Asaf :) Thank you. Yes let us use this list well + with respect.
Moderation has been much appreciated.
Yaroslav: +1 to all of that!
James: There were /Talk subpages already in 2001 ;)
The pursuit of a generalized solution is important.
It also seems fair to have a *single page* on {meta, other?} for a WMF
noticeboard. Either a section of the m:Wikimedia Forum
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum>, or a separate page.
With translations provided where needed. Then anyone who runs across
discussions elsewhere (including on this list) that want a specifically WMF
response can point people there (and even summarize the Q in a sentence on
the noticeboard, if they wish to facilitate).
A small set of response templates may also be helpful, to invite dialogue
and partial answers.
"interesting, I also care about this topic",
"not sure there's an answer atm",
"not sure I'm in a position to answer, but here's part of it"
"this is a perennial question (link to archive)".
"this is a perennial flame war, is there a more constructive version that
might be answerable?"
Everyone benefits from a good central space for Q&A since it is needed for
so many ideas and projects that are promoted -- you could also send those
topical q&as (currently done on a number of separate wiki fora) back to an
umbrella section on such a noticeboard.
SJ
On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 5:04 PM Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi James,
thank you for the answer, appreciated.
Specifically about on-wiki communication, I possibly misunderstand the
situation, but out of 900+ projects you mention, some are dead (no regular
editors), and a vast majority is still in the regime when a few active
users can follow the recent edit list. (I am admin on the Russian
Wikivoyage and I have checked every single edit there since its transfer to
WMF in 2012 - we currently have about a hundred per day). All these
projects only have one noticeboards (typically accessible from the panel on
the left as Community Portal, or, of not, it can be easily located). Again,
at the Russian Wikivoyage, except for the very first cuple of months, when
we were coordinating transfer from the Wikitravel, I can not recollect any
WMF-related person who was interested in discussing anything. We get useful
announcements (typically related to software), but the only time we had
something else (the beginning of the current strategy cycle), we did not
get an impression anybody was interested in listening to us.
Now, bigger projects - there are may be 30 or so of them where one can not
follow the recent changes (the vast majority being Wikipedias, plus
Commons, Wikidata, and possibly English and German Wikivoyages and a couple
of more projects). The absolute majority of these also have one central
place (typically, again linked to Community portal), where things should be
discussed. I would think that a WMF representative trying to discuss smth
at a particular article talk page - it is not impossible, but as a
community member I would find this odd - at the very least, it should be a
pointer to that discussion.
Finally, there are some really big projects, where one can several village
pumps without an obvious choice. I am obviously more familiar with the
English Wikipedia, and indeed RfCs can proliferate anywhere (even though
there is a central place one cal locate all of them), and it might be a bit
tricky to find a correct one, but in all cases I have seen if the topic is
even remotely connected to WMF business (and sometimes even when it is not
connected to it at all) somebody would ping one, or two, or five WMF
employees - who could come and engage ina discussion, or come and say they
are not interested, or not come at all - which is fine, obviously
reasonable people do not expect A-level employees to react to every ping
anywhere in the Wikimedia universe - but at least I think these discussion
places are reasonably well localized and are easy to follow if anybody is
interested in. I am, again, not saying that WMF employees should follow all
discussion on all projects - or even that they should check several
selected pages every day - but some communication channel much exist. In my
experience, most of the reasonable questions just simply get ignored -
which obviously creates an impression that nobody is listening to the
community.
Cheers
Yaroslav
On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 10:31 PM James Hare <jhare(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 6:26 AM Yaroslav Blanter
<ymbalt(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
This is of course fine, and everybody is free to
participate or not to
participate on this mailing list, but, generally speaking,
does WMF have
any channels to listen to the volunteers working on the project?
I am a product manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. What this means, in
the
broadest of terms, is that I need to know what
people want/need in order
to
do my job “correctly,” for some definition of
“correct.” Of course, what
constitutes a “correct” decision on my part is something not everyone
will
agree on and that’s fine. But I need to gather
information as part of
this
work.
The problem is that there is no “one” place to go. To give you an idea of
the magnitude of the problem, there are over 900 wikis. Hundreds of
those
wikis comprise Wikipedia, a project with a
cumulative total of 50,000,000
articles. Each one of those articles either has a talk page or could
theoretically get one as soon as someone makes the first post. So, just
starting with Wikipedia articles, we have over 50,000,000 potential or
existing discussion venues, with very little coordination or
cross-organization between these venues, and this doesn’t even include
individual user talk pages or really, really specific talk pages like
“Wikipedia talk:Administrators’ noticeboard/Incidents” which is... very
precisely, a venue to discuss the administration of that specific
noticeboard (but not to, itself, host noticeboard-like posts).[0]
It is very convenient and easy to create a talk page because talk pages
are
a very central paradigm to the MediaWiki software
(going back to 2002?
2003?) and so they are built into the overall website experience in a way
that things that were tacked on way later, simply are not. But it is a
poor
interface that doesn’t scale across more than
several people or a few
concurrent conversations. But if Wikipedia’s fundamental sidebar chat
system fails to support more than occasional chatter, how exactly is any
of
this supposed to work?
There are two ways to go from here: (a) fix the original problem or (b)
develop workarounds. If you were around back in 2013 or so you may
recall a
project called “Flow” that is now called
“Structured Discussions.” I
can’t
speak officially to any of it because it was
before my time and many of
the
staff involved no longer work here. And I am
actually very hesitant to
bring it up at all, much less by name, because of the taboo that
developed
around it. A retrospective on this project is
out-of-scope for this post,
but if you need a short and convenient answer: it didn’t work, and it
generally made it impossible for the Wikimedia Foundation to even broach
the subject for the following several years. (There is starting to be
work
on this again, and this time, it seems to be
going at a more deliberate
pace, but I will defer to the staff working on this.)
Let’s talk about workarounds. We have workarounds that make the talk
pages
themselves more useful (talk page archiving comes
to mind[1]), and we
also
have workarounds that consist of outsourcing the
issue entirely, whether
it
be solutions we host ourselves (mailing lists,
Discourse) or proprietary
platforms that happen to be convenient for large segments of our
communities. There are different advantages and disadvantages to each
solution, which has only resulted in the proliferation of solutions.
Let’s back up. On the wikis themselves there are millions of discussion
venues; there are different software interventions that work or don’t
work,
depending on the situation; and we are now in a
position where we have so
many places to hold conversations it becomes an extraordinary use of time
(and several people’s full time jobs) to try to understand the
extraordinarily complex social interactions that take place in the
hundreds
of languages we speak.
Having introduced all that context, the short answer to your question is
there are some channels we are better at paying attention to than others,
but we don’t know what we don’t know. And this is frustrating for
everyone
involved. It makes projects take longer, it makes
it harder to onboard
staff, and I can imagine it’s *even more* frustrating for the many users
of
our many wikis who have to deal with the software
being broken and not
really knowing what to do. I think we manage, but I think we deserve
better than just “managing” it.
My best regards,
James Hare
[0] This brings up another topic that not all discussions that take place
on Wikipedia happen on discussion pages. Also, there are over 50,000,000
Wikidata items, and almost none of them have talk pages, but
theoretically
*all
of them* can.
[1] I remember when Werdna wrote the first talk page archiving bot in
2006.
I thought it was cool that someone did that, but
looking back on it, I
wonder why I was happy with that as a solution – it seems really
convoluted
in retrospect.
> positive tone needs to be made and a much
more conciliatory stance
taken.
Otherwise
we all might as well pack our bags.
On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 2:17 AM Asaf Bartov <asaf.bartov(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> > Speaking as a (very) longtime member of this mailing list, and one
who
> is
> > > carefully observing it for a few years now as a volunteer list
> > > co-administrator:
> > >
> > > On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 3:56 AM Joseph Seddon <
jseddon(a)wikimedia.org
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I, like many others, wish to see this list become a crucible of
good
> > > > suggestions, healthy and critical debate about ideas and as a
sound
> >
> mechanism for oversight and account . A huge amount of staff time
and
> > > movement resources is taken up by
the consumption of its content.
And
> > yet
> > > > it remains the greatest shame that much of the best most
worthwhile
> > > > constructive discussions have
moved to platforms like Facebook
> because
> > > this
> > > > list is viewed as hosting such an unhealthy atmosphere when
emails
are
> > > written with such overt passive aggression.
> > >
> > > I call it out because if we want people to participate on this
list,
> the
> > > unhealthy way in which this list gets treated by some of its most
> active
> > > participants needs to be dealt with. Otherwise valid points will
not
> > get
> > > > acknowledged or answered.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I am not sure the causality here runs in the direction you
describe.
> > It's
> > > true that this list had some aggressive, even vulgar participants
in
> the
> > > past, and that some senior staff members, as well as board members,
> have
> > > left the list in protest. Personally, I think that was a mistake
on
>
their
> > part: to improve the list atmosphere, you model good behavior
yourself,
> and
> > you call upon the rest of the list -- the "silent majority" -- to
call
> > out
> > > bad behavior and enforce some participation standards (as, indeed,
I
> and
> > my
> > > co-moderators have been doing since we took over).
> > >
> > > By senior people's departing this list, and no longer requiring
staff
to
> be
> > on this list, a strong signal was sent that this is not a venue
crucial
> > to
> > > listen to, and that, coupled with the decreasing frequency of WMF
> > responses
> > > to legitimate volunteer inquiries and suggestions, had a *powerful*
> > > chilling effect on the willingness of most volunteers to engage
here.
> > > Especially when, as you say, they
were able to get better
engagement
on
> > > Facebook and other channels, despite the serious shortcomings of
> > > accountability on those channels (immutable archiving,
searchability,
> >
access to anonymous volunteers, etc.)
> >
> > Yes, this list has also seen some pseudonymous critics whose
questions
> > may
> > > have been inconvenient or troublesome to address. Yet I think the
> > > accountable thing to do would have been to respond, however
briefly,
to
> > prevent the sealioning and
sanctimonious posts that filled the list
--
> > and,
> > > I am sure, greatly annoyed and demotivated many subscribers. Even
a
> > > response stating WMF chooses not
to respond to a certain question,
or
> not
> > > to dig up certain data, would have been better than the stony
silence
>
that
> > has become the all-too-common stance for WMF on this list.
> >
> > As you know, I also work for WMF (though I am writing this in my
> volunteer
> > capacity, and out of my care for the well-being of this list).
While I
> > have never shied away from responding
on this list, I have on
occasion
> been
> > scolded (internally) for attempting to answer volunteer queries to
the
> > best
> > > of my knowledge, for "outstepping my remit" or interfering in
someone
> > > else's remit. I have taken
this to heart, and accordingly no
longer
try
> to
> > respond to queries such as Fae's (which in this case I find a
perfectly
> > reasonable question, meriting an
answer). Several past attempts by
me
to
> > ping appropriate senior staff on questions on this list (or on talk
> pages)
> > have also met with rebuke, so I have ceased those as well.
> >
> > For these reasons I do not accept this wholesale blaming of this
list's
> > > subscribers on the difficulty having meaningful conversations here:
> > >
> > > But if we want to see staff members more actively
> > > > participating here then those long standing individuals need to
> really
> > > > thing about the tone in which they engage here, particularly
those
> who
> > do
> > > > so most often. If that does not change, this list will continue
to
> > > languish
> > > > and those few staff members who continue to engage here will
slowly
> >
> disappear. This now increasingly perennial topic keeps coming up
and
> my
> > > > fear is that it will on go away through the increasing
abandonment
this
> > > list faces.
> > >
> >
> > It is WMF that is not behaving collaboratively here. And it is
within
> > WMF's power to change it.
C-levels, the ED, and other managers at
WMF
> > could all decide to participate more
actively in this list; to
respond
to
> > questions or delegate the answering to their subordinates, who are
> awaiting
> > their cue; and indeed, they could themselves make more use of this
list
> as
> > a sounding board, a consultation room, and a reserve of experience
and
> > > diverse context. They can be the change they (and you, and me)
would
>
like
> > to see.
> >
> > Perhaps this e-mail could convince some of them. And if not my
words,
> then
> > perhaps those of some of the other list subscribers.
> >
> > A.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> >
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> >
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> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe:
,
> > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
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