Why we’ve changed
I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come out of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective only.
After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission: community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get great at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I believe in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the challenge in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require undistracted focus.
What changed?
When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a much faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.
As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a caustic community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own value of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community. Wikipedia is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.
Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is increasing exponentially http://qpmf.com/the-book/welcome-to-hyper-innovation/. User interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.
So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our mission and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our community work.
What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need to focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our sites).
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:
-
scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally connect open sources) -
expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)
There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/ to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting sources through structured data would go much further and allow our editors to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.
Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing of search https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/First_Portal_Test.pdf , but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that eventually we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community support none of this will be remotely possible.
Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity. Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the difference.
Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the Gender Gap is the “canary in the coal mine”. Women are the first to leave contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of rude and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop. In the latest research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.
What does this mean for the WMF?
In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and community. We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between the volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization, such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot of responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional relationships. We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila
Lila, a few notes.
First, many staff members feel that the accomplishments you claim under "we" are not attributable to you.
Complaints about lack of strategy and confusing management have come from all levels of the staff; the implication that people who failed to be promoted might be behind discontent seems not to hold water.
As to shutting down pet projects to improve focus, it's unclear what projects you refer to.
Fundamentally we agree that we must improve tech. But the tech side of the organization, based on my conversations with other employees including managers, does not seem to have benefited from your tenure -- ops laregely manages itself, while the other sections get occasionally surprised by a reorg. We've still not fully recovered from the 2015 reorg and Damon's appearance and disappearance.
If your contention is that tech supports you as a silent majority, I have strong doubts that this is the case.
-- brion
On Feb 21, 2016 4:22 PM, "Lila Tretikov" lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Why we’ve changed
I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come
out
of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective
only.
After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission: community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get
great
at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I
believe
in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the
challenge
in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require undistracted focus.
What changed?
When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a
much
faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.
As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a
caustic
community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own
value
of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community. Wikipedia is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.
Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is
increasing
exponentially http://qpmf.com/the-book/welcome-to-hyper-innovation/.
User
interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.
So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our
mission
and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our community work.
What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need
to
focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our sites).
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:
scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally connect open sources)
expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)
There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/
to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting sources through structured data would go much further and allow our
editors
to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.
Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing
of
search <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/First_Portal_Test.pdf
, but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that
eventually
we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community support none of this will be remotely possible.
Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity. Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the difference.
Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the Gender Gap is the “canary in the coal mine”. Women are the first to leave contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of
rude
and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop. In the latest research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.
What does this mean for the WMF?
In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and
community.
We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between
the
volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization, such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot
of
responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional
relationships.
We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges
of
the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change
at
this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
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On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 5:41 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
First, many staff members feel that the accomplishments you claim under "we" are not attributable to you.
I assumed that's why she used the word "we". I took it that she was taking some credit for pushing some of the initiatives, but not that she was taking credit for all of the results.
Complaints about lack of strategy and confusing management have come from all levels of the staff; the implication that people who failed to be promoted might be behind discontent seems not to hold water.
I didn't see any such implication when I read it. If it is/was implied, I would agree with your disagreement.
As to shutting down pet projects to improve focus, it's unclear what
projects you refer to.
Agreed.
Fundamentally we agree that we must improve tech. But the tech side of the organization, based on my conversations with other employees including managers, does not seem to have benefited from your tenure -- ops laregely manages itself, while the other sections get occasionally surprised by a reorg. We've still not fully recovered from the 2015 reorg and Damon's appearance and disappearance.
The process that led to the 2015 reorg was horrible. And the current structure is far from perfect. But I think the structure of the tech departments of the WMF after the re-org is, overall, much more effective than it was before the re-org. I say that having only experienced the old structure for a couple months, so my perspective is limited.
The tech parts of the org seem to have more of a sense of accountability now, with more of a focus on outcomes, and costs, than before. Again, it's far from perfect, but those seem like healthy improvements, as part of an organization maturing. I know a lot of techies will disagree (strongly!), as they prefer more of a "hacker" culture, and they feel we are becoming too "corporate". I would like to see us settle in at a happy medium, avoiding either extreme.
I think those are a couple ways in which the tech org *has* benefited from Lila's tenure. It's very possible that those benefits are overshadowed by other problems. But I think anyone who sees absolutely zero improvements either has clouded judgment, or isn't paying attention. I would prefer to judge each action and decision (by anyone) on its own merits, attempting to avoid the "halo effect/horns effect"[1].
If your contention is that tech supports you as a silent majority, I have strong doubts that this is the case.
I didn't see any indication that this was being asserted. If it is/was being asserted, I would agree with your doubts.
Recognizing that change *is* painful and difficult is valuable. I think people generally tend to underestimate that pain, and I think that has happened here. It's not clear how much of the pain we are experiencing is due to "change", and how much is due to other causes. I'm pretty sure change itself is a non-zero (and underestimated) component, but obviously it doesn't account for anywhere near 100% either.
For me, this essay as a whole is a welcome (and probably long overdue) expression of Lila's vision for where she wants to take the WMF, and why. Perhaps I'm naive, but I am assuming good faith here. Understanding Lila's tech focus is important, since that has been a point of contention with many people. Whether that vision is optimal for the org is debatable, of course.
Kevin
brion,
there is 10'000 km between you and me so i only read mails on this list. would you mind detailing what you expect from your CEO to trigger "she benefits me"?
best, rupert
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
Lila, a few notes.
First, many staff members feel that the accomplishments you claim under "we" are not attributable to you.
Complaints about lack of strategy and confusing management have come from all levels of the staff; the implication that people who failed to be promoted might be behind discontent seems not to hold water.
As to shutting down pet projects to improve focus, it's unclear what projects you refer to.
Fundamentally we agree that we must improve tech. But the tech side of the organization, based on my conversations with other employees including managers, does not seem to have benefited from your tenure -- ops laregely manages itself, while the other sections get occasionally surprised by a reorg. We've still not fully recovered from the 2015 reorg and Damon's appearance and disappearance.
If your contention is that tech supports you as a silent majority, I have strong doubts that this is the case.
-- brion
On Feb 21, 2016 4:22 PM, "Lila Tretikov" lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Why we’ve changed
I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come
out
of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective
only.
After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission: community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get
great
at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I
believe
in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the
challenge
in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require undistracted focus.
What changed?
When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a
much
faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.
As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a
caustic
community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own
value
of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community. Wikipedia is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.
Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is
increasing
exponentially http://qpmf.com/the-book/welcome-to-hyper-innovation/.
User
interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.
So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our
mission
and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our community work.
What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need
to
focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our sites).
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:
scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally connect open sources)
expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)
There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/
to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting sources through structured data would go much further and allow our
editors
to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.
Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing
of
search <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/First_Portal_Test.pdf
, but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that
eventually
we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community support none of this will be remotely possible.
Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity. Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the difference.
Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the Gender Gap is the “canary in the coal mine”. Women are the first to leave contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of
rude
and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop. In the latest research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.
What does this mean for the WMF?
In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and
community.
We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between
the
volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization, such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot
of
responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional
relationships.
We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges
of
the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change
at
this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
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 New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 11:14 PM, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
brion,
there is 10'000 km between you and me so i only read mails on this list. would you mind detailing what you expect from your CEO to trigger "she benefits me"?
I'd say these would help a lot:
* articulate a vision for her leadership term that is aligned with the stated mission of the Wikimedia Foundation * communicate with staff to understand what we do for the mission & what we believe we can do further, and to help us maximize our ability to achieve great things * foster a positive, creative work environment where staff can do that without burning out * communicate with our broader community of editors, volunteers, chapter organizers, readers, educators, developers, students, photographers, videographers, copyeditors, researchers, etc about what they need to maximize their contributions to the mission and how Wikimedia Foundation and its staff can help achieve that
I don't believe these have been achieved during Lila's tenure.
This thread is the closest to a leadership vision that I've seen, and it comes after months of private complaints, some intervention from the board, an employee engagement survey that indicated very low confidence in senior leadership's ability to convey a strategy, and finally weeks of open complaints from staff that communication is bad, morale is bad, and strategy is missing. We've seen some public strategy consultation, but that's been recent (after the November board meeting) and there remain concerns as to how open and consultative the process is.
As for the work environment, I believe I've made clear that I don't think it's super great, and we're losing valuable staff rapidly due to that and will likely continue to lose more.
I'm glad that some people outside the organization reportedly feel that communication between them and the Foundation has improved, but internally many staff do not feel they have been communicated with clearly. We've spent so long talking about things like the 'Knowledge Engine' project origins because we never got straightforward answers about what direction things were moving in...
-- brion
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:41 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
If your contention is that tech supports you as a silent majority, I have strong doubts that this is the case.
I think the silent majority of the WMF employees, tech or not, expressed their opinion quite clearly with the employee engagement survey.
[goes back to lurking]
Giuseppe
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 12:22 AM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:
- scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally
connect open sources)
- expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search
portal)
Lila,
Could you please explain the reasoning behind the focus on "open knowledge" and "open sources" in what you wrote above?
Just to avoid any misunderstanding -- I am of course well aware that Wikipedia itself is (at its best) "open knowledge". This, after all, is what volunteers are here to build – a body of open knowledge.
