The problem is a systematic one, and thus very serious. While I have some clue about the problem, I don't pretend to give the full answer about causes, present problems, consequences and possible solutions. It should be analyzed by the whole (at least "meta") community not just because I am not able to gather all data, but because the whole community, or, at least, the significant part of it has to participate in the finding solution and implementing it.
The worst method which may be applied in the situations when some serious problem exists is to lie ourselves and to say that everything is fine, that we just need to interpret data differently.
== Present problems ==
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
- All groups -- global and local -- tend to close itself. If it is not in the sense of delaying incorporation of new members, it is in the sense of making a group of persons which are self-sufficient and which don't need communication with external part of the community.
- At the project level, especially Wikipedia level, we are not anymore in the edit war phase. Actually, edit war phase looks now as super healthy phase for the present phase. Present phase is full of much more intelligent destructive persons at the projects, and even supported by the whole and relevant communities. At the other side, people who are willing to deal with such problems don't get enough support from the upper levels.
- When one community gets into the ill situation, even we do the right things at the right moments -- years (yes, years, one or two, at least) have to pass to put that community in the better position. As a steward I have some clue what is going on inside of some communities and, if my examples -- and there are, I think enough of examples -- are representative, I have to say that we have very significant problems in the most of the communities. Healthy community is an exception; bad relations inside of the community is the rule.
- Except the German (and probably Swiss and Polish) chapter, our chapters are not more than the groups of Wikipedians which have a formal organization in their countries and which don't know what to do with it. This is especially important because Wikipedia is not anymore "a miracle", but "an ordinary thing" of everyday life. Like an ordinary journalist doesn't have some special need to make news about Google or IBM, an ordinary journalist doesn't have a special need to make news about Wikipedia. During the first year of Wikimedia Serbia, I didn't have to call any journalist, they called me. Today, any media appearance has to be organized. Every chapter needs a PR strategy now. And it is just about PR. What about other things? How many chapters are able to fund some project? I think two: German and Swiss. And, as far as I am introduced, we have more than 20.
- The situation with the software is a chaotic one. There are a lot of basic and near-to-basic functionalities which we don't have, while we have tons of extensions which are really not necessary (in comparison with the first two groups). The worst thing here is that we don't have systematic thinking about what do we need and how to help to various projects. At the other side, WMF has enough money to fund fundamental software needs.
- Communication between projects are at the positive zero. Yes, there are some communication, but it is more than very poor. At the other side, I don't see systematic work toward making the communication better. Without communication, we have separate projects hosted at WMF servers, nothing more.
- Besides all of those reasons, I may clearly see decadency inside of the Wikimedian community. The same decadency which was characteristic of all big societies at the end of the golden era. Bureaucracy is an excuse for not doing things and keeping present positions; openness toward new things is around zero; glorifying of "ol' good days" is more and more common; there are more and more bizarre things; and so on.
I am sure that I may gather other present problems, as well as I am sure that others may add more problems here. The list above is consisted just of things which came into my mind during writing this email.
== Causes ==
As I said at the beginning of this email, causes of those problems are not particular. I don't think that any particular group is responsible for the present systematic problem inside of the Wikimedia community. At the other side, all of us are responsible for that problem. And this is the worst thing: when all and no one are responsible, such problems tend not to be solved.
At the other side, I may list some of the issues which caused this problem:
- WMF tends to work on their issues, related usually just to gathering money. Presently, we have global financial crisis and I realize why it is a priority, but I also think that Wikimedia is one of the last institutions of the modern world which would loose will for support. A great part of the planet understands the significance of Wikimedia projects and they are willing to help.
- At the other side, WMF is not willing to interfere into the community issues. As the community (or the communities) was not driven well in the previous years, today WMF Board is the only body able to make significant changes at the level of the global community.
- While transparent work is something desirable, the most of Wikimedia community bodies are not working transparently. It seems that one thing is to add as Erik's or Sue's duties to report to the community about their work; while the completely other thing is to demand it from volunteers (while I think that no one demanded it from committees, stewards and other groups).
- Efforts to increase communication inside of the community are partialized. When I was trying some time ago to realize which Wikimedia body has the goal related to communication between projects, I realized that we have ComCom, ComProj, as well as a number of not official communication channels, like Wikizine, Wikipedia Weekly, Not the Wikipedia Weekly and so on are.
- In relation to WMF position, we don't have any meta body which is able to make some community-wide decision. Solving problems at some community is a matter of personal initiative of some persons. Solving problems in which two or more communities are involved is science fiction for us.
As for the previous section, I am sure that others may add here more issues.
== Consequences ==
- 2008 is the year of Wikipedia stagnation [1]. I am sure that we may get some more precise data from other statistics, but Alexa's statistics are informative enough. We are not even at the beginning of stagnation (we were in that position at the end of the last year), we are now in very obvious stagnation.
This may be explained by different reasons, including the fact that we reached our reasonable top and that we are not able to go further anymore. If this is the only visible part of our stagnation, it could be interpreted like that. But, it is not. We have other projects which didn't reach their top and they are also in stagnation: Wikinews is at the same level for years; Wikibooks is in stagnation; Wikiversity shows that it has some improvement for the last two months or so -- after years of stagnation.
At the other side, stagnation for us means growing, too: we have more articles every day. But, if we want to keep us inside of this kind of "growing", we have to work extremely clever. We have to automatize a lot of things which we are doing by hand, at least. However, I don't see such moves.
- The worst and the most possible consequence of a stagnation is a decline. I am not anymore so hard "at the field" and I am not able to see how the things are going on. However, when I went to the article about France (related to one of the previous topics at this list), I realized that during 2006 the article had around 1000 edits per ~4 months. Unlike then, the last 1000 edits were made for one year (between November 2007 and October 2008).
But, the article about France is just the top of the iceberg. It is one of ~1000 articles about which the community will take care "up to the last moment". I am wondering do we have not maintained articles now -- which were maintained fairly well during 2006 or so.
Again, it could be the consequence of the fact that we have now much more articles than we had in 2006. But, the real number about we should take care in this situation is the number of articles per (very active) editor. If the number is growing (in the case of bigger projects) -- we are in the problem: we wouldn't have enough of volunteers to keep the projects.
- World is changing very fast. Position of Wikipedia as the only source of particular informations is not anymore untouchable. There are projects, wiki projects -- even MediaWiki based -- which have better informations about particular topics than Wikipedia. I see that as a positive tendency. Simply, it is not possible -- as well as it is not necessary -- to gather all kinds of people at one project. Of course, while the knowledge is license-compatible.
But, when people introduced in medicine, linguistics, Star Wars, OpenOffice and so on; when they make relevant sources of informations in their fields; when they cover the most of relevant fields -- Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects wouldn't be so relevant.
And this relevancy is not in the sense of seeking for the best possible information about some issue -- Wikipedia, as any other encyclopedia, is just a starting point -- it is about seeking for the general information. Why should Google, or any search engine, prefer Wikipedia about the encyclopedic informations about OpenOffice at the time when OpenOffice wiki would have better encyclopedic informations about it?
The second problem with that is decline of number of readers and, consequently, of editors. Again, about 10 millions of articles someone should take care. Do we have some relevant approximation about how many editors are enough for keeping projects consistent? What is the line for which we have to fight?
And, the third problem here is a possibility of creation of the real Wikipedia competitor. No one of the previous general purpose wiki encyclopedias are not real Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) competitors. Wikinfo has different POV-related policy, Citizendium has different organization, Knol is much more Citizendium competitor than Wikipedia competitor; there are, of course, a number of projects which cover specific topics, too.
While we may debate about is concurrency a good thing or not (in this case I think it is not because of wasting efforts two times for the same thing in open and generally transparent environment), it is not a question here. The real question is, again, related to decline of number of maintainers of more than 10 millions of articles.
- The last question related to the consequences is: Have we finished the job? Looking from the point of view of one historian from the future, I am sure that he would say that we did a great job and that we have our place in the history. But, do we think that we finished it? Are there some issues which we haven't done and we are able to do? While I have a long list of what do I think that we haven't done, this is not the question just for me, but to all of us.
If the answer is that we have finished the most important part of the job, we may conclude that should keep Wikimedia projects and that we should start to work on other sides to achieve other goals. If the answer is not, then we should try to move things forward, out of the stagnation and possible decline.
== Possible solutions ==
I was thinking to list possible solutions, general and particular, here. However, I don't think that particular solutions have the place here.
- This is the systematic problem. It is not up to some particular bodies to work on their own hand and to hope for the best. The only Wikimedian body which is able make a real influence is the Board. However, much wider consensus is needed; much more people than ~10 board members should be included into marking problems, thinking about them and solving them.
- I was very loud about WikiCouncil a couple of months ago. Without community and Board support it was doomed to failure. Also, while I have to say that I met some great persons during that process, I have to say that we didn't choose each other as a group members, but we had been put together. Such group has to have a couple of persons with strong initiative to survive.
The point here is: no WikiCouncil (or whichever body which is working on the community regulation) -- no community. Yes, a number of communities with different interests exist and will exist, but any kind of cooperation on a lot of not solved global issues is and will be just a nice dream. And, without solving not solved issues, we have come in this position.
- After that, I was thinking that making a new role, global sysop role, would be able to help in the process of communication between communities. As I mentioned a couple of times, it was the main idea behind my action (besides it is a very useful thing). People should be interested in volunteering. Saying to someone that they should just volunteer is not so motivating action. However, it didn't pass because of some number of things. Even it had a lot of support, even some redefined proposal would have much more support, I concluded that 80% of support is science fiction for any kind of such proposals.
- One more possible solution is to gather people interested in this issue somewhere and to see their production after a couple of months or so. However, again, it seems to me that there are not so much persons interested in solving this problem. It is maybe a too hard problem for thinking about; maybe the most of Wikimedians don't see this as a problem -- I don't know. (I just know that the problem will be more and more visible.)
There is one more problem with this approach: I don't think that we have couple of months. If nothing would happen during the next couple of months, the situation will be changed. While changed situation is not the end of the world, we would have to redefine our goals. To be honest, I think that we came into the situation when just the group of professionals (at least in the sense of time which they need to spend) is needed.
And, of course, maybe someone has some other ideas...
[1] - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org
tl;dr
If these are all related problems, then could you please summarise? If they are separate problems, then they belong in separate threads.
Hoi. Sorry, this seems to me to be a summary already.. just read it, parse it, digest it. Then add to it because there is more to say. Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
tl;dr
If these are all related problems, then could you please summarise? If they are separate problems, then they belong in separate threads.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2008/10/27 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi. Sorry, this seems to me to be a summary already.. just read it, parse it, digest it. Then add to it because there is more to say. Thanks, GerardM
It's 2601 words long and took up 7 pages when I copied and pasted it into Word to do the count. How long was the original?
From a quick scan through, it seems to be a collection of unrelated
concerns (or, at most, loosely related). It is impractical to discuss them all in one thread.
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:34 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/27 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi. Sorry, this seems to me to be a summary already.. just read it, parse it, digest it. Then add to it because there is more to say. Thanks, GerardM
It's 2601 words long and took up 7 pages when I copied and pasted it into Word to do the count. How long was the original?
From a quick scan through, it seems to be a collection of unrelated concerns (or, at most, loosely related). It is impractical to discuss them all in one thread.
Thomas, this is the summary, as Gerard said. The problem is systematic and I gave examples for that. Also, I've also separated things into the sections, so if you are bothered by examples of problems and my analysis of the causes of the problems, you may continue with reading the rest, more important parts ("Consequences" and "Possible solutions").
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication
channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
I agree that the mailing lists need to be reorganized.
Wikipedia-l needs to be revived.
How?
Foundation-l should be separated split in two: One list for all WMF projects and one for the internal issues of the WMF. (I, for one, would be interested in the "all projects" emails, and not interested in internal WMF issues.) Furthermore, sending to Foundation-l emails that should go Wikipedia-l must be frowned upon, until the senders learn what is on topic and what is not. The mixing of all those things often makes me want to unsubscribe from them all.
WikiEN-l should be about WikiEN-l only. For things that are relevant only to en.wiki and not to sr.wiki, for example. The reality, however, is that WikiEN gets a lot of traffic that should really go to Wikipedia-l.
This is also part of the solution to the "positive zero communication between projects" problem.
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication
channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
I agree that the mailing lists need to be reorganized.
Wikipedia-l needs to be revived.
How?
Foundation-l should be separated split in two: One list for all WMF projects and one for the internal issues of the WMF. (I, for one, would be interested in the "all projects" emails, and not interested in internal WMF issues.)
... If i wasn't clear, this Milos' email would belong on the "all projects" mailing list.
Hi Milos,
add the quality issue to the list of problems.
Actually, the number of edits per year is irrelevant: if the article is being written, it gets a huge number of edits, but when it is almost completed, only numbers have to be updated, and I do not see any problem about it.
For the Wikicouncil, well, it just did not occur because we could not decide what it is about. My last idea was it is about the inter-project collaboration in general, but since I did not get any response, I assume right now the idea just does not exist.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- Communication between projects are at the positive zero. Yes, there
are some communication, but it is more than very poor. At the other side, I don't see systematic work toward making the communication better. Without communication, we have separate projects hosted at WMF servers, nothing more.
I care a lot about inter-project communication. (On the other hand, i love learning foreign languages. Not everybody is like me.)
Recently i started a new page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization
It is an attempt to establish a new culture of discussion about interwiki links. The response has been surprisingly positive: a lot of people understood the instructions that i made up out of the blue and started new discussions.
So, well... communication between projects is not at the absolute zero, but it is still quite close to that. I can identify several reasons for low communication between projects:
1. Most people don't know foreign languages well, and even if they do know them, they mostly write in one of them. They may be unsure about their spelling abilities and well, not much can be done about that. Or they are reluctant to interfere in a different community. For example, i write a lot in Hebrew and English and those two communities are quite different, but i am able to fit into both. I write comparatively little in the Russian Wikipedia, even though it is my native language, because its community is even more different (in the issues of NPOV, Verifiability and copyright, for example).
2. People may dislike other projects. As i already said above, i dislike certain aspects of the Russian Wikipedia. Some - definitely not all - Hebrew Wikipedians strongly dislike the English one, because they consider it to be "extremely inclusionist" (i disagree, but that's what they think).
3. Communities like their autonomy: I like the en.wiki policies on verifiability, notability, templates, userboxes, deletion discussion, appointing admins, etc.; I find them logical and i wish that all Wikipedias would adopt them. But some people who dislike certain aspects of another project may consider it so important that they would dislike the whole project because of that and wouldn't even want to hear about its positive sides and learn from them. Hence, a lot of wheel reinventing happens. So maybe the foundation could try to force some global policies? Probably not: Since communities like their autonomy and many editors would retire if policies would be stuck down their throats.
4. Quite simply, extra boldness is required to look into a new project after you are already used to one. Many people may often go and visit their parents or uncles in another town, but rarely visit the neighbor next door.
2008/10/27 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com:
- Communities like their autonomy: I like the en.wiki policies on
verifiability, notability, templates, userboxