit from it -- Thedore
Grey's award-winning "Elements" app is a nice example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FesjAdIWBk
- better ways to go from one article to the next: data visualizations,
topic maps, dynamic lists, etc.
The reason I think this matches well with what's stated in the strategy is that it's clear that Wikimedia cannot do it alone. Many interactive applications will require the kind of open data platform that Wikidata will hopefully become. Revision metadata APIs (with some form of write access) may make it easier for folks to help with the assessment of content quality.
The international education space (schools, colleges, unis) may often seem intractable and difficult to navigate. But from what I can tell, there's been a slow and steady shift away from crappy Flash/Java applets to more reusable HTML5 components and open repositories. The value of open licensing has become increasingly apparent to countless public institutions.
By sharpening their own role in these networks, WMF and other movement organizations may be able to positively influence decisions on questions like licensing, internationalization, and technology choice.
Since we last discussed this, I've come across a great research paper on Meta, "Considering 2030: Future technology trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement", prepared for WMF by independent consultants Dot Connector Studio (Philadelphia) and Lutman & Associates (St Paul):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Sources/Con...
The sections "Things to keep in mind" and "Questions for the Wikimedia movement to consider" most closely reflect my own concerns.
I agree with the authors of this paper that WMF should carefully position itself between early adopter and "laggard" when it comes to new tech. Finding ways how tech can aid learning/collaboration, and become part of the commons, turns WMF into a leader from the perspective of many other organizations that are concerned with delivering knowledge and learning, and a follower from the perspective of tech companies. It's a special place to be. :)
Erik
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Hi James,
I fail to see the relation between Erik message and you answer.
I have huge doubt that Mandarin will eclipse English anytime soon. Despite the Confucius institutes growing everywhere in the world, as far as my narrow knowledge of the world goes, PRC doesn't seem to aim exporting Mandarin with heavy means of soft power competing with the Hollywood industry.
Anstataŭe mi bone fidas ke Esperanto frue estos ĉie parolita anstataŭ, kiel celas nian sekretan planon de monda superrego. Fakte ni jam kontrolas Ĉinian politikon pri tio, kaj uzas ĝiajn rimedojn por nia propra propagando[1], ehe!
Mondsuperrege, psikosklavoj
Le 28/10/2017 à 00:39, James Salsman a écrit :
Hi Erik,
I get the feeling you would question my identity if I didn't follow up by asking you whether they asked you to endorse the possibility that Mandarin could eclipse English?
Best regards, James
On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at all, was raised on this list in July for example.
There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):
I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.
If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.
Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing providence/citations is a good idea.
An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information overload).
It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if [[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over that edge. :P
That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community, etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for knowledge or our need to develop new skills.
I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that keep you coming back.
In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain. While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.
I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask whether it results in people getting better learning experiences, through WMF's sites or through affiliates and partners. Personally, I think the long term focus on "knowledge as a service" and "knowledge equity" is right on target, but it's also useful to explicitly think about good old Wikipedia and how it might benefit directly. Here are some things that I think might help develop better learning experiences on Wikipedia:
- a next generation templating system optimized for data exploration,
timelines, etc., with greater separation of design, code, data and text
- better support for writing/finding articles that target different
audiences (beginners/experts)
- tech standards and requirements for embedding rich, interactive
"explorable explanations" beyond what any template system can do
- commissioned illustrations or animations for highly complex topics
(possibly organized through another nonprofit)
- assessment partnerships with external groups to verify that learners
get what they need from a given resource
In practice, this could translate to:
- beautiful animations illustrating concepts like the immune system,
the Big Bang, or the inner workings of different engine types
- custom interactive explanations for concepts in statistics or
mathematics, such as the ones in http://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory/
- code that you can interact with in articles _about_ code like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort
- highly visual explorables for topics that benefit from it -- Thedore
Grey's award-winning "Elements" app is a nice example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FesjAdIWBk
- better ways to go from one article to the next: data visualizations,
topic maps, dynamic lists, etc.
The reason I think this matches well with what's stated in the strategy is that it's clear that Wikimedia cannot do it alone. Many interactive applications will require the kind of open data platform that Wikidata will hopefully become. Revision metadata APIs (with some form of write access) may make it easier for folks to help with the assessment of content quality.
The international education space (schools, colleges, unis) may often seem intractable and difficult to navigate. But from what I can tell, there's been a slow and steady shift away from crappy Flash/Java applets to more reusable HTML5 components and open repositories. The value of open licensing has become increasingly apparent to countless public institutions.
By sharpening their own role in these networks, WMF and other movement organizations may be able to positively influence decisions on questions like licensing, internationalization, and technology choice.
Since we last discussed this, I've come across a great research paper on Meta, "Considering 2030: Future technology trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement", prepared for WMF by independent consultants Dot Connector Studio (Philadelphia) and Lutman & Associates (St Paul):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Sources/Con...
The sections "Things to keep in mind" and "Questions for the Wikimedia movement to consider" most closely reflect my own concerns.
I agree with the authors of this paper that WMF should carefully position itself between early adopter and "laggard" when it comes to new tech. Finding ways how tech can aid learning/collaboration, and become part of the commons, turns WMF into a leader from the perspective of many other organizations that are concerned with delivering knowledge and learning, and a follower from the perspective of tech companies. It's a special place to be. :)
Erik
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(Oddly enough, I am more likely to read a Wikipedia article from beginning to end if I'm looking something up on the Kindle, while I'm reading a book.)
There's definitely some appetite for [WP-branded and -supported!] reading and research devices tuned for this sort of work: hyperlinked referencing, bookmarking, reading, annotating, and compiling into an overview of one's thoughts while working through an original document [book, article, encyclopedia article].
I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing
"Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects like OSM) access to proprietary resources
Warmly agreed. Related essential services: curating and organizing proprietary resources, and transmogrifying them into reusable elements [cf. ContentMine/FactMine]. A few narrow areas of this are covered by commercial services, but most are not.
Sam.
As I mentioned earlier on a different occasion, at the very first step we at the Russian Wikivoyage have taken the strategy discussion seriously and compiled this document (Russian + translation to English),
https://ru.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D1%...
It was essentially ignored: We never received any feedback, and there was no indication any of our points were taken to Step 2, or, in fact, that anybody ever read it. (Which indeed corresponds with the existing proposal to define all Wikivoyage communities as least developed - "(lower impact; don't merit *proactive* investment)").
After that, none of us participated in the subsequent strategy discussions. I am clearly not going to endorse the resulting strategy document, though I appreciate the time and effort of people who compiled it.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 4:12 PM, Joseph Seddon josephseddon@gmail.com wrote:
Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
Seddon
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on with how the foundations remain flawed.
Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
will
never keep you there.
Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful improvements, please.
Fae https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+ http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk" zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
movement/2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
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Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However, I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy-2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference. People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly. But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group, from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of the accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this process, is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that a few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last
version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree with enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for the next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a few weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in a shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope that we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en&uselang=en
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik i/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
For a while I have had a strong sensation, possibly unjustly so, of a highly over-complicated result. There are many good words, but I keep not seeing a simple, concise, intuitively understood statement. I feel we are still missing an understandable elevator pitch. If asked, I seriously doubt I would be able to explain where things are headed.
It is easy to explain in a complicated way. It is very hard to explain it simply. Or as Einstein put it, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”
On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 4:35 PM, Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However, I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy-2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference. People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly. But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group, from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of the accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this process, is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that a few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree with enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for the next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a few weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in a shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope that we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&uselang=en>
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik i/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
-- Guillaume Paumier _______________________________________________ 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
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you that this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or „begrudging fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully join Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly anything to the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge about your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most terrible things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the first place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2 called our work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come from? Not from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a man who runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his ancestry to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as the cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also the opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I was against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But what I saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for the KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American point of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix - the WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being a social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social inequity. But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants - given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate, while the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt. 2017 um 22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However, I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy-2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference. People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly. But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group, from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of the accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this process, is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that a few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree with enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for the next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a few weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in a shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope that we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en& uselang=en <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en&...
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 +1 (415) 712 4873 kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
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-- Guillaume Paumier _______________________________________________ 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
Dear Ziko,
For context, I want to preface this by saying that I am speaking as a former member of the strategy team, not as a Foundation employee. My perspective was always that the team leading the movement strategy process was working in service of the movement, not of the Foundation.
I hear that you are unsatisfied with some of the content of the document. I hear that you disagree with particular elements like advocacy or new forms of knowledge. I hear that you question the broad definition of "community", which in your opinion should only include active Wikipedians.
I don't agree with all your points, but I understand them and I relate to some.
I appreciate that you hold very strong opinions on some of those topics. I would like you to see that other people in the movement can hold dramatically different opinions that are just as valid.
Many people (in and outside the movement) pushed for Wikimedia organizations to become much more active politically. Others expressed concerns about becoming too political. In the end, the document gave a nod to political advocacy but didn't make it the number-one priority of the movement. There was a balance to strike, and I would like you to understand that need.
I would also like you to understand that your approach and language may alienate other members of our communities. When you call oral traditions one of "the most terrible things from the paper" and disparage experts who shared their opinion with us, your words unwittingly cast away communities who have been historically left out, and you contribute to perpetuating their structural oppression.
You argue that the notions of new forms of knowledge, oral traditions, and Western bias were pushed by experts and by the Foundation, and didn't come from the communities. And yet, at the 2017 Wikimedia conference in Berlin, whose participants were coming from Wikimedia communities, the most-voted-for statement at the end of the conference was this one:
*Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge.* [ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2017/Documentation/Move... ]
What I am trying to convey is that for each of your concerns, there are people within our movement and communities who have fought, like you are fighting now, for those elements to be part of the movement's strategic direction. And they have outweighed you. On some other topics, your opinion is the one that prevailed. On many topics, we all agreed. It is now time to accept the outcome and focus on what motivates us to contribute individually to parts of the strategic direction, so that we can advance as a movement.
2017-10-03 13:38 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you that this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or „begrudging fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully join Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly anything to the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge about your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most terrible things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the first place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2 called our work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come from? Not from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a man who runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his ancestry to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as the cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also the opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I was against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But what I saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for the KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American point of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix - the WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being a social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social inequity. But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants - given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate, while the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt. 2017 um 22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However, I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy- 2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference. People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly. But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group, from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of the accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this process, is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that a few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree with enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for the next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a few weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in a shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope that we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in
the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the
draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&
uselang=en <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&uselang=en>
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that
"community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular
basis
as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my
greatest
thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but
will of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm
talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We
have
more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885> +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873> kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ 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
,
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-- Guillaume Paumier _______________________________________________ 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
Strategy mailing list Strategy@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/strategy
Dear Guillaume,
Thank you for making your point of view clear, I appreciate that. Please allow me to make two points clear myself.
(A) It is not my opinion that only active Wikipedians are „community“. There are other Wikimedia wikis, and also activities, that have a community character. I do reject the idea to open the term community to literally everybody/anybody „and beyond“. It would be necessary that the draft paper, instead, explains what should be understood by „movement“ or „community“ in order to avoid certain ambiguities.
(B) I also do not deny that there is an overweight of content that is related to Western countries and culture. On (English) Wikipedia, the average Dutch village is certainly much better described than a larger city in, for example, Ethiopia or Guatemala. I am always supportive of initiatives that want to do something about this lack of balance. (And I suppose that most people on the Berlin conference meant that, too).
But the wording in the further strategy process was much different. The concept of „reliable sources“ was called a Western bias, while „oral traditions“ should be considered to be reliable as well.
I know that writing the history of many countries is difficult because of the lack of written material. That makes it also difficult to write a more complete history of, for example, Celtic and Germanic tribes in ancient times.
But „oral traditions“ are just not reliable in the way scholarly literature is. Historians provide us with numerous examples how people fail in remembering what they heard a long time ago, or even recently. The human brain is simply not made by nature to be a historian or a data storage; human memory is fragile and changes. Also, additionally some people have a malicious intent when giving their testimony to a historian or a well meaning platform for „oral history“. A historian‘s work is to collect several testimonies, compare them to each other (= the transcripts of their interviews) and corroborate them with other material - and finally write their own account of their research.
Imagine, I would claim that I am a descendant of Charlemagne (source: my father and grandfather told me so). Or that national socialism had a positive impact on Germany and many other lucky countries in Europe (source: what someone told me at family meetings). - Wikipedia works because we use „secondary sources“, scholarly literature. That is where (some major aspects of) the quality comes from. That is why people like Wikipedia and donate for it.
It would be necessary to make Wikipedia the great (even greater) encyclopedia it could be. With an integration of Wikidata and Commons, and good interfaces. With the focus on readability, with a well thought through concept of providing content for the general public, for special groups and for scholars. With an understanding of what we do and what we explicitly don’t do, with whom we can partner up (and where are the limits). This more cautious vision makes me not very enthusiast, to say the least, about widening the scope to a degree that we loose recognizability.
Kind regards, Ziko
o
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mi. 4. Okt. 2017 um 04:37:
Dear Ziko,
For context, I want to preface this by saying that I am speaking as a former member of the strategy team, not as a Foundation employee. My perspective was always that the team leading the movement strategy process was working in service of the movement, not of the Foundation.
I hear that you are unsatisfied with some of the content of the document. I hear that you disagree with particular elements like advocacy or new forms of knowledge. I hear that you question the broad definition of "community", which in your opinion should only include active Wikipedians.
I don't agree with all your points, but I understand them and I relate to some.
I appreciate that you hold very strong opinions on some of those topics. I would like you to see that other people in the movement can hold dramatically different opinions that are just as valid.
Many people (in and outside the movement) pushed for Wikimedia organizations to become much more active politically. Others expressed concerns about becoming too political. In the end, the document gave a nod to political advocacy but didn't make it the number-one priority of the movement. There was a balance to strike, and I would like you to understand that need.
I would also like you to understand that your approach and language may alienate other members of our communities. When you call oral traditions one of "the most terrible things from the paper" and disparage experts who shared their opinion with us, your words unwittingly cast away communities who have been historically left out, and you contribute to perpetuating their structural oppression.
You argue that the notions of new forms of knowledge, oral traditions, and Western bias were pushed by experts and by the Foundation, and didn't come from the communities. And yet, at the 2017 Wikimedia conference in Berlin, whose participants were coming from Wikimedia communities, the most-voted-for statement at the end of the conference was this one:
*Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge.* [
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_2017/Documentation/Move... ]
What I am trying to convey is that for each of your concerns, there are people within our movement and communities who have fought, like you are fighting now, for those elements to be part of the movement's strategic direction. And they have outweighed you. On some other topics, your opinion is the one that prevailed. On many topics, we all agreed. It is now time to accept the outcome and focus on what motivates us to contribute individually to parts of the strategic direction, so that we can advance as a movement.
2017-10-03 13:38 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you
that
this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or „begrudging fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully join Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly anything
to
the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge about your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most terrible things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the
first
place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2 called
our
work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come from?
Not
from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a man
who
runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his ancestry to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as the cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also the opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I was against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But what I saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for the KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American point of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think
differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix - the WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being a social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social
inequity.
But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants - given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate, while the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt. 2017
um
22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose.
However,
I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy- 2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference. People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell
you
from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities
is a
difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it
perfectly.
But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last
version
is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during
multiple
Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group, from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all
too
familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that
can
be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to
comments.
I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would
be
other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong
and
needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of
the
accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this
process,
is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that
a
few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree
with
enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for
the
next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a
few
weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in
a
shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope
that
we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in
the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based
on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the
draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&
uselang=en <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&uselang=en>
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that
"community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular
basis
as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1. Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my
greatest
thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of
you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but
will of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback
on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
the
feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the
process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As
we
transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and
new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians
from
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla
led a
series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees
for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm
talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates.
Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible
and
often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within
the
Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any
support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is
in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I
am
incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We
have
more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved
already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885> +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873> kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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I fully support Ziko on this point. Making oral tradidions welcome, in particular, making them welcome at Wikipedia, will open the door to all king of fringe POV theories. We were able to distinguish ourselves exactly because these fringe theories had no place on Wikipedia. Allowing them meaning shoot our own feet.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Guillaume,
Thank you for making your point of view clear, I appreciate that. Please allow me to make two points clear myself.
(A) It is not my opinion that only active Wikipedians are „community“. There are other Wikimedia wikis, and also activities, that have a community character. I do reject the idea to open the term community to literally everybody/anybody „and beyond“. It would be necessary that the draft paper, instead, explains what should be understood by „movement“ or „community“ in order to avoid certain ambiguities.
(B) I also do not deny that there is an overweight of content that is related to Western countries and culture. On (English) Wikipedia, the average Dutch village is certainly much better described than a larger city in, for example, Ethiopia or Guatemala. I am always supportive of initiatives that want to do something about this lack of balance. (And I suppose that most people on the Berlin conference meant that, too).
But the wording in the further strategy process was much different. The concept of „reliable sources“ was called a Western bias, while „oral traditions“ should be considered to be reliable as well.
I know that writing the history of many countries is difficult because of the lack of written material. That makes it also difficult to write a more complete history of, for example, Celtic and Germanic tribes in ancient times.
But „oral traditions“ are just not reliable in the way scholarly literature is. Historians provide us with numerous examples how people fail in remembering what they heard a long time ago, or even recently. The human brain is simply not made by nature to be a historian or a data storage; human memory is fragile and changes. Also, additionally some people have a malicious intent when giving their testimony to a historian or a well meaning platform for „oral history“. A historian‘s work is to collect several testimonies, compare them to each other (= the transcripts of their interviews) and corroborate them with other material - and finally write their own account of their research.
Imagine, I would claim that I am a descendant of Charlemagne (source: my father and grandfather told me so). Or that national socialism had a positive impact on Germany and many other lucky countries in Europe (source: what someone told me at family meetings). - Wikipedia works because we use „secondary sources“, scholarly literature. That is where (some major aspects of) the quality comes from. That is why people like Wikipedia and donate for it.
It would be necessary to make Wikipedia the great (even greater) encyclopedia it could be. With an integration of Wikidata and Commons, and good interfaces. With the focus on readability, with a well thought through concept of providing content for the general public, for special groups and for scholars. With an understanding of what we do and what we explicitly don’t do, with whom we can partner up (and where are the limits). This more cautious vision makes me not very enthusiast, to say the least, about widening the scope to a degree that we loose recognizability.
Kind regards, Ziko
o
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mi. 4. Okt. 2017 um 04:37:
Dear Ziko,
For context, I want to preface this by saying that I am speaking as a former member of the strategy team, not as a Foundation employee. My perspective was always that the team leading the movement strategy
process
was working in service of the movement, not of the Foundation.
I hear that you are unsatisfied with some of the content of the
document. I
hear that you disagree with particular elements like advocacy or new
forms
of knowledge. I hear that you question the broad definition of
"community",
which in your opinion should only include active Wikipedians.
I don't agree with all your points, but I understand them and I relate to some.
I appreciate that you hold very strong opinions on some of those topics.
I
would like you to see that other people in the movement can hold dramatically different opinions that are just as valid.
Many people (in and outside the movement) pushed for Wikimedia organizations to become much more active politically. Others expressed concerns about becoming too political. In the end, the document gave a
nod
to political advocacy but didn't make it the number-one priority of the movement. There was a balance to strike, and I would like you to
understand
that need.
I would also like you to understand that your approach and language may alienate other members of our communities. When you call oral traditions one of "the most terrible things from the paper" and disparage experts
who
shared their opinion with us, your words unwittingly cast away
communities
who have been historically left out, and you contribute to perpetuating their structural oppression.
You argue that the notions of new forms of knowledge, oral traditions,
and
Western bias were pushed by experts and by the Foundation, and didn't
come
from the communities. And yet, at the 2017 Wikimedia conference in
Berlin,
whose participants were coming from Wikimedia communities, the most-voted-for statement at the end of the conference was this one:
*Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge.* [
2017/Documentation/Movement_Strategy_track/Day_3
]
What I am trying to convey is that for each of your concerns, there are people within our movement and communities who have fought, like you are fighting now, for those elements to be part of the movement's strategic direction. And they have outweighed you. On some other topics, your
opinion
is the one that prevailed. On many topics, we all agreed. It is now time
to
accept the outcome and focus on what motivates us to contribute individually to parts of the strategic direction, so that we can advance
as
a movement.
2017-10-03 13:38 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you
that
this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or „begrudging fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully join Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly anything
to
the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge
about
your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most terrible things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the
first
place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2 called
our
work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come from?
Not
from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a man
who
runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his
ancestry
to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as the cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also
the
opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I
was
against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But
what I
saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for the KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American
point
of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think
differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix -
the
WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being a social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social
inequity.
But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants - given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate,
while
the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt. 2017
um
22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously
nothing
preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose.
However,
I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where
it's
going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy- 2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight
preference.
People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell
you
from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities
is a
difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it
perfectly.
But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared
vision
of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I
did
consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last
version
is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during
multiple
Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting
group,
from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all
too
familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments
and
feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that
can
be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an
encyclopedia
article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to
comments.
I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a
large
group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be
positive,
fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time,
I'd
probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there
would
be
other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong
and
needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of
the
accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture,
but I
think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this
process,
is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting
that
a
few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree
with
enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for
the
next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and
responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a
few
weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know
you
enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you
agree
with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving
in
a
shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope
that
we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed
in
the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based
on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the
draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&
uselang=en <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&uselang=en>
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community":
"from
editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that
"community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular
basis
as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact
abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing,
and
including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October
Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups
to
endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my
greatest
thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of
you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but
will of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback
on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based
on
the
feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we
are
building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the
process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As
we
transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and
new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians
from
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla
led a
series of discussions on the direction, including what it means
for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees
for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you
appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm
talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates.
Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible
and
often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within
the
Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have
been
affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any
support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation
is
in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and
I
am
incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the
strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We
have
more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved
already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885> +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873> kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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(first I'll respond to Ziko/Yaroslav, and then I'll ponder a bit about the direction in a more general sense)
Just to check, Ziko and Yaroslav: are you talking about Wikipedia, or the sum of all human knowledge? Are you arguing that Wikipedia should only make use of secondary sources, or are you arguing that the whole Wikimedia movement should limit itself to that?
I can see pathways (although they won't be easy) of how oral knowledge can be collected, described, analyzed, compared and turned into a secondary source in Wikimedia projects. Maybe Wikipedia is not the most suitable project for that - this is something we could discuss. This is a typical topic that is super important to a part of our community.
This is probably true for many things: what doesn't work for Wikipedia (right now), may well work within other projects. Not each component of the strategy is equally applicable to every single person and every single situation.
But in general, there are two ways that the strategic direction can be improved - and they are in direct contradiction. The first is to make everything more acceptable to everyone. That is basically what you're arguing here. The second is what was a resonating feedback I heard at Wikimania: to make clearer choices. Actually setting a direction.
We are an incredibly diverse community (even if we are underrepresented in many groups), and people will want to go in different directions. After reading the current direction, I'm acknowledging there's more 'direction', but still feel left hanging.
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there is too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that our work is being put to good use. Is this a correct (simplified) interpretation?
Lodewijk
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 5:31 AM, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
I fully support Ziko on this point. Making oral tradidions welcome, in particular, making them welcome at Wikipedia, will open the door to all king of fringe POV theories. We were able to distinguish ourselves exactly because these fringe theories had no place on Wikipedia. Allowing them meaning shoot our own feet.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Guillaume,
Thank you for making your point of view clear, I appreciate that. Please allow me to make two points clear myself.
(A) It is not my opinion that only active Wikipedians are „community“. There are other Wikimedia wikis, and also activities, that have a
community
character. I do reject the idea to open the term community to literally everybody/anybody „and beyond“. It would be necessary that the draft
paper,
instead, explains what should be understood by „movement“ or „community“
in
order to avoid certain ambiguities.
(B) I also do not deny that there is an overweight of content that is related to Western countries and culture. On (English) Wikipedia, the average Dutch village is certainly much better described than a larger
city
in, for example, Ethiopia or Guatemala. I am always supportive of initiatives that want to do something about this lack of balance. (And I suppose that most people on the Berlin conference meant that, too).
But the wording in the further strategy process was much different. The concept of „reliable sources“ was called a Western bias, while „oral traditions“ should be considered to be reliable as well.
I know that writing the history of many countries is difficult because of the lack of written material. That makes it also difficult to write a
more
complete history of, for example, Celtic and Germanic tribes in ancient times.
But „oral traditions“ are just not reliable in the way scholarly
literature
is. Historians provide us with numerous examples how people fail in remembering what they heard a long time ago, or even recently. The human brain is simply not made by nature to be a historian or a data storage; human memory is fragile and changes. Also, additionally some people have
a
malicious intent when giving their testimony to a historian or a well meaning platform for „oral history“. A historian‘s work is to collect several testimonies, compare them to each other (= the transcripts of
their
interviews) and corroborate them with other material - and finally write their own account of their research.
Imagine, I would claim that I am a descendant of Charlemagne (source: my father and grandfather told me so). Or that national socialism had a positive impact on Germany and many other lucky countries in Europe (source: what someone told me at family meetings). - Wikipedia works because we use „secondary sources“, scholarly literature. That is where (some major aspects of) the quality comes from. That is why people like Wikipedia and donate for it.
It would be necessary to make Wikipedia the great (even greater) encyclopedia it could be. With an integration of Wikidata and Commons,
and
good interfaces. With the focus on readability, with a well thought
through
concept of providing content for the general public, for special groups
and
for scholars. With an understanding of what we do and what we explicitly don’t do, with whom we can partner up (and where are the limits). This
more
cautious vision makes me not very enthusiast, to say the least, about widening the scope to a degree that we loose recognizability.
Kind regards, Ziko
o
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mi. 4. Okt. 2017
um
04:37:
Dear Ziko,
For context, I want to preface this by saying that I am speaking as a former member of the strategy team, not as a Foundation employee. My perspective was always that the team leading the movement strategy
process
was working in service of the movement, not of the Foundation.
I hear that you are unsatisfied with some of the content of the
document. I
hear that you disagree with particular elements like advocacy or new
forms
of knowledge. I hear that you question the broad definition of
"community",
which in your opinion should only include active Wikipedians.
I don't agree with all your points, but I understand them and I relate
to
some.
I appreciate that you hold very strong opinions on some of those
topics.
I
would like you to see that other people in the movement can hold dramatically different opinions that are just as valid.
Many people (in and outside the movement) pushed for Wikimedia organizations to become much more active politically. Others expressed concerns about becoming too political. In the end, the document gave a
nod
to political advocacy but didn't make it the number-one priority of the movement. There was a balance to strike, and I would like you to
understand
that need.
I would also like you to understand that your approach and language may alienate other members of our communities. When you call oral
traditions
one of "the most terrible things from the paper" and disparage experts
who
shared their opinion with us, your words unwittingly cast away
communities
who have been historically left out, and you contribute to perpetuating their structural oppression.
You argue that the notions of new forms of knowledge, oral traditions,
and
Western bias were pushed by experts and by the Foundation, and didn't
come
from the communities. And yet, at the 2017 Wikimedia conference in
Berlin,
whose participants were coming from Wikimedia communities, the most-voted-for statement at the end of the conference was this one:
*Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge.* [
2017/Documentation/Movement_Strategy_track/Day_3
]
What I am trying to convey is that for each of your concerns, there are people within our movement and communities who have fought, like you
are
fighting now, for those elements to be part of the movement's strategic direction. And they have outweighed you. On some other topics, your
opinion
is the one that prevailed. On many topics, we all agreed. It is now
time
to
accept the outcome and focus on what motivates us to contribute individually to parts of the strategic direction, so that we can
advance
as
a movement.
2017-10-03 13:38 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you
that
this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or
„begrudging
fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully
join
Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly
anything
to
the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge
about
your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most
terrible
things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the
first
place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2
called
our
work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come
from?
Not
from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a
man
who
runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his
ancestry
to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as
the
cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also
the
opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I
was
against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But
what I
saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for
the
KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American
point
of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think
differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix -
the
WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being
a
social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social
inequity.
But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants
given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate,
while
the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt.
2017
um
22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously
nothing
preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose.
However,
I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where
it's
going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy- 2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight
preference.
People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can
tell
you
from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those
priorities
is a
difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it
perfectly.
But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared
vision
of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I
did
consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last
version
is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during
multiple
Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting
group,
from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize
and
endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that
not
every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue
all
too
familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments
and
feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something
that
can
be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an
encyclopedia
article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to
comments.
I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a
large
group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be
positive,
fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather
the
opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time,
I'd
probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there
would
be
other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped
me
realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's
wrong
and
needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus
of
the
accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture,
but I
think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel
visions
widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this
process,
is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence
means
recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting
that
a
few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of
individuals,
groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process.
Not
everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree
with
enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point
for
the
next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and
responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in
a
few
weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know
you
enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you
agree
with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving
in
a
shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I
hope
that
we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away
from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed
in
the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is
based
on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited
to
endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the
draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&
uselang=en <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&uselang=en>
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community":
"from
editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that
"community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a
regular
basis
as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if
in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact
abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher <kmaher@wikimedia.org
:
> Hi all, > > Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing,
and
> including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
> strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1] > > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow,
October
> Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and
groups
to
> endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my
greatest
> thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many
of
you
have > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a
shared
strategic > direction. > > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
> developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we
have
built
> together. I do not have many more details to share right now,
but
will of
> course offer an update as they become available. > > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided
feedback
on
the
> draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based
on
the
> feedback you offered. > > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will
be
invited > to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we
are
> building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the
process
and > timeline. > > *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers, > staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible!
As
we
> transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded
and
new
ones > created in their place. We'll keep you updated. > > *Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join
Wikimedians
from
> Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth
annual
Wikimedia > CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla
led a
> series of discussions on the direction, including what it means
for
CEE.[3] > Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the
attendees
for
such > a wonderful event! > > *In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you
appreciate
these > updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm
talking
to > the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
> planning process concludes, with a focus on more general
updates.
Keep
the > feedback coming. > > Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its
incredible
and
> often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many
within
the
> Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have
been
> affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been
in
touch
> with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any
support
we
> can. > > Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation
is
in
the > process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower.
We
invite
> you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4] > > We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process,
and
I
am
> incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the
strategy.
Thank
> you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process.
We
have
> more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved
already.
> > Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”), > > Katherine > > [1] > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/ 2017/Direction > [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 > [3] > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% > E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf > [4] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- > September/088654.html > [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
headquarters
> > -- > Katherine Maher > Executive Director > > *We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:* > > Wikimedia Foundation > 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 > San Francisco, CA 94104 > > +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885> > +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873> > kmaher@wikimedia.org > https://annual.wikimedia.org > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> 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>
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Thanks Lodewijk.
I do not know about Ziko, but my personal position which I also expressed during the strategy consultations is that oral traditions can not be taken to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government), but at least I see how it can exist. We certainly do have WMF projects which allow original research.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 8:19 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
(first I'll respond to Ziko/Yaroslav, and then I'll ponder a bit about the direction in a more general sense)
Just to check, Ziko and Yaroslav: are you talking about Wikipedia, or the sum of all human knowledge? Are you arguing that Wikipedia should only make use of secondary sources, or are you arguing that the whole Wikimedia movement should limit itself to that?
I can see pathways (although they won't be easy) of how oral knowledge can be collected, described, analyzed, compared and turned into a secondary source in Wikimedia projects. Maybe Wikipedia is not the most suitable project for that - this is something we could discuss. This is a typical topic that is super important to a part of our community.
This is probably true for many things: what doesn't work for Wikipedia (right now), may well work within other projects. Not each component of the strategy is equally applicable to every single person and every single situation.
But in general, there are two ways that the strategic direction can be improved - and they are in direct contradiction. The first is to make everything more acceptable to everyone. That is basically what you're arguing here. The second is what was a resonating feedback I heard at Wikimania: to make clearer choices. Actually setting a direction.
We are an incredibly diverse community (even if we are underrepresented in many groups), and people will want to go in different directions. After reading the current direction, I'm acknowledging there's more 'direction', but still feel left hanging.
I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there is too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that our work is being put to good use. Is this a correct (simplified) interpretation?
Lodewijk
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 5:31 AM, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
I fully support Ziko on this point. Making oral tradidions welcome, in particular, making them welcome at Wikipedia, will open the door to all king of fringe POV theories. We were able to distinguish ourselves
exactly
because these fringe theories had no place on Wikipedia. Allowing them meaning shoot our own feet.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com
wrote:
Dear Guillaume,
Thank you for making your point of view clear, I appreciate that.
Please
allow me to make two points clear myself.
(A) It is not my opinion that only active Wikipedians are „community“. There are other Wikimedia wikis, and also activities, that have a
community
character. I do reject the idea to open the term community to literally everybody/anybody „and beyond“. It would be necessary that the draft
paper,
instead, explains what should be understood by „movement“ or
„community“
in
order to avoid certain ambiguities.
(B) I also do not deny that there is an overweight of content that is related to Western countries and culture. On (English) Wikipedia, the average Dutch village is certainly much better described than a larger
city
in, for example, Ethiopia or Guatemala. I am always supportive of initiatives that want to do something about this lack of balance. (And
I
suppose that most people on the Berlin conference meant that, too).
But the wording in the further strategy process was much different. The concept of „reliable sources“ was called a Western bias, while „oral traditions“ should be considered to be reliable as well.
I know that writing the history of many countries is difficult because
of
the lack of written material. That makes it also difficult to write a
more
complete history of, for example, Celtic and Germanic tribes in ancient times.
But „oral traditions“ are just not reliable in the way scholarly
literature
is. Historians provide us with numerous examples how people fail in remembering what they heard a long time ago, or even recently. The
human
brain is simply not made by nature to be a historian or a data storage; human memory is fragile and changes. Also, additionally some people
have
a
malicious intent when giving their testimony to a historian or a well meaning platform for „oral history“. A historian‘s work is to collect several testimonies, compare them to each other (= the transcripts of
their
interviews) and corroborate them with other material - and finally
write
their own account of their research.
Imagine, I would claim that I am a descendant of Charlemagne (source:
my
father and grandfather told me so). Or that national socialism had a positive impact on Germany and many other lucky countries in Europe (source: what someone told me at family meetings). - Wikipedia works because we use „secondary sources“, scholarly literature. That is where (some major aspects of) the quality comes from. That is why people like Wikipedia and donate for it.
It would be necessary to make Wikipedia the great (even greater) encyclopedia it could be. With an integration of Wikidata and Commons,
and
good interfaces. With the focus on readability, with a well thought
through
concept of providing content for the general public, for special groups
and
for scholars. With an understanding of what we do and what we
explicitly
don’t do, with whom we can partner up (and where are the limits). This
more
cautious vision makes me not very enthusiast, to say the least, about widening the scope to a degree that we loose recognizability.
Kind regards, Ziko
o
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mi. 4. Okt. 2017
um
04:37:
Dear Ziko,
For context, I want to preface this by saying that I am speaking as a former member of the strategy team, not as a Foundation employee. My perspective was always that the team leading the movement strategy
process
was working in service of the movement, not of the Foundation.
I hear that you are unsatisfied with some of the content of the
document. I
hear that you disagree with particular elements like advocacy or new
forms
of knowledge. I hear that you question the broad definition of
"community",
which in your opinion should only include active Wikipedians.
I don't agree with all your points, but I understand them and I
relate
to
some.
I appreciate that you hold very strong opinions on some of those
topics.
I
would like you to see that other people in the movement can hold dramatically different opinions that are just as valid.
Many people (in and outside the movement) pushed for Wikimedia organizations to become much more active politically. Others
expressed
concerns about becoming too political. In the end, the document gave
a
nod
to political advocacy but didn't make it the number-one priority of
the
movement. There was a balance to strike, and I would like you to
understand
that need.
I would also like you to understand that your approach and language
may
alienate other members of our communities. When you call oral
traditions
one of "the most terrible things from the paper" and disparage
experts
who
shared their opinion with us, your words unwittingly cast away
communities
who have been historically left out, and you contribute to
perpetuating
their structural oppression.
You argue that the notions of new forms of knowledge, oral
traditions,
and
Western bias were pushed by experts and by the Foundation, and didn't
come
from the communities. And yet, at the 2017 Wikimedia conference in
Berlin,
whose participants were coming from Wikimedia communities, the most-voted-for statement at the end of the conference was this one:
*Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge.* [
2017/Documentation/Movement_Strategy_track/Day_3
]
What I am trying to convey is that for each of your concerns, there
are
people within our movement and communities who have fought, like you
are
fighting now, for those elements to be part of the movement's
strategic
direction. And they have outweighed you. On some other topics, your
opinion
is the one that prevailed. On many topics, we all agreed. It is now
time
to
accept the outcome and focus on what motivates us to contribute individually to parts of the strategic direction, so that we can
advance
as
a movement.
2017-10-03 13:38 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with
you
that
this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or
„begrudging
fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully
join
Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly
anything
to
the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge
about
your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most
terrible
things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they
still
appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in
the
first
place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2
called
our
work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come
from?
Not
from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a
man
who
runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his
ancestry
to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as
the
cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and
also
the
opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“.
Certainly, I
was
against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But
what I
saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for
the
KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American
point
of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think
differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix
the
WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes,
being
a
social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social
inequity.
But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“
wants
given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their
concerns
about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate,
while
the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt.
2017
um
22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously
nothing
preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose.
However,
I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and
where
it's
going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more
so [
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy- 2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight
preference.
People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can
tell
you
from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those
priorities
is a
difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it
perfectly.
But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared
vision
of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the
direction, I
did
consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last
version
is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during
multiple
Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting
group,
from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every
single
comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize
and
endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that
not
every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue
all
too
familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate
comments
and
feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something
that
can
be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an
encyclopedia
article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to
comments.
I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a
large
group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be
positive,
fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather
the
opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited
time,
I'd
probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there
would
be
other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have
helped
me
realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of
the
process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's
wrong
and
needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose
focus
of
the
accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture,
but I
think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel
visions
widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this
process,
is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence
means
recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting
that
a
few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited
and
motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the
last
version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of
individuals,
groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process.
Not
everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement
agree
with
enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point
for
the
next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and
responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction
in
a
few
weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I
know
you
enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in
the
movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you
agree
with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of
moving
in
a
shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I
hope
that
we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our
typically
Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
> Hello Katherine, > > This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away
from
being > a useful and appropriate document for our future. > > The serious issues from the talk page are only partially
addressed
in
the > rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is
based
on
the > feedback you offered." > > You have announced that organizations and individuals are
invited
to
> endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject
the
draft? I > remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked
the
community > how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to
be
against > it. > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_ referendum/en& > uselang=en > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_ referendum/en&uselang=en
> > The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community":
"from
> editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community" > were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a
regular
basis > as volunteers. > > I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But
if
in
future > more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact
abolishing
the > community. > > Kind regards, > Ziko van Dijk > > > > > > 2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher <
kmaher@wikimedia.org
:
> > > Hi all, > > > > Since my update last month, we have been collecting,
processing,
and
> > including your most recent input into the lastest version of
the
movement > > strategic direction. This version is available on
Meta-Wiki.[1]
> > > > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow,
October
> > Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and
groups
to
> > endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest > > thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many
of
you
> have > > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a
shared
> strategic > > direction. > > > > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which
will
involve > > developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we
have
built > > together. I do not have many more details to share right now,
but
will of > > course offer an update as they become available. > > > > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided
feedback
on
the > > draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is
based
on
the > > feedback you offered. > > > > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, > > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement
will
be
> invited > > to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future
we
are
> > building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the
process
> and > > timeline. > > > > *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the > volunteers, > > staff, and contractors who came together to make this
possible!
As
we
> > transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded
and
new
> ones > > created in their place. We'll keep you updated. > > > > *Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join
Wikimedians
from
> > Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth
annual
> Wikimedia > > CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel
Vaidla
led a
> > series of discussions on the direction, including what it
means
for
> CEE.[3] > > Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the
attendees
for
> such > > a wonderful event! > > > > *In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you
appreciate
> these > > updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on.
I'm
talking > to > > the Communications department about keeping them going once
the
strategic > > planning process concludes, with a focus on more general
updates.
Keep
> the > > feedback coming. > > > > Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its
incredible
and
> > often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many
within
the
> > Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have
been
> > affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have
been
in
touch > > with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any
support
we > > can. > > > > Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the
Foundation
is
in
> the > > process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery
Tower.
We
invite > > you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4] > > > > We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process,
and
I
am
> > incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the
strategy.
Thank > > you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this
process.
We
have > > more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved
already.
> > > > Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”), > > > > Katherine > > > > [1] > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/ > 2017/Direction > > [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_
2017
> > [3] > > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% > > E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf > > [4] > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- > > September/088654.html > > [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_ headquarters > > > > -- > > Katherine Maher > > Executive Director > > > > *We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:* > > > > Wikimedia Foundation > > 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 > > San Francisco, CA 94104 > > > > +1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885> > > +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873> > > kmaher@wikimedia.org > > https://annual.wikimedia.org > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > 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>
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to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government), but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend ». TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend ». TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English (plural urban legends https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English (countable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit orally from one generation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit :
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend ». TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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
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There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would at least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by a reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their due diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project, but anything less would be like a magnet for everything we don't want. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English (plural urban legends https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English (countable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit orally from one generation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit :
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend ». TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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
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Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why should we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just publish books in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would at least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by a reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their due diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project, but anything less would be like a magnet for everything we don't want. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit :
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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
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And that is where the broader Wikimedia movement could come in, to provide that pipeline of rigor and reliability, right? I don't know a solution either, but the question for the strategy is not whether we have a solution right now. The question would be whether the movement should work towards finding a solution through our ecosystem (or even beyond), and support that. Maybe at the end of this process, some information may end up on Wikipedia - if the process proves to be reliable enough. And maybe not.
I also agree with the nuance by Charles, that we're talking about many different types of knowledge - some of which may be more suitable than others.
Lodewijk
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why should we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just publish books in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would
at
least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by
a
reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their
due
diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project,
but
anything less would be like a magnet for everything we don't want. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in
Wikipedia
today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in
French
rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they
are
not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt of bias
too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#
uncountable>,
plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit :
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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Hello Lodewijk and Charles,
I am now quickly responding after arriving in my hotel. The question whether it is about Wikipedia or about knowledge - I am not sure, but I think that it is a very useful, structuring question.
About „oral traditions“. I don‘t have my books here, but I give you an example what I mean. I remember the case (I hope correctly) from Johannes Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung.
There was a territory in Africa, occupied by the British in the 19th century. Shortly after, they wanted to learn more about this territory. There were no history books, but they asked the inhabitants. For example, why is this territory divided in seven provinces. The British got the answer: Once there was a king. He had seven sons. So he divided the territory into seven provinces, each for every son.
Time went by. The British colonial rule changed the administrative division of the territory. They reduced the number of provinces from seven to five. Decades later, in the 20th century, the colonial rule came to an end. Shortly before that, the British asked the inhabitants about the territory again. They got to hear: Once there was a king. He had five sons. So he divided the territory into five provinces.
The human brain and memory, and collective memory, are not unchangeble unlike paper. They adapt. The human brain is not made to record data for historians but to deal with life. You cannot remember everything. When needed, your brain builds up a new story from remembered fragments and tries to keep the new story coherent with present information.
About an „oral traditions“ project outside of Wikipedia: It has been proposed. But it will encounter problems like any other platform for „oral history“. It is a lot of work, it can attract extremists, and you have to make sure that the content is actually usuable for historians or other scientists (e.g., the person speaking must be identified correctly). And, of course, the testimonials have to undergo the same scrutiny as any other historical source. In my experience most scientists prefer to interview people by themselves, under their own conditions, and being the first to use the material.
Kind regards, Ziko
Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org schrieb am Mi. 4. Okt. 2017 um 22:11:
And that is where the broader Wikimedia movement could come in, to provide that pipeline of rigor and reliability, right? I don't know a solution either, but the question for the strategy is not whether we have a solution right now. The question would be whether the movement should work towards finding a solution through our ecosystem (or even beyond), and support that. Maybe at the end of this process, some information may end up on Wikipedia - if the process proves to be reliable enough. And maybe not.
I also agree with the nuance by Charles, that we're talking about many different types of knowledge - some of which may be more suitable than others.
Lodewijk
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why
should
we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just publish
books
in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the
purpose,
but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would
at
least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded
by
a
reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their
due
diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project,
but
anything less would be like a magnet for everything we don't want. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in
Wikipedia
today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in
French
rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they
are
not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really
so
more value than the words of the Ancient of the African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not
forget
that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt of bias
too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it
may
be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition,
very
different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that
is
untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#
uncountable>,
plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material
transmitted <
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit
:
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban
legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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I agree that is the current situation, but why should we not have such a project (in theory - in practice I could list several obstacles, possibly surmountable) Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:54 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why should we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just publish books in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would at least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by a reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their due diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project, but anything less would be like a magnet for everything we don't want. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit :
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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I guess for the same reason we never managed to run a successful journal, despite talking about this for about ten years. This project would need to have infrastructure comparable with the infrastructure needed to run an academic publishing house - editors, referees etc, which at this point looks insurmountable. And it will not be a project anyone can edit, which is a new entity in a Wikimedia universe.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
I agree that is the current situation, but why should we not have such a project (in theory - in practice I could list several obstacles, possibly surmountable) Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:54 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why should we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just publish books in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would at least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by a reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their due diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project, but anything less would be like a
magnet for everything we don't want.
Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the
African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt
of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit :
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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Oral stories do adapt and change over time to suit the circumstances but the under lying fact remain consistent as in the case of Ziko's story that a King divided his realm amongst his sons thus forming the basis of the regions, whether its 5,7,9 or some other figure its still the same. We were once one group until an elder, respected, leader created multiple we are separate groups yet we are all the same. This same thing has occurred regularly across europe as well even now borders are still shifting.
When recording intangible sources two things must remain consistent, we need to record the voice that the story is being spoken for and recognise that different voice will tell different stories because they have different perspectives, just like "eyewitness" accounts. The other thing is to recognise that when recording these stories we aren't setting them in stone creating or selecting a single definitive narrative.
- example: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Bulyit#Oral_Accounts
Whether we deal with oral sources within a stand alone project or within the specific language wikipedia becomes irrelevant, if we want to include Indigenous knowledge we have accept and work with the ways in which that particular Indigenous knowledge is shared.
It will be project anyone can edit, because its just like the written knowledge we now share and modify, because you have box doesn't mean it has to be a cube.
On 5 October 2017 at 15:19, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
I guess for the same reason we never managed to run a successful journal, despite talking about this for about ten years. This project would need to have infrastructure comparable with the infrastructure needed to run an academic publishing house - editors, referees etc, which at this point looks insurmountable. And it will not be a project anyone can edit, which is a new entity in a Wikimedia universe.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
I agree that is the current situation, but why should we not have such a project (in theory - in practice I could list several obstacles, possibly surmountable) Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:54 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why should we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just
publish
books in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would at least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by a reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their due diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project, but anything less would be like a
magnet for everything we don't want.
Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the
African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt
of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit
:
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the Zionist Occupational Government),
but
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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We do have a somewhat successful journal here on Wikiversity https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine
The journal provides peer review and people are publishing under their real names. Could such a journal publish oral histories? Sure why not. We would just need a group of volunteers interested in pushing the initiative forwards.
With more engagement maybe the WikiJournals could one day become a full fledged sister site.
James
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 1:49 AM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
Oral stories do adapt and change over time to suit the circumstances but the under lying fact remain consistent as in the case of Ziko's story that a King divided his realm amongst his sons thus forming the basis of the regions, whether its 5,7,9 or some other figure its still the same. We were once one group until an elder, respected, leader created multiple we are separate groups yet we are all the same. This same thing has occurred regularly across europe as well even now borders are still shifting.
When recording intangible sources two things must remain consistent, we need to record the voice that the story is being spoken for and recognise that different voice will tell different stories because they have different perspectives, just like "eyewitness" accounts. The other thing is to recognise that when recording these stories we aren't setting them in stone creating or selecting a single definitive narrative.
- example:
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/nys/Bulyit#Oral_Accounts
Whether we deal with oral sources within a stand alone project or within the specific language wikipedia becomes irrelevant, if we want to include Indigenous knowledge we have accept and work with the ways in which that particular Indigenous knowledge is shared.
It will be project anyone can edit, because its just like the written knowledge we now share and modify, because you have box doesn't mean it has to be a cube.
On 5 October 2017 at 15:19, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
I guess for the same reason we never managed to run a successful journal, despite talking about this for about ten years. This project would need to have infrastructure comparable with the infrastructure needed to run an academic publishing house - editors, referees etc, which at this point looks insurmountable. And it will not be a project anyone can edit, which is a new entity in a Wikimedia universe.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 9:08 AM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
I agree that is the current situation, but why should we not have such a project (in theory - in practice I could list several obstacles, possibly surmountable) Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: Wednesday, October 4, 2017 9:54 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
Yes, but if oral tradition is recorded at the academic standard, why should we be the first publication venue? Usually these people just
publish
books in academic publishing houses.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
There may be a way to do it on another project designed for the purpose, but that cannot be English Wikipedia, and I doubt that any project that allows anonymous editing could manage it credibly. Oral tradition would at least have to be sourced to the teller, and would have to be recorded by a reliable and identified recorder, who can be held responsible for their due diligence. This would not be an easy thing for a crowdsourced project, but anything less would be like a
magnet for everything we don't want.
Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chandres Wikipedia Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 9:25 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I do not have a perfect solution to introduce oral traditions in Wikipedia today, but I’m convince that we need to find a way to do it.
Just to give you an illustration:
Today ,a significative amount of African topics in the Wikipedia in French rely only on the work of only few French historian. Without saying they are not honest, I find difficult to consider that there words have really so more value than the words of the Ancient of the
African tribes.
We know for sure than oral tradition will include bias, but do not forget that the « traditional western historian work » are not exempt
of bias too.
Charles
PS: IMHO, I find offensive the way you define oral traditions, but it may be caused by a misconception from my part.
These are the definition I use for urban legend and oral tradition, very different each other I think. urban https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban#English legend < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legend#English%3E (plural urban legends < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urban_legends#English%3E) A widely circulated story https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story that is untrue https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untrue or apocryphal < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apocryphal%3E, often having elements of humour https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humour or horror < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror%3E. oral https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oral#English tradition < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tradition#English%3E (countable < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#countable%3E and uncountable https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#uncountable, plural oral traditions https://en.wiktionary.org/ wiki/oral_traditions#English) Cultural https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/culture material transmitted < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/transmit%3E orally from one generation < https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/generation%3E to another.
Le 4 oct. 2017 à 21:11, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com a écrit
:
You might be right, and the goal is indeed to differentiate between them. I just do not see how it could be implemented in practice. A legend is a legend, be it urban or not.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 9:09 PM, Chandres Wikipedia chandres.wp@gmail.com wrote:
> to Wikipedia. They might still be a separate WMF project, which is > likely to be problematic (since it is really difficult to > differentiate between say folk tales and the oral traditions which > state that Earth is flat and that all US presidents report to the > Zionist Occupational Government), but >
For me, your definition of oral tradition is the one of « urban legend
».
TO my understanding, oral tradition refer to culture where the History of the tribes/nation/people is transmit only by a spoken way and never put on paper. Am I wrong?
charles
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I don't think the intention is to allow that sort of source on Wikipedias, there is no chance that they would be accepted on English Wikipedia, at least - I don’t know the others well enough to claim to speak for them. This would have to be a completely separate project. I do have my reservations on how it could be made into anything approaching reliable if it is open to editing by anyone, for the reasons mentioned by Yaroslav and Ziko, but there has not been a concrete proposal yet that I know of, so I accept the possibility that someone might have workable ideas, and reserve judgement on those ideas until I see them. Not every project has to be open to everyone to make anonymous edits. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: Wednesday, 04 October 2017 2:32 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Strategy] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)
I fully support Ziko on this point. Making oral tradidions welcome, in particular, making them welcome at Wikipedia, will open the door to all king of fringe POV theories. We were able to distinguish ourselves exactly because these fringe theories had no place on Wikipedia. Allowing them meaning shoot our own feet.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Guillaume,
Thank you for making your point of view clear, I appreciate that. Please allow me to make two points clear myself.
(A) It is not my opinion that only active Wikipedians are „community“. There are other Wikimedia wikis, and also activities, that have a community character. I do reject the idea to open the term community to literally everybody/anybody „and beyond“. It would be necessary that the draft paper, instead, explains what should be understood by „movement“ or „community“ in order to avoid certain ambiguities.
(B) I also do not deny that there is an overweight of content that is related to Western countries and culture. On (English) Wikipedia, the average Dutch village is certainly much better described than a larger city in, for example, Ethiopia or Guatemala. I am always supportive of initiatives that want to do something about this lack of balance. (And I suppose that most people on the Berlin conference meant that, too).
But the wording in the further strategy process was much different. The concept of „reliable sources“ was called a Western bias, while „oral traditions“ should be considered to be reliable as well.
I know that writing the history of many countries is difficult because of the lack of written material. That makes it also difficult to write a more complete history of, for example, Celtic and Germanic tribes in ancient times.
But „oral traditions“ are just not reliable in the way scholarly literature is. Historians provide us with numerous examples how people fail in remembering what they heard a long time ago, or even recently. The human brain is simply not made by nature to be a historian or a data storage; human memory is fragile and changes. Also, additionally some people have a malicious intent when giving their testimony to a historian or a well meaning platform for „oral history“. A historian‘s work is to collect several testimonies, compare them to each other (= the transcripts of their interviews) and corroborate them with other material - and finally write their own account of their research.
Imagine, I would claim that I am a descendant of Charlemagne (source: my father and grandfather told me so). Or that national socialism had a positive impact on Germany and many other lucky countries in Europe (source: what someone told me at family meetings). - Wikipedia works because we use „secondary sources“, scholarly literature. That is where (some major aspects of) the quality comes from. That is why people like Wikipedia and donate for it.
It would be necessary to make Wikipedia the great (even greater) encyclopedia it could be. With an integration of Wikidata and Commons, and good interfaces. With the focus on readability, with a well thought through concept of providing content for the general public, for special groups and for scholars. With an understanding of what we do and what we explicitly don’t do, with whom we can partner up (and where are the limits). This more cautious vision makes me not very enthusiast, to say the least, about widening the scope to a degree that we loose recognizability.
Kind regards, Ziko
o
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mi. 4. Okt. 2017 um 04:37:
Dear Ziko,
For context, I want to preface this by saying that I am speaking as a former member of the strategy team, not as a Foundation employee. My perspective was always that the team leading the movement strategy
process
was working in service of the movement, not of the Foundation.
I hear that you are unsatisfied with some of the content of the
document. I
hear that you disagree with particular elements like advocacy or new
forms
of knowledge. I hear that you question the broad definition of
"community",
which in your opinion should only include active Wikipedians.
I don't agree with all your points, but I understand them and I relate to some.
I appreciate that you hold very strong opinions on some of those topics.
I
would like you to see that other people in the movement can hold dramatically different opinions that are just as valid.
Many people (in and outside the movement) pushed for Wikimedia organizations to become much more active politically. Others expressed concerns about becoming too political. In the end, the document gave a
nod
to political advocacy but didn't make it the number-one priority of the movement. There was a balance to strike, and I would like you to
understand
that need.
I would also like you to understand that your approach and language may alienate other members of our communities. When you call oral traditions one of "the most terrible things from the paper" and disparage experts
who
shared their opinion with us, your words unwittingly cast away
communities
who have been historically left out, and you contribute to perpetuating their structural oppression.
You argue that the notions of new forms of knowledge, oral traditions,
and
Western bias were pushed by experts and by the Foundation, and didn't
come
from the communities. And yet, at the 2017 Wikimedia conference in
Berlin,
whose participants were coming from Wikimedia communities, the most-voted-for statement at the end of the conference was this one:
*Knowledge is global: we must move beyond western written knowledge, towards multiple and diverse forms of knowledge (including oral and visual), from multiple and diverse peoples and perspectives, to truly achieve the sum of all human knowledge.* [
2017/Documentation/Movement_Strategy_track/Day_3
]
What I am trying to convey is that for each of your concerns, there are people within our movement and communities who have fought, like you are fighting now, for those elements to be part of the movement's strategic direction. And they have outweighed you. On some other topics, your
opinion
is the one that prevailed. On many topics, we all agreed. It is now time
to
accept the outcome and focus on what motivates us to contribute individually to parts of the strategic direction, so that we can advance
as
a movement.
2017-10-03 13:38 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Guillaume,
Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you
that
this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or „begrudging fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully join Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly anything
to
the average Wikipedian.
As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge
about
your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most terrible things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the
first
place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2 called
our
work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come from?
Not
from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a man
who
runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his
ancestry
to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!
As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as the cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also
the
opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I
was
against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But
what I
saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for the KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American
point
of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think
differently.
If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix
the
WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being a social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social
inequity.
But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants - given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(
Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate,
while
the concerns will have to use the backyard entrance?
Kind regards Ziko
Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt. 2017
um
22:36:
Hello,
If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously
nothing
preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose.
However,
I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where
it's
going.
Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy- 2030-discussions/ ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight
preference.
People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell
you
from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities
is a
difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it
perfectly.
But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared
vision
of a large part of the movement.
As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I
did
consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last
version
is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during
multiple
Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting
group,
from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all
too
familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments
and
feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that
can
be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an
encyclopedia
article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to
comments.
I had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a
large
group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be
positive,
fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time,
I'd
probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there
would
be
other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong
and
needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of
the
accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture,
but I
think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions widen and meet.
One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this
process,
is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting
that
a
few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and motivated to participate.
From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals, groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree
with
enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for
the
next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and
responsibilities.
I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a
few
weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know
you
enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you
agree
with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving
in
a
shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope
that
we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com:
Hello Katherine,
This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.
The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed
in
the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based
on
the
feedback you offered."
You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the
draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
against
it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&
uselang=en <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_
referendum/en&uselang=en>
The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community":
"from
editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that
"community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular
basis
as volunteers.
I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact
abolishing
the
community.
Kind regards, Ziko van Dijk
2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher kmaher@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing,
and
including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October
Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups
to
endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my
greatest
thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of
you
have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
direction.
In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but
will of
course offer an update as they become available.
*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback
on
the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based
on
the
feedback you offered.
*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow, organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we
are
building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the
process
and
timeline.
*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As
we
transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and
new
ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians
from
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla
led a
series of discussions on the direction, including what it means
for
CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees
for
such
a wonderful event!
*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you
appreciate
these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm
talking
to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the
strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates.
Keep
the
feedback coming.
Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible
and
often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within
the
Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have
been
affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in
touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any
support
we
can.
Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation
is
in
the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We
invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and
I
am
incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the
strategy.
Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We
have
more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved
already.
Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
Katherine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/
2017/Direction
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017 [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_% E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017- September/088654.html [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_
headquarters
-- Katherine Maher Executive Director
*We're moving on October 1, 2017! **Our new address:*
Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635 <(415)%20839-6885> +1 (415) 712 4873 <(415)%20712-4873> kmaher@wikimedia.org https://annual.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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