But I would contend that if we are talking about Wikipedia aspiring to be a *door *to something, then that aspiration is to be the door to *all knowledge*, isn't it? Not the door to *open knowledge*?
This is reflected in the fundamental Wikimedia vision, which is -- to this day -- for people to be able to freely share in "the sum of all knowledge" -- not "the sum of all *open* knowledge" (i.e. knowledge that is *already* open).
In line with this vision, Wikipedia for example cites all manner of sources today – from paywalled journals and books costing hundreds of dollars to CC-licensed and public-domain websites.
Indeed, in terms of creating open knowledge, content based on the most exclusive, most expensive sources is arguably the most valuable content Wikimedia projects contain: it liberates knowledge that would otherwise be inaccessible to those without ample enough means -- or indeed any means -- to pay.
Beyond that, there are many mainstream sources of knowledge that are "All rights reserved", i.e. not open, yet can still be consulted by anyone with an Internet connection, without payment.
We all consult such sources every day. They include publications like the Guardian newspaper (whose publisher's board Jimmy Wales joined recently); the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; CNN; and thousands of others. These are high-quality knowledge sources that are "All rights reserved" -- not open -- yet freely accessible.
So, if you speak of structurally connecting *open* sources, as a basis for smart editing tools, you seem to be saying that such copyrighted yet openly accessible sources, as well as all genuinely paywalled sources, should be excluded from these efforts.
If that's correct, and I am not misunderstanding what you mean to say here (please correct me if I do!), how do you square it with the Wikimedia vision?
Andreas
On 02/21/2016 11:03 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
So, if you speak of structurally connecting *open* sources, as a basis for smart editing tools, you seem to be saying that such copyrighted yet openly accessible sources, as well as all genuinely paywalled sources, should be excluded from these efforts.
If that's correct, and I am not misunderstanding what you mean to say here (please correct me if I do!), how do you square it with the Wikimedia vision?
She did not say anything about excluding references to proprietary sources like those you mentioned above. I think we're all in agreement they will still be referenced.
She described possible enhanced support for including/connecting to open data. That may not be possible/advisable to do for proprietary data, which might require proprietary licenses or software.
Of course, it depends on the actual details, but as an analogy think of how fair use images are allowed on some specific projects (e.g. English Wikipedia), but the central repositories (Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata) only include open content/data.
Matt Flaschen
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 10:21 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 02/21/2016 11:03 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
So, if you speak of structurally connecting *open* sources, as a basis for smart editing tools, you seem to be saying that such copyrighted yet openly accessible sources, as well as all genuinely paywalled sources, should be excluded from these efforts.
If that's correct, and I am not misunderstanding what you mean to say here (please correct me if I do!), how do you square it with the Wikimedia vision?
She did not say anything about excluding references to proprietary sources like those you mentioned above. I think we're all in agreement they will still be referenced.
Thanks for your reply, Matt. At the Knowledge Engine FAQ on Meta, your colleague Chris Koerner told me, when I asked what criteria a source will have to fulfil in order to be included in the Knowledge Engine's search results, that he personally believed "that not only should the sources be open-access, but they should be in agreement with our other values, neutral point of view, free license, etc."
So evidently we're not *all* in agreement.
She described possible enhanced support for including/connecting to open data. That may not be possible/advisable to do for proprietary data, which might require proprietary licenses or software.
Enhanced support for including/connecting open data could, I guess, benefit both editors adding that data to a Wikimedia project's page (Magnus tweeted an interesting application earlier today, see [[Falkensee]] in the English Wikipedia) and commercial re-users.
Of course, it depends on the actual details, but as an analogy think of how fair use images are allowed on some specific projects (e.g. English Wikipedia), but the central repositories (Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata) only include open content/data.
Thanks. That is a good analogy.
I see that there is now a record of a candid discussion between Lila and the Discovery team of what happened with the Knowledge Engine project here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/2016-02-16_Discussing_Knowledge_Eng...
That is good to see.
Best, Andreas
Lila,
Congratulations for having such a clear and wise understanding of the present and future of Wikimedia. Your views collide with those of many who from positions of power both at the WMF and the communities have had a chance to impose them on everybody else, squashing, blocking and deleting dissent. Your task will not be easy, but you are doing the right thing.
With respect to the Gender Gap, I believe there's room for improvement recognizing that there's more than men and women. The contributions of the LBGT genders are not adequately recognized.
I'm also very sorry to have to state that although you have the freedom to share you views using this list, and many that nurtured for you nothing else but hate and contempt, I have no such freedom. Following a dubious process, that has been described elsewhere and of which, conveniently, only part is saved in the list archives, this comment will only reach the members of this list if a group of censors (kindly called "moderators") approve it for publication.
This message is sent at the risk of having myself removed form this list, as it has already happened from others, for reasons that shame any human being worthy of that name. To have my support might also not do any good for you. I fear that it will bring more hate to bear on you. That is the fate of the human condition, to be its own worst enemy.
I wish you, the Foundation and Wikimedia all the best, and a bright and shining future,
Virgilio A. P. Machado
Lila's statement of her vision for WMF is compelling and attractive. If properly and faithfully executed, it seems like it would make just the right adjustments to the culture of the WMF and its interaction with and support of the Wikimedia community. I have long been concerned that a number of positions at the WMF amounted to sinecures, or at least returned little value to the projects in exchange for resources expended. It seems logical to me that such a radical change, even well enacted, would prompt discontent and departures from the organization.
That said, I'm not convinced that this paradigm shift has been handled well by the WMF executive team and the board. First and foremost, this statement from Lila is the best explanation given anywhere that I'm aware of describing the shift within the WMF. That is not good. Second, it appears that the work has not been done to get key members of the paid team and volunteers on board with this process. This is another very substantial failure.
For anyone who believes that Lila's vision statement is right for the future of the WMF, these unforced errors should cause serious anguish - needed changes might be lost or avoided because incompetent execution of prior initiatives left everyone deeply change-averse.
Hoi, Where have you been when the search was on for a new director for the WIkimedia Foundation? It was the vision that Lila refers to that made her the chosen candidate. The fact that people object, frustrate and sometimes sabotage is an unfortunate micro level consequence of what is happening.
Yes, we as a community are extremely self serving, we care for our own hobby horses and we do not consider the impact of this narrow mindedness. It makes what Lila stand for one enemy, others who have differing objectives are at best ignored because arguments do not really matter, are ignored or are refuted by quoting the same old old. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 05:38, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's statement of her vision for WMF is compelling and attractive. If properly and faithfully executed, it seems like it would make just the right adjustments to the culture of the WMF and its interaction with and support of the Wikimedia community. I have long been concerned that a number of positions at the WMF amounted to sinecures, or at least returned little value to the projects in exchange for resources expended. It seems logical to me that such a radical change, even well enacted, would prompt discontent and departures from the organization.
That said, I'm not convinced that this paradigm shift has been handled well by the WMF executive team and the board. First and foremost, this statement from Lila is the best explanation given anywhere that I'm aware of describing the shift within the WMF. That is not good. Second, it appears that the work has not been done to get key members of the paid team and volunteers on board with this process. This is another very substantial failure.
For anyone who believes that Lila's vision statement is right for the future of the WMF, these unforced errors should cause serious anguish - needed changes might be lost or avoided because incompetent execution of prior initiatives left everyone deeply change-averse. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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'm with Vibber. He has seen things clearly.
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 8:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Where have you been when the search was on for a new director for the WIkimedia Foundation? It was the vision that Lila refers to that made her the chosen candidate. The fact that people object, frustrate and sometimes sabotage is an unfortunate micro level consequence of what is happening.
Yes, we as a community are extremely self serving, we care for our own hobby horses and we do not consider the impact of this narrow mindedness. It makes what Lila stand for one enemy, others who have differing objectives are at best ignored because arguments do not really matter, are ignored or are refuted by quoting the same old old. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 05:38, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's statement of her vision for WMF is compelling and attractive. If properly and faithfully executed, it seems like it would make just the right adjustments to the culture of the WMF and its interaction with and support of the Wikimedia community. I have long been concerned that a number of positions at the WMF amounted to sinecures, or at least
returned
little value to the projects in exchange for resources expended. It seems logical to me that such a radical change, even well enacted, would prompt discontent and departures from the organization.
That said, I'm not convinced that this paradigm shift has been handled
well
by the WMF executive team and the board. First and foremost, this
statement
from Lila is the best explanation given anywhere that I'm aware of describing the shift within the WMF. That is not good. Second, it appears that the work has not been done to get key members of the paid team and volunteers on board with this process. This is another very substantial failure.
For anyone who believes that Lila's vision statement is right for the future of the WMF, these unforced errors should cause serious anguish - needed changes might be lost or avoided because incompetent execution of prior initiatives left everyone deeply change-averse. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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 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'm with Vibber too. I work in Engineering. This summary does not represent my views, or the views of anyone I know.
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 12:04 AM, Anna Stillwell astillwell@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm with Vibber. He has seen things clearly.
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 8:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Where have you been when the search was on for a new director for the WIkimedia Foundation? It was the vision that Lila refers to that made her the chosen candidate. The fact that people object, frustrate and sometimes sabotage is an unfortunate micro level consequence of what is happening.
Yes, we as a community are extremely self serving, we care for our own hobby horses and we do not consider the impact of this narrow mindedness. It makes what Lila stand for one enemy, others who have differing objectives are at best ignored because arguments do not really matter, are ignored or are refuted by quoting the same old old. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 05:38, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's statement of her vision for WMF is compelling and attractive. If properly and faithfully executed, it seems like it would make just the right adjustments to the culture of the WMF and its interaction with and support of the Wikimedia community. I have long been concerned that a number of positions at the WMF amounted to sinecures, or at least
returned
little value to the projects in exchange for resources expended. It seems logical to me that such a radical change, even well enacted, would prompt discontent and departures from the organization.
That said, I'm not convinced that this paradigm shift has been handled
well
by the WMF executive team and the board. First and foremost, this
statement
from Lila is the best explanation given anywhere that I'm aware of describing the shift within the WMF. That is not good. Second, it appears that the work has not been done to get key members of the paid team and volunteers on board with this process. This is another very substantial failure.
For anyone who believes that Lila's vision statement is right for the future of the WMF, these unforced errors should cause serious anguish - needed changes might be lost or avoided because incompetent execution of prior initiatives left everyone deeply change-averse. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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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-- Anna Stillwell Major Gifts Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.806.1536 *www.wikimediafoundation.org http://www.wikimediafoundation.org* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hoi,
<grin> It is not that I am not with Brion. </grin> The problem is multi faceted and I do not pretend that I know personell and how Lila is appreciated. I am talking about community and about perceptions and maybe a bit of the sociology of all this.
Being for or against is not the point, hearing arguments where they are made is at issue. If all we can do is state positions and let the dice role, a lot more people will be hurt than necessary. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 06:04, Anna Stillwell astillwell@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm with Vibber. He has seen things clearly.
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 8:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, Where have you been when the search was on for a new director for the WIkimedia Foundation? It was the vision that Lila refers to that made her the chosen candidate. The fact that people object, frustrate and
sometimes
sabotage is an unfortunate micro level consequence of what is happening.
Yes, we as a community are extremely self serving, we care for our own hobby horses and we do not consider the impact of this narrow mindedness. It makes what Lila stand for one enemy, others who have differing objectives are at best ignored because arguments do not really matter,
are
ignored or are refuted by quoting the same old old. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 05:38, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's statement of her vision for WMF is compelling and attractive. If properly and faithfully executed, it seems like it would make just the right adjustments to the culture of the WMF and its interaction with
and
support of the Wikimedia community. I have long been concerned that a number of positions at the WMF amounted to sinecures, or at least
returned
little value to the projects in exchange for resources expended. It
seems
logical to me that such a radical change, even well enacted, would
prompt
discontent and departures from the organization.
That said, I'm not convinced that this paradigm shift has been handled
well
by the WMF executive team and the board. First and foremost, this
statement
from Lila is the best explanation given anywhere that I'm aware of describing the shift within the WMF. That is not good. Second, it
appears
that the work has not been done to get key members of the paid team and volunteers on board with this process. This is another very substantial failure.
For anyone who believes that Lila's vision statement is right for the future of the WMF, these unforced errors should cause serious anguish - needed changes might be lost or avoided because incompetent execution
of
prior initiatives left everyone deeply change-averse. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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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-- Anna Stillwell Major Gifts Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.806.1536 *www.wikimediafoundation.org http://www.wikimediafoundation.org* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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
Please consider, Gerard: Maybe it is time you stopped explaining to us all what is and isn't the point.
A.
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 9:26 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi,
<grin> It is not that I am not with Brion. </grin> The problem is multi faceted and I do not pretend that I know personell and how Lila is appreciated. I am talking about community and about perceptions and maybe a bit of the sociology of all this.
Being for or against is not the point, hearing arguments where they are made is at issue. If all we can do is state positions and let the dice role, a lot more people will be hurt than necessary. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 06:04, Anna Stillwell astillwell@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm with Vibber. He has seen things clearly.
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 8:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, Where have you been when the search was on for a new director for the WIkimedia Foundation? It was the vision that Lila refers to that made
her
the chosen candidate. The fact that people object, frustrate and
sometimes
sabotage is an unfortunate micro level consequence of what is
happening.
Yes, we as a community are extremely self serving, we care for our own hobby horses and we do not consider the impact of this narrow
mindedness.
It makes what Lila stand for one enemy, others who have differing objectives are at best ignored because arguments do not really matter,
are
ignored or are refuted by quoting the same old old. Thanks, GerardM
On 22 February 2016 at 05:38, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's statement of her vision for WMF is compelling and attractive.
If
properly and faithfully executed, it seems like it would make just
the
right adjustments to the culture of the WMF and its interaction with
and
support of the Wikimedia community. I have long been concerned that a number of positions at the WMF amounted to sinecures, or at least
returned
little value to the projects in exchange for resources expended. It
seems
logical to me that such a radical change, even well enacted, would
prompt
discontent and departures from the organization.
That said, I'm not convinced that this paradigm shift has been
handled
well
by the WMF executive team and the board. First and foremost, this
statement
from Lila is the best explanation given anywhere that I'm aware of describing the shift within the WMF. That is not good. Second, it
appears
that the work has not been done to get key members of the paid team
and
volunteers on board with this process. This is another very
substantial
failure.
For anyone who believes that Lila's vision statement is right for the future of the WMF, these unforced errors should cause serious
anguish -
needed changes might be lost or avoided because incompetent execution
of
prior initiatives left everyone deeply change-averse. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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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-- Anna Stillwell Major Gifts Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415.806.1536 *www.wikimediafoundation.org http://www.wikimediafoundation.org* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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 Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 11:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Where have you been when the search was on for a new director for the WIkimedia Foundation? It was the vision that Lila refers to that made her the chosen candidate. The fact that people object, frustrate and sometimes sabotage is an unfortunate micro level consequence of what is happening.
Most of what I read at that time, and since, has revolved around some simplistic version of "make the WMF a technology / high tech organization." For that reason the OP here struck me as the best and most complete statement of this vision that I have read. If you are aware of a better one that I have missed (completely possible, even likely!), could you please provide a link?
Thanks, Nathan
Hi Lila,
Thanks for the message. I won't go into this and the other aspects of the current situation in detail -- I think this is an important conversation primarily with current staff and active community members --, but I'll respond to a couple points that I think are important, and for which I can provide some historical perspective.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline.
This is a pretty powerful statement! As many folks know, "stemming the editor decline" was long a top organizational priority, due to research that showed an increasing tendency for new editors to encounter barriers, such as the Editor Trends Study, summarized here:
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
Many will remember the graph illustrating this study, which specifically underscores that new editors' 1-year retention decreasing dramatically during Wikipedia's most rapid growth, and remained low since then.
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enwp_retention_vs_active_editors.pn...
As a consequence, an important number to pay attention to when characterizing the editor decline is the number of new editors who successfully join the project. Has that number increased or stabilized?
It has not, as far as I can tell: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm
Note in interpreting all data that January is a seasonal recovery month in editor statistics.
One number to look at here is "New editors", which is the number of editors who have crossed the threshold of 10 edits in a given month. For all Wikipedias combined, this number has been in the 12000-13000s for the last 6 months. Near as I can tell, the last time it has hovered around or below those levels for this long was a decade ago, in December 2005. The more modern metric of "new editor activation" (which does not seem to have the same level of data-completeness) appears to show similar troubling signs:
https://vital-signs.wmflabs.org/#projects=all,ruwiki,itwiki,dewiki,frwiki,en...
Another key metric we paid attention to is the "Active Editors" number, which has stagnated for a long time; it appears to continue to do so with no recovery. The most complete visualization I was able to find is still the one we created years ago, here:
https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors
Finally, there's the measure of "very active editors". These are folks who make 100 edits/month, and one could also call this the "core community". It's a measure less affected by new user barriers, and more by the effectiveness of existing editing/curation tools. This is one metric which does indeed show a positive trend, as was noted here:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/09/25/wikipedia-editor-numbers/
This graph focuses on English Wikipedia; this table contains the numbers for all languages combined, in the "Very active editors" column:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm
The numbers for "very active editors" appear to have stabilized at a slightly higher level than previously. I can't find any firm conclusion on what has caused this in Wikimedia's public communications, but the HHVM rollout, long-planned and implemented in December 2014 under Ori Livneh's leadership seems like a plausible hypothesis:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing-wikipedia-twice-as...
It seems reasonable to assume that very active editors would most benefit from performance improvements.
One very positive trend is the Content Translation tool, and its impact on new article creation, especially in combination with targeted calls to action, as detailed here:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/growing-www16.pdf
But overall, it seems premature of speaking of "stemming the decline", unless I'm missing something (entirely possible). I don't mean to be negative about it -- I do think it's a super-important problem, and hence important to be clear and precise about where we are in addressing it.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects
Like Brion, I'm also curious what this ("pet projects") refers to. With regard to tech, I'm not aware of any major projects that were shut down. I read that major feature development on Flow was suspended, but active maintenance work to support an active trial (launched after said announcement) on user talk pages is ongoing, as far as I can tell:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/Flow+status:merged,n,z
To be clear, the course of action taken here -- to evaluate a controversial tool for a specific use case, and see how it fares -- seems completely reasonable to me. I'm just curious if that's what you're referring to, though, or if there are other examples, perhaps outside engineering, you have in mind?
Erik
On 22/02/16 18:45, Erik Moeller wrote:
The numbers for "very active editors" appear to have stabilized at a slightly higher level than previously. I can't find any firm conclusion on what has caused this in Wikimedia's public communications, but the HHVM rollout, long-planned and implemented in December 2014 under Ori Livneh's leadership seems like a plausible hypothesis:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing-wikipedia-twice-as...
I don't think it is plausible, given the data collected at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:HHVM_newcomer_engagement_experiment
25,000 new users were put into an HHVM bucket, so the whole site was twice as fast for them. Then they were tracked for a week. There was no improvement in engagement or productivity.
I'm sure the performance improvements we did in 2004-2005 had a big impact, especially initial batch of 9 Tampa servers in February 2004. There must be a scale effect: going from 20s to 10s is much more important than going from 2s to 1s.
-- Tim Starling
2016-02-22 1:26 GMT-08:00 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
I don't think it is plausible, given the data collected at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:HHVM_newcomer_engagement_experiment
25,000 new users were put into an HHVM bucket, so the whole site was twice as fast for them. Then they were tracked for a week. There was no improvement in engagement or productivity.
I'm sure the performance improvements we did in 2004-2005 had a big impact, especially initial batch of 9 Tampa servers in February 2004. There must be a scale effect: going from 20s to 10s is much more important than going from 2s to 1s.
I'm familiar with that research. I suggested at the time (see talk) to specifically also evaluate impact on existing users. My reasoning was that a new editor faces many barriers and high cognitive load, and as you say, performance improvements at the level realized here are probably not going to be the thing that helps you in making those first edits. But if you're a power user who, say, performs a ton of category edits with low cognitive load, reducing the amount of time spent waiting ought to increase productivity.
Erik
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 22/02/16 18:45, Erik Moeller wrote:
The numbers for "very active editors" appear to have stabilized at a slightly higher level than previously. I can't find any firm conclusion on what has caused this in Wikimedia's public communications, but the HHVM rollout, long-planned and implemented in December 2014 under Ori Livneh's leadership seems like a plausible hypothesis:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing-wikipedia-twice-as...
I don't think it is plausible, given the data collected at:
< https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:HHVM_newcomer_engagement_experiment
25,000 new users were put into an HHVM bucket, so the whole site was twice as fast for them. Then they were tracked for a week. There was no improvement in engagement or productivity.
Erik is supposing the impact was felt by highly-active editors, a hypothesis which was not tested by this experiment. Few users become active editors; few active editors become very active; and few very active editors become very active in their first week as registered users, which is all that the experiment considered -- the activity of new users during their first week.
I think the impact of HHVM rollout hasn't tested on new user survival rate [1] they might become very active later.
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Surviving_new_editor
Best On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:14 PM Ori Livneh ori@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:26 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 22/02/16 18:45, Erik Moeller wrote:
The numbers for "very active editors" appear to have stabilized at a slightly higher level than previously. I can't find any firm conclusion on what has caused this in Wikimedia's public communications, but the HHVM rollout, long-planned and implemented in December 2014 under Ori Livneh's leadership seems like a plausible hypothesis:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/12/29/how-we-made-editing-wikipedia-twice-as...
I don't think it is plausible, given the data collected at:
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:HHVM_newcomer_engagement_experiment
25,000 new users were put into an HHVM bucket, so the whole site was twice as fast for them. Then they were tracked for a week. There was no improvement in engagement or productivity.
Erik is supposing the impact was felt by highly-active editors, a hypothesis which was not tested by this experiment. Few users become active editors; few active editors become very active; and few very active editors become very active in their first week as registered users, which is all that the experiment considered -- the activity of new users during their first week. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On 22/02/16 11:22, Lila Tretikov wrote:
We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
Not really. The crisis has always been about means, not ends. I keep hearing people say "this is a good idea, but why did it have to be done this way?"
The gripe list which the staff presented to you in November essentially said the same thing. It complained about process and the absence of strategy, not the choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get great at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I believe in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter.
You are referring to the "narrowing focus" strategy introduced by Sue Gardner in 2012. Indeed, you were hired to continue with Sue's tech-focused strategy, which was already fully established by the time you took office. Until now, I have not heard anyone suggest that it is still a significant source of conflict within the Foundation.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline.
Well, the minimum number of very active editors on en.wikipedia.org was in September 2013, but yes, more or less. As the blog post said, nobody is quite sure why this has happened. Nobody is saying that Wikipedia is a lovely and friendly place to work.
There is no WMF initiative that fully explains the reversal, although the Teahouse (which was not officially supported by WMF engineering) may have played a role.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop.
I am very happy to see this. For years I argued for more effective moderation of Wikipedia as key to editor retention, and I was very frustrated that nobody ever had the guts to do anything about it. Not Sue, not the Board, not the ArbCom.
I agree with your broad strategic goals (educate, innovate, retain volunteers, secure funding), I just doubt your ability to implement them. Because an ED of a non-profit organisation needs to be able to lead, not just dictate. And an effective manager should make decisions rationally and collaboratively.
-- Tim Starling
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:22 AM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
I could take issue with several things you've said on this list, Lila, but I've tried to remain neutral for the sake of fairly moderating the conversation.
I really don't think I can let this one go, though. Would you please name one "pet project"—actually, I don't think it's so much to ask to name them all—that's had to be shut down?
And, for that matter, why? I honestly cannot think of any reason that this could not be truthfully and immediately answered.
Austin
Is it time for a #IamwithVibber tag now? :)
It might be time to consider just promoting Brion or something? (as deputy or head of engineering). There is no one the community would trust more on the engineering needs of WMF. And from the looks of it, he does have the support of staff and isn't holding back any relevant information or opinion. He can bring stability to a very shake ship right now.
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
I really don't think I can let this one go, though. Would you please name one "pet project"—actually, I don't think it's so much to ask to name them all—that's had to be shut down?
I think that might be a reference to Flow or AFT, even the MoodBar (3 off the top of my head). Apart from that staff roles and entire departments like Globaldev, and I even remember a strategy department briefly, that was reshuffled. The timeline isn't as clear when these things were refactored but a lot of things were abandoned over the years.
Lila, I don't know what impression you had before you joined WMF. This wasn't a struggling project, or not at the desperate level that is forming your narrative now. We had larger and more successful fundraisers every year, the staff doubled and tripled, the pageviews rose, as did unique visitors, and we enjoyed an improving reputation - there were no immediate burning fires that needed addressing. This entire paradigm shift reeks of a desperation that isn't supported by facts.
Your project and vision is far too radical for the need of the hour. Even the changes you speak of, they can only be achieved gradually. You can't turn this ship in such a dramatic fashion for such an ambitious project. You should have prototyped exactly what it is you want - you had more than enough funds and resources without this tiny Knight foundation grant and this whole drama.
Regards Theo
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Is it time for a #IamwithVibber tag now? :)
awwww
It might be time to consider just promoting Brion or something? (as deputy or head of engineering). There is no one the community would trust more on the engineering needs of WMF. And from the looks of it, he does have the support of staff and isn't holding back any relevant information or opinion. He can bring stability to a very shake ship right now.
Thanks, but I'll openly say that managing a department full of people is a lot of very hard work and requires skillsets I do not have; that's why I happily transitioned out of the CTO role in 2009 (and burnout related to that was one of the reasons I left WMF for a while around that time, returning in 2011).
-- brion
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
I really don't think I can let this one go, though. Would you please name one "pet project"—actually, I don't think it's so much to ask to name them all—that's had to be shut down?
I think that might be a reference to Flow or AFT, even the MoodBar (3 off the top of my head). Apart from that staff roles and entire departments like Globaldev, and I even remember a strategy department briefly, that was reshuffled. The timeline isn't as clear when these things were refactored but a lot of things were abandoned over the years.
Lila, I don't know what impression you had before you joined WMF. This wasn't a struggling project, or not at the desperate level that is forming your narrative now. We had larger and more successful fundraisers every year, the staff doubled and tripled, the pageviews rose, as did unique visitors, and we enjoyed an improving reputation - there were no immediate burning fires that needed addressing. This entire paradigm shift reeks of a desperation that isn't supported by facts.
Your project and vision is far too radical for the need of the hour. Even the changes you speak of, they can only be achieved gradually. You can't turn this ship in such a dramatic fashion for such an ambitious project. You should have prototyped exactly what it is you want - you had more than enough funds and resources without this tiny Knight foundation grant and this whole drama.
Regards Theo _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hi,
On 02/21/2016 04:22 PM, Lila Tretikov wrote:
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
No, it's not. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Values#Our_community_is_our_biggest_asset
-- Legoktm
Hi, This explanation is really appreciated and it helps to understand a point of view. The problem is that it's "a" point of view.
We can define it as a "change management". In this explanation are missed some points.
The first point is the mapping of the stakeholders and to define what the stakeholders think of this change and how they can influence or block this change.
This point is really important and it's considered as "initiation phase" of a change. Without this mapping a project can easily fail.
The second missed point is the communication.
A change should demonstrate to introduce several benefits and to be efficient. Basically after the mapping, the communication helps to keep the support of those stakeholders.
Personally I have seen big projects to fail cause a bad communication and the creation of a block and of a resistance to the change in important stakeholders. This is a risk that should be considered because this risk can block any change even if good and rational.
A change cannot be "imposed" because WMF is an open system interacting with the environment.
I remember that Sue Gardner, when introduced the strategic plan, spent a long session during the chapters meeting in Berlin in order to communicate and to collect feedbacks from the chapters considered an important stakeholder.
Probably her strategic plan was weaker, but the introduction generated lesser discussion and conflicts.
Kind regards
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:22 AM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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 have been letting Lila's mail stew in my brain for a little while, and I am going to respond now having had time to think it over.
I apologize in advance for the length. There are three main sections to my analysis and argument, and then some concluding points and implications.
First - the good. I believe most here should agree that the Wikipedia movement, communities, projects all have had and have today major challenges. An immense good is done by what we have all communally built, but there are things wrong we haven't fixed.
Lila's ED statement lays out a subset of the total problems, effectively briefly explains her reasoning on why they are problematic, and forms a vision statement for engaging with fixing them. It's a vision statement and a call to action, and contains the kind of leadership we need.
One can quibble about the set of problems to focus on or priorities, long and short term goals. I am sure people will. But the Foundation needs a leadership vision like this. It can evolve over time, but we should think in these terms.
Second - I want to focus now on this section to explain what I see as having gone wrong.
Quoting Lila:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.
For context:
I am an IT industry technical consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area with well over 20 years experience and 18 of those consulting. I have literally seen the insides of 100 organizations big and small.
Many of those organizations were broken or failing, and needed serious reform to succeed. I've seen and participated in a number of restructurings, including helping plan some. These things are sometimes necessary.
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few eggs." For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
These types of reforms are at times necessary. I do not know from the outside whether they were necessary for successful at the WMF, but for now I agree this may well have been necessary and proper. Some of those affected may disagree; I don't seek to diminish that discussion but for now am putting it aside.
We come now to what I think went wrong with this change that I agree may have needed to happen.
Broken eggs type major organizational changes are launched with varying degrees of planning and vision and coordination beforehand. I have seen such launched, in process, or the aftereffects across the range of initial planning and communications from none at all at one extreme to clearly envisioned, planned, communicated, and executed at the other.
Lila here and now communicated a clear vision for what was intended and why, and the intention to "break eggs" to do it. I had not previously seen anything like this, or even a good suggestion of this. Nobody I know of in the community seems to have seen or guessed at it. From the comments we are seeing, a lot of current and ex Foundation staff do not seem to have seen it. Nobody has yet admitted they had seen it, after Lila's post.
I don't know how well it was understood before/during by more senior staff / leadership staff, the Board, or laid out this clearly and coherently in Lila's head.
There are undoubtedly a range of answers to those questions depending on who you ask and what time period we ask about.
I will bound the extremes of credible answers with "clearly articulated and communicated at high levels, including commitment to change by breaking eggs", or at the other extreme "this was not clearly envisioned or articulated or communicated at high levels beforehand."
I want to emphasize this: Either the senior leadership launched a major broken eggs extent reform without communicating what was happening to major community and staff stakeholders on purpose, or by accident, or somewhere in between with mixed consequences of both.
I have seen these happen in industry and noncommercial organizations. The lack of communications to stakeholders has not necessarily made reforms fail, though it has rarely helped. If you care about success of the changes, what happened is not best practice, but not a sign in and of itself of failure.
In terms of judging success, while there are cracks all over, I don't see that the reform has failed or is likely to. For the sake of the argument I am assuming it will succeed, and moving on.
Third - and finally - I want to explain why I think this is now evidently a disaster for the overall Wikimedia movement as a whole.
Lila said this in part:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful.
I agree with this. It's a good statement. If's arguable we should hold all staff and the Board to it.
That said, I have a hard time reconciling that statement with having launched a major broken eggs extent reform without communicating what was happening to major community and staff stakeholders either on purpose or by accident. There was, on purpose or by accident (or varying degrees of both) a fundamental gap in professionalism and respect in communicating the launch of the reform effort.
Beyond that, the consequences of doing so are magnified by the nature of the Wikimedia movement. I have been trying to think of an example organization which would be more negatively affected by having done that. I haven't found one yet. The nature of the wide diverse community, tensions between the Community and Foundation, Community and Ops, and Engineering; ED and Staff; ED and Community; even the Community and Board. All of these relationships are necessary for the movement to succeed. All are fundamentally and deeply challenged by the nature of this gaffe.
It would help untangle this situation to get the historical perspectives and intentions of everyone here. Board members (current and past), Lila, other senior leaders, I urge you to publicly lay out what you were thinking and trying to do early on and more recently.
However, as far as I can see it regardless of which way those explanations go, the final implications are clear to me.
I don't know that the movement as a whole can trust a Board or ED who would have either accidentally or on purpose launched this degree of changes in secret and without communicating. Other organizations whose leadership did this have better odds. THIS organization, as a whole, is now broken rather severely by how you executed the probably necessary and hopefully successful reform.
To the Board:
If the Board at the time knew and concurred - I think every board member involved needs to consider how this can possibly be reconciled with trust within the movement, and ultimately whether further service on the board is in the best interests of the movement or Foundation.
If the Board did not understand the nature of the change, I think every board member needs to consider whether their ability to manage and provide guidance and oversight of major organizational changes is adequate for the needs of the organization now and in the future. And ultimately whether further service on the board is in the best interests of the movement or Foundation.
To Lila:
I assume good faith. I agree with your vision.
I do not understand why this was not just made public prior to initiation of reforms, or once they started.
I am concerned and skeptical that you can now lead the Foundation, in this wider Wikimedia movement, regardless of what that answer is.
This pains me especially because of the quality and on-target focus of the vision you expressed. I am very sorry to come to this conclusion. But I don't know how you can lead here if you launched into breaking a bunch of THESE eggs in secret as opposed to openly, whether it was on purpose and preplanned or evolved into that without planning and communicating it through.
It might well work at dot-com companies, but not I think here.
I believe the ED position requires someone who would have known that.
I am glad you posted that vision statement. It both provides a vision and template the movement and Foundation should move towards. I hope it is a successful legacy.
George William Herbert Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 21, 2016, at 4:22 PM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Why we’ve changed
I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come out of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective only.
After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission: community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get great at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I believe in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the challenge in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require undistracted focus.
What changed?
When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a much faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.
As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a caustic community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own value of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community. Wikipedia is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.
Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is increasing exponentially http://qpmf.com/the-book/welcome-to-hyper-innovation/. User interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.
So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our mission and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our community work.
What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need to focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our sites).
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:
scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally connect open sources)
expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)
There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/ to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting sources through structured data would go much further and allow our editors to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.
Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing of search https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/First_Portal_Test.pdf , but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that eventually we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community support none of this will be remotely possible.
Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity. Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the difference.
Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the Gender Gap is the “canary in the coal mine”. Women are the first to leave contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of rude and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop. In the latest research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.
What does this mean for the WMF?
In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and community. We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between the volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization, such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot of responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional relationships. We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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
Le 22/02/16 11:03, George Herbert a écrit :
I have been letting Lila's mail stew in my brain for a little while, and I am going to respond now having had time to think it over.
I apologize in advance for the length. There are three main sections to my analysis and argument, and then some concluding points and implications.
First - the good. I believe most here should agree that the Wikipedia movement, communities, projects all have had and have today major challenges. An immense good is done by what we have all communally built, but there are things wrong we haven't fixed.
Lila's ED statement lays out a subset of the total problems, effectively briefly explains her reasoning on why they are problematic, and forms a vision statement for engaging with fixing them. It's a vision statement and a call to action, and contains the kind of leadership we need.
One can quibble about the set of problems to focus on or priorities, long and short term goals. I am sure people will. But the Foundation needs a leadership vision like this. It can evolve over time, but we should think in these terms.
Second - I want to focus now on this section to explain what I see as having gone wrong.
Quoting Lila:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.
For context:
I am an IT industry technical consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area with well over 20 years experience and 18 of those consulting. I have literally seen the insides of 100 organizations big and small.
Many of those organizations were broken or failing, and needed serious reform to succeed. I've seen and participated in a number of restructurings, including helping plan some. These things are sometimes necessary.
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few eggs." For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
These types of reforms are at times necessary. I do not know from the outside whether they were necessary for successful at the WMF, but for now I agree this may well have been necessary and proper. Some of those affected may disagree; I don't seek to diminish that discussion but for now am putting it aside.
We come now to what I think went wrong with this change that I agree may have needed to happen.
Broken eggs type major organizational changes are launched with varying degrees of planning and vision and coordination beforehand. I have seen such launched, in process, or the aftereffects across the range of initial planning and communications from none at all at one extreme to clearly envisioned, planned, communicated, and executed at the other.
Lila here and now communicated a clear vision for what was intended and why, and the intention to "break eggs" to do it. I had not previously seen anything like this, or even a good suggestion of this. Nobody I know of in the community seems to have seen or guessed at it. From the comments we are seeing, a lot of current and ex Foundation staff do not seem to have seen it. Nobody has yet admitted they had seen it, after Lila's post.
I don't know how well it was understood before/during by more senior staff / leadership staff, the Board, or laid out this clearly and coherently in Lila's head.
There are undoubtedly a range of answers to those questions depending on who you ask and what time period we ask about.
I will bound the extremes of credible answers with "clearly articulated and communicated at high levels, including commitment to change by breaking eggs", or at the other extreme "this was not clearly envisioned or articulated or communicated at high levels beforehand."
I want to emphasize this: Either the senior leadership launched a major broken eggs extent reform without communicating what was happening to major community and staff stakeholders on purpose, or by accident, or somewhere in between with mixed consequences of both.
I have seen these happen in industry and noncommercial organizations. The lack of communications to stakeholders has not necessarily made reforms fail, though it has rarely helped. If you care about success of the changes, what happened is not best practice, but not a sign in and of itself of failure.
In terms of judging success, while there are cracks all over, I don't see that the reform has failed or is likely to. For the sake of the argument I am assuming it will succeed, and moving on.
Third - and finally - I want to explain why I think this is now evidently a disaster for the overall Wikimedia movement as a whole.
Lila said this in part:
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful.
I agree with this. It's a good statement. If's arguable we should hold all staff and the Board to it.
That said, I have a hard time reconciling that statement with having launched a major broken eggs extent reform without communicating what was happening to major community and staff stakeholders either on purpose or by accident. There was, on purpose or by accident (or varying degrees of both) a fundamental gap in professionalism and respect in communicating the launch of the reform effort.
Beyond that, the consequences of doing so are magnified by the nature of the Wikimedia movement. I have been trying to think of an example organization which would be more negatively affected by having done that. I haven't found one yet. The nature of the wide diverse community, tensions between the Community and Foundation, Community and Ops, and Engineering; ED and Staff; ED and Community; even the Community and Board. All of these relationships are necessary for the movement to succeed. All are fundamentally and deeply challenged by the nature of this gaffe.
It would help untangle this situation to get the historical perspectives and intentions of everyone here. Board members (current and past), Lila, other senior leaders, I urge you to publicly lay out what you were thinking and trying to do early on and more recently.
However, as far as I can see it regardless of which way those explanations go, the final implications are clear to me.
I don't know that the movement as a whole can trust a Board or ED who would have either accidentally or on purpose launched this degree of changes in secret and without communicating. Other organizations whose leadership did this have better odds. THIS organization, as a whole, is now broken rather severely by how you executed the probably necessary and hopefully successful reform.
To the Board:
If the Board at the time knew and concurred - I think every board member involved needs to consider how this can possibly be reconciled with trust within the movement, and ultimately whether further service on the board is in the best interests of the movement or Foundation.
If the Board did not understand the nature of the change, I think every board member needs to consider whether their ability to manage and provide guidance and oversight of major organizational changes is adequate for the needs of the organization now and in the future. And ultimately whether further service on the board is in the best interests of the movement or Foundation.
To Lila:
I assume good faith. I agree with your vision.
I do not understand why this was not just made public prior to initiation of reforms, or once they started.
I am concerned and skeptical that you can now lead the Foundation, in this wider Wikimedia movement, regardless of what that answer is.
This pains me especially because of the quality and on-target focus of the vision you expressed. I am very sorry to come to this conclusion. But I don't know how you can lead here if you launched into breaking a bunch of THESE eggs in secret as opposed to openly, whether it was on purpose and preplanned or evolved into that without planning and communicating it through.
It might well work at dot-com companies, but not I think here.
I believe the ED position requires someone who would have known that.
I am glad you posted that vision statement. It both provides a vision and template the movement and Foundation should move towards. I hope it is a successful legacy.
To reflect on the question "did the board know"... I think it did.
I would like to point you to : https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ALilaTretikov_%28WMF...
Quote : All of this is going to require change, change that might not be acceptable to some of you. I hope that all of you will be a part of this next step in our evolution. But I understand that if you decide to take a wiki-break, that might be the way things have to be. Even so, you have to let the Foundation do its work and allow us all to take that next step when needed. I can only hope that your break is temporary, and that you will return when the time is right.
Florence
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 5:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
Since you bring it up, and ask for the perspective of past trustees -- as one of the people who helped hired Lila, I did so because I found much of how she thought about technology, contribution and open knowledge compelling -- some of which is stated in her mail above -- and I hoped that she'd have the right combination of openness and boldness to help lead us. I also thought she had the right foundation of skills and values to do the work in our weird, complex environment.
The Board's initial task for her, as it might have been for any new ED, was to learn the organization, continue with the usual running of the organization, and to work with us and Wikimedia as a whole to develop a strategy for the future. We expected and supported her focusing on technology, given what a big piece of the organization this is and her own background; and we supported explorations into the organization's culture and how it could improve.
I've heard a few conspiracy theories about how the board must have intended to clean house with Lila's hire. From my perspective, that was not the case. We hoped of course that Lila would help the organization improve -- but I am thinking of improvements like speeding up development and reducing drama around software rollouts, goals that I don't think would either come as a surprise to anyone or are particularly controversial.
That does not mean I was surprised that some staff left, especially in the first few months after she was hired. People do leave in a leadership transition, for many reasons. And I also was not surprised by the possibility that Lila might create a different style of working environment at the Foundation, which would lead others to leave later. I am surprised and saddened however by this current crisis (and the last few months leading up to it). According to many people, things seem to have gone quite badly in terms of communication, giving guidance and developing organizational consensus around strategy. Those problems are general problems of execution and management, and that is deeply unfortunate.
best, Phoebe
Thank you, Phoebe.
George William Herbert Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 22, 2016, at 10:06 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 5:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
Since you bring it up, and ask for the perspective of past trustees -- as one of the people who helped hired Lila, I did so because I found much of how she thought about technology, contribution and open knowledge compelling -- some of which is stated in her mail above -- and I hoped that she'd have the right combination of openness and boldness to help lead us. I also thought she had the right foundation of skills and values to do the work in our weird, complex environment.
The Board's initial task for her, as it might have been for any new ED, was to learn the organization, continue with the usual running of the organization, and to work with us and Wikimedia as a whole to develop a strategy for the future. We expected and supported her focusing on technology, given what a big piece of the organization this is and her own background; and we supported explorations into the organization's culture and how it could improve.
I've heard a few conspiracy theories about how the board must have intended to clean house with Lila's hire. From my perspective, that was not the case. We hoped of course that Lila would help the organization improve -- but I am thinking of improvements like speeding up development and reducing drama around software rollouts, goals that I don't think would either come as a surprise to anyone or are particularly controversial.
That does not mean I was surprised that some staff left, especially in the first few months after she was hired. People do leave in a leadership transition, for many reasons. And I also was not surprised by the possibility that Lila might create a different style of working environment at the Foundation, which would lead others to leave later. I am surprised and saddened however by this current crisis (and the last few months leading up to it). According to many people, things seem to have gone quite badly in terms of communication, giving guidance and developing organizational consensus around strategy. Those problems are general problems of execution and management, and that is deeply unfortunate.
best, Phoebe
--
- I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
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On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few eggs." For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
I left the board during the search process, but remained on the search committee. So while I cannot know what the board was thinking after her tenure began, I can say that the search committee was not looking for a "turnaround CEO"--at least to my understanding we were looking for someone who would be able to execute better on some of the areas (particularly engineering) where we wanted to make more improvements but hadn't.
(Which would naturally involve some change--but sweeping reforms were not envisioned; part of why Sue stepped down when she did was that she felt the organization was basically stable and could be smoothly handed off. It is certainly possible for someone to come in and decide that was a wrong assessment, but it wasn't what the committee had been looking for.)
-Kat
Thank you as well, Kat.
George William Herbert Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 22, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org wrote:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few eggs." For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
I left the board during the search process, but remained on the search committee. So while I cannot know what the board was thinking after her tenure began, I can say that the search committee was not looking for a "turnaround CEO"--at least to my understanding we were looking for someone who would be able to execute better on some of the areas (particularly engineering) where we wanted to make more improvements but hadn't.
(Which would naturally involve some change--but sweeping reforms were not envisioned; part of why Sue stepped down when she did was that she felt the organization was basically stable and could be smoothly handed off. It is certainly possible for someone to come in and decide that was a wrong assessment, but it wasn't what the committee had been looking for.)
-Kat
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Hi Kat This is good.
But why not to look for a CTO?
Designing a CTO's profile and putting it in a CEO's profile is a big challenge. This can happen but means also to have a big change of the vision of WMF.
Kind regards Il 22/Feb/2016 19:12, "Kat Walsh" kat@mindspillage.org ha scritto:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few
eggs." For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having
explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees'
intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
I left the board during the search process, but remained on the search committee. So while I cannot know what the board was thinking after her tenure began, I can say that the search committee was not looking for a "turnaround CEO"--at least to my understanding we were looking for someone who would be able to execute better on some of the areas (particularly engineering) where we wanted to make more improvements but hadn't.
(Which would naturally involve some change--but sweeping reforms were not envisioned; part of why Sue stepped down when she did was that she felt the organization was basically stable and could be smoothly handed off. It is certainly possible for someone to come in and decide that was a wrong assessment, but it wasn't what the committee had been looking for.)
-Kat
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As an employee of the WMF and a long-time Wikimedian, I strongly agree with Brion.
Lila, I find your message completely deaf to the real concerns that staff have been raising for many months. It seems to imply that the turmoil and heartache we're suffering are not products of poor leadership, but instead minor side effects of a carefully designed plan. Let me be clear: I am no part of any silent majority which supports such a plan.
*Neil P. Quinn* +1 (202) 656 3457
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 12:16 PM, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Kat This is good.
But why not to look for a CTO?
Designing a CTO's profile and putting it in a CEO's profile is a big challenge. This can happen but means also to have a big change of the vision of WMF.
Kind regards Il 22/Feb/2016 19:12, "Kat Walsh" kat@mindspillage.org ha scritto:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:03 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes we need to break a few
eggs." For those who are not native american english speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having
explicitly intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees'
intention in hiring her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
I left the board during the search process, but remained on the search committee. So while I cannot know what the board was thinking after her tenure began, I can say that the search committee was not looking for a "turnaround CEO"--at least to my understanding we were looking for someone who would be able to execute better on some of the areas (particularly engineering) where we wanted to make more improvements but hadn't.
(Which would naturally involve some change--but sweeping reforms were not envisioned; part of why Sue stepped down when she did was that she felt the organization was basically stable and could be smoothly handed off. It is certainly possible for someone to come in and decide that was a wrong assessment, but it wasn't what the committee had been looking for.)
-Kat
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Lila,
This is a pretty infuriating email, full of inaccuracies, FUD and unnecessary platitudes. We're in need of answers and actions, not essays.
After such a failed record as an ED, I would expect you to acknowledge that we have indeed changed, but for the worst. Then, learn from your mistakes and work on fixing them (possibly silently; I'd undrestand that). I'm personally all for course-corrections and/or second chances. As you probably know, I've been trying to be positive, calm and helpful help during this mess -- this is one of my very few emails on the subject of your performance.
What you did instead was to sent a community-wide email making it sound like this was a carefully executed plan and the only reason people are revolting is because they're either change-averse or bitter for not getting a promotion. This is downright insulting.
Finally, with all of your references to "community", it also sounds to me like like you're trying to gain some support from our community and effectively stategically place the (almost unanimously) revolting staff at odds with our community, in the hopes that you can get supporters and salvage your position. This would be a pretty desperate and selfish move. I hope I'm wrong.
Regards, -- Faidon Liambotis Principal Engineer, Technical Operations Wikimedia Foundation
On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 04:22:07PM -0800, Lila Tretikov wrote:
Why we’ve changed
I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come out of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective only.
After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission: community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.
The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get great at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I believe in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the challenge in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require undistracted focus.
What changed?
When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a much faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.
As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a caustic community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own value of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community. Wikipedia is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.
Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is increasing exponentially http://qpmf.com/the-book/welcome-to-hyper-innovation/. User interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.
So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our mission and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our community work.
What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need to focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our sites).
When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:
scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally connect open sources)
expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)
There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/30/artificial-intelligence-x-ray-specs/ to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting sources through structured data would go much further and allow our editors to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.
Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing of search https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/First_Portal_Test.pdf , but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that eventually we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community support none of this will be remotely possible.
Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity. Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.
In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the difference.
Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the Gender Gap is the “canary in the coal mine”. Women are the first to leave contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of rude and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.
Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Harassment_workshop. In the latest research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.
What does this mean for the WMF?
In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and community. We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between the volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization, such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot of responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional relationships. We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.
This has not been easy.
In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.
All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.
I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.
The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.
Lila
Dear Lila,
I woke up this morning and as usual I went for my WMF email with my coffee.
I woke up to read my ED implying that the employee discontent[1] was due to, amongst other things:
We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional relationships. We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.
Now, one easy way to read this, the most obvious one, is that the attitude towards work of the WMF employees was somewhat not right or unprofessional, and that we were lazy and not goal-driven.
I would find this inappropriate in an internal email, but you went to state that in public, and I have to admit I find this is deeply offending on a personal and professional level.
I restrained from expressing publicly any issues I might have with your own performance; I would love you to not spread covert allegations on my performace and professional attitude (not specifically, but well, I'm part of the staff here right?).
For the first time in the two years since I joined the WMF I felt a sour taste in my mouth for just sitting down to work.
Deeply sad,
Giuseppe [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-06/News_a... "WMF Staff morale" -- Giuseppe Lavagetto Senior Technical Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
I found this response interesting. It highlights the imbalance we, on the outside, are having to deal with. It is OK for anyone to criticize the ED on this list and elsewhere but if she says something that implies shortcomings on the part of one or more of her staff or former staff - and if WMF had problems when she arrived at least some of them were staff problems - it is used as proof she's "literally Hitler".
None of us on the outside knows who's Hitler here. And I guess we never will. Sorry, but the volunteers who actually write and run Wikipedia can't just believe either of you.
Does anyone know when the board is meeting (has it met) to resolve this? I don't want them to rush a poorly thought-through decision but, after a while, inaction in a human crisis like this becomes negligent abuse. On 22 Feb 2016 10:53 pm, "Giuseppe Lavagetto" glavagetto@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear Lila,
I woke up this morning and as usual I went for my WMF email with my coffee.
I woke up to read my ED implying that the employee discontent[1] was due to, amongst other things:
We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our
responsibilities and professional relationships.
We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value
to our communities and the world.
Now, one easy way to read this, the most obvious one, is that the attitude towards work of the WMF employees was somewhat not right or unprofessional, and that we were lazy and not goal-driven.
I would find this inappropriate in an internal email, but you went to state that in public, and I have to admit I find this is deeply offending on a personal and professional level.
I restrained from expressing publicly any issues I might have with your own performance; I would love you to not spread covert allegations on my performace and professional attitude (not specifically, but well, I'm part of the staff here right?).
For the first time in the two years since I joined the WMF I felt a sour taste in my mouth for just sitting down to work.
Deeply sad,
Giuseppe [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-06/News_a... "WMF Staff morale" -- Giuseppe Lavagetto Senior Technical Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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Danny, four months ago the board decided to give her time. The vocal staff have responded by rejecting that. The board needs to reconsider, in light of that response, and either confirm their commitment to the ED or come to a different resolution. Soon, preferably. On 23 Feb 2016 12:09 am, "Danny Horn" dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
Does anyone know when the board is meeting (has it met) to resolve this?
I
don't want them to rush a poorly thought-through decision but, after a while, inaction in a human crisis like this becomes negligent abuse.
Yeah, that happened four months ago. It's going great so far. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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 think everyone should remember that sarcasm, and tone in general, frequently do not come through across the wires, as it were.
For that matter, please, stay civil. I'm happy to report that I haven't had to moderate anyone, yet, but I think we can all appreciate the current circumstances.
Austin
Hey everyone, i'd really like to reaffirm what Àlex wrote in his mail: let's start with people, not technology.
When i read this in Lila's message:
Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community.
It seems like it's a bad thing that people reuse our work. But isn't that the whole point of our mission? Wikipedia might be the last big site on the internet where the main focus is not on getting everyone to share their content in the same walled garden (like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) but on altruistically creating something that benefits the whole world.
I completely agree that Wikimedia should be a high-tech organization. I'm very glad that the focus of development (and user experience in particular) has shifted to the WMF the last couple of years, bringing us great improvements like the Visual Editor. But we should not never forget the purpose of all those improvements: it's to better serve the community and our mission. We shouldn't be building tech for tech's sake!
Everyone who has spent more than a few years in this community knows how incredibly difficult it is to balance the needs of the editors, the readers, and developers. I'm incredibly grateful to those who managed to make improvements while not disturbing that balance too much. Unfortunately, many of these people have left the WMF the last few years, and that's a very sad thing. It's hard to get good people, it's even harder to replace them when they're gone.
However important those technical improvements are, the greatest asset of our movement is not the software we built. It's not even the hard working people in chapters and the WMF. It's the more than 26 million people who have had the courage in the last fifteen years to press the 'edit' button and voluntarily gave their time and knowledge for the common good. When major decisions are made, we should be very sure that they benefit those people.
Best, -- Hay / Husky
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 5:29 PM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
I think everyone should remember that sarcasm, and tone in general, frequently do not come through across the wires, as it were.
For that matter, please, stay civil. I'm happy to report that I haven't had to moderate anyone, yet, but I think we can all appreciate the current circumstances.
Austin
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On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 8:03 AM, Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com wrote:
I found this response interesting. It highlights the imbalance we, on the outside, are having to deal with. It is OK for anyone to criticize the ED on this list and elsewhere but if she says something that implies shortcomings on the part of one or more of her staff or former staff - and if WMF had problems when she arrived at least some of them were staff problems - it is used as proof she's "literally Hitler".
I don't think she's even figuratively Hitler; rather, she's not good at communicating ideas or demonstrating leadership.
Multiple staffers are interpreting Lila's message as a carefully constructed narrative positioning herself as a strong-willed reformer in opposition to intransigent/incompetent staff. If anything, it's the most well-constructed communication she's created to date... but even if that narrative spoke to me as an ideal ("kick out the bums! get work done!") it doesn't gel with what I've seen, and what other staff have seen, in the last year and a half. If you don't believe one of us, fine; if you don't believe any of us, well, I don't know what to say.
The achievements she claims are those of staff, often created as skunkworks "pet projects". The projects she cites as successes have been losing their leaders to resignation after resignation. I just don't buy the new narrative she's giving that our work environment problems are due to non-performing staff angry at not being promoted or their pet projects being shut down.
Does anyone know when the board is meeting (has it met) to resolve this? I don't want them to rush a poorly thought-through decision but, after a while, inaction in a human crisis like this becomes negligent abuse.
Rumor mill says they're meeting again on the subject at 9am pacific today.
(As noted elsewhere, the November board meeting covered the topic of Lila's performance as ED, and many staff do not feel there has been visible improvement since. The Board could come back and say "we gave her until April to improve, she's gotta stay until then, deal with it" or they could come back with a different decision. Or they might continue to stay silent. It's increasingly hard to read them, with so many board members failing to engage in public discussion.)
-- brion
On 22 Feb 2016 10:53 pm, "Giuseppe Lavagetto" glavagetto@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear Lila,
I woke up this morning and as usual I went for my WMF email with my
coffee.
I woke up to read my ED implying that the employee discontent[1] was due to, amongst other things:
We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our
responsibilities and professional relationships.
We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value
to our communities and the world.
Now, one easy way to read this, the most obvious one, is that the attitude towards work of the WMF employees was somewhat not right or unprofessional, and that we were lazy and not goal-driven.
I would find this inappropriate in an internal email, but you went to state that in public, and I have to admit I find this is deeply offending on a personal and professional level.
I restrained from expressing publicly any issues I might have with your own performance; I would love you to not spread covert allegations on my performace and professional attitude (not specifically, but well, I'm part of the staff here right?).
For the first time in the two years since I joined the WMF I felt a sour taste in my mouth for just sitting down to work.
Deeply sad,
Giuseppe [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-06/News_a...
"WMF Staff morale"
Giuseppe Lavagetto Senior Technical Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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Hi All,
The core problem (as several times before) seems to me that all these broad discussions are held AFTER things went wrong or a specific meta decision got out of hand.
Obviously the current transparency of or even the current decision-making process in its entirety isn't appropiate (anymore) for a movement of such global variety and plurality.
The BoT is basically paralysed and most probably overstrained, because e.g. for the sake of the rules of the current construct the relevant power play decisions must stay non public, not to speak of possible hidden interests which can conveniently sneak in. And as the icing of the cake a person asking the wrong questions can easily be removed as a board member.
As much as I care basically more about the subject-oriented debates and the discourse about the balanced appreciations of values I more and more convinced that a critical review of the core decision-making processes become necessary. Not as an end to itself, but to openly rethink the ways how power and responsibilty in a global, pluralistic movement should be organized. A movement with the kernel project of an encyclopedia still being the biggest role model for the idea of an open and free knowledge based internet (which not necessarily was to follow all the tech and social media trends relevant to a more commercially oriented platform-monoculture internet)
It's true, we have to change. But maybe the whys and the hows of change should be discussed and decided more broadly, more democratically represented as in the current structure. And especially BEFORE the paths are already written in stone and the horses have bolted.
Best regards Jens Best
2016-02-22 17:03 GMT+01:00 Anthony Cole ahcoleecu@gmail.com:
I found this response interesting. It highlights the imbalance we, on the outside, are having to deal with. It is OK for anyone to criticize the ED on this list and elsewhere but if she says something that implies shortcomings on the part of one or more of her staff or former staff - and if WMF had problems when she arrived at least some of them were staff problems - it is used as proof she's "literally Hitler".
None of us on the outside knows who's Hitler here. And I guess we never will. Sorry, but the volunteers who actually write and run Wikipedia can't just believe either of you.
Does anyone know when the board is meeting (has it met) to resolve this? I don't want them to rush a poorly thought-through decision but, after a while, inaction in a human crisis like this becomes negligent abuse. On 22 Feb 2016 10:53 pm, "Giuseppe Lavagetto" glavagetto@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear Lila,
I woke up this morning and as usual I went for my WMF email with my
coffee.
I woke up to read my ED implying that the employee discontent[1] was due to, amongst other things:
We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our
responsibilities and professional relationships.
We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value
to our communities and the world.
Now, one easy way to read this, the most obvious one, is that the attitude towards work of the WMF employees was somewhat not right or unprofessional, and that we were lazy and not goal-driven.
I would find this inappropriate in an internal email, but you went to state that in public, and I have to admit I find this is deeply offending on a personal and professional level.
I restrained from expressing publicly any issues I might have with your own performance; I would love you to not spread covert allegations on my performace and professional attitude (not specifically, but well, I'm part of the staff here right?).
For the first time in the two years since I joined the WMF I felt a sour taste in my mouth for just sitting down to work.
Deeply sad,
Giuseppe [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-06/News_a...
"WMF Staff morale"
Giuseppe Lavagetto Senior Technical Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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On Monday, 22 February 2016, Faidon Liambotis <faidon@wikimedia.org javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','faidon@wikimedia.org');> wrote:
What you did instead was to sent a community-wide email making it sound like this was a carefully executed plan and the only reason people are revolting is because they're either change-averse or bitter for not getting a promotion. This is downright insulting.
It also slides over the fact that the people who have been leaving recently are people who had been hired or promoted during Lila's tenure. This is quite different from people leaving within the first months of a new director's arrival.
The tricky thing is that the staff have been trying their best - because they are professionals - to keep internal "office problems" hidden from public view. They have not been advertising their frustrations on-wiki but trying to express their concerns through private and official procedures. This means that now we are at a stage where staff are OPENLY criticising the leadership that can appear to the wider wikiverse like the first sign of a problem and that they are being petty. But it is actually the end of a long road, not the beginning.
Suffice to say - in an organisation where the staff are well know for their commitment to the values of the movement, to be complaining publicly (and not just one or two new people, all the senior people too - see the report of the staff survey in The Signpost) means that this is not an insignificant problem or concern only held by some troublemakers.
Finally, with all of your references to "community", it also sounds to me like like you're trying to gain some support from our community and effectively stategically place the (almost unanimously) revolting staff at odds with our community, in the hopes that you can get supporters and salvage your position. This would be a pretty desperate and selfish move. I hope I'm wrong.
I too get the sense that this email as trying to claim a sense of martyrdom. Of pointing to the staff and and saying that "they" are unwilling to embrace change - particularly with regards to being a "high tech organisation". This might be a more believable argument if it was not for the tech department have been the most vocal in criticism. I don't think anyone was implacably opposed to improvements in the way tech should be managed - the smoothness of new rollouts and speed of development of new products was famously poor. But that's quite different from the silicon-valley mindset of paranoia about marketshare and product-secrecy.
As several people have said to me in the last week (referencing an American-political aphorism) "it's not the crime, it's the coverup".
Hi,
First of all thank you Lila for making such a clear statement on how you see the movement. I would like to go to the basics.
I do agree with your vision of what we did 15 years ago and could agree about the changing environment and that we need to constantly rethink ourselves in this hyper-innovation era. I also believe that we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding, but I'm not sure if I agree with your proposal of solution.
You say let’s begin with technology and I would say let's begin with the people.
Our mission https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Homedoesn't talk about tech. Tech is the tool to reach a goal. The tool is very very important, but not the most.
I've always seen the WMF staff, BoT and ED as the "*concierge*" of the Wikimedia projects. They have the "house keys", but they don't own it. We need WMF-staff, BoT and ED to keep everything working, safe and clean, and make, finnaly to make "community inner life easier", and most of the times it happens. But lasts weeks life in the wikiverse is becoming weird (just the common areas, projects are still ok).
I ask some of the concierges to put some order again in the neighborhood, please. I need a lot of time and tranquility to keep wikiprojects ongoing, editing Wikipedia takes a lot of time. ;)
Best
2016-02-22 15:13 GMT+01:00 Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com:
On Monday, 22 February 2016, Faidon Liambotis <faidon@wikimedia.org javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','faidon@wikimedia.org');> wrote:
What you did instead was to sent a community-wide email making it sound like this was a carefully executed plan and the only reason people are revolting is because they're either change-averse or bitter for not getting a promotion. This is downright insulting.
It also slides over the fact that the people who have been leaving recently are people who had been hired or promoted during Lila's tenure. This is quite different from people leaving within the first months of a new director's arrival.
The tricky thing is that the staff have been trying their best - because they are professionals - to keep internal "office problems" hidden from public view. They have not been advertising their frustrations on-wiki but trying to express their concerns through private and official procedures. This means that now we are at a stage where staff are OPENLY criticising the leadership that can appear to the wider wikiverse like the first sign of a problem and that they are being petty. But it is actually the end of a long road, not the beginning.
Suffice to say - in an organisation where the staff are well know for their commitment to the values of the movement, to be complaining publicly (and not just one or two new people, all the senior people too - see the report of the staff survey in The Signpost) means that this is not an insignificant problem or concern only held by some troublemakers.
Finally, with all of your references to "community", it also sounds to me like like you're trying to gain some support from our community and effectively stategically place the (almost unanimously) revolting staff at odds with our community, in the hopes that you can get supporters and salvage your position. This would be a pretty desperate and selfish move. I hope I'm wrong.
I too get the sense that this email as trying to claim a sense of martyrdom. Of pointing to the staff and and saying that "they" are unwilling to embrace change - particularly with regards to being a "high tech organisation". This might be a more believable argument if it was not for the tech department have been the most vocal in criticism. I don't think anyone was implacably opposed to improvements in the way tech should be managed - the smoothness of new rollouts and speed of development of new products was famously poor. But that's quite different from the silicon-valley mindset of paranoia about marketshare and product-secrecy.
As several people have said to me in the last week (referencing an American-political aphorism) "it's not the crime, it's the coverup".
-- wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines 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
<quote name="Lila Tretikov" date="2016-02-21" time="16:22:07 -0800">
Why we’ve changed
Lila,
This is either the 3rd (or 4th?) semi-conflicting grand statement of your overall thinking for the WMF that you have shared. If it’s not that, it reads like an explanation for how you have been thinking about the WMF since you started.
If the latter, why have we (staff and the community) not been told this for 661 days? Or, in case I missed it, please do let me know where you shared this previously. The best way to get people on board with your thinking is by sharing your thinking in the first place.
Greg
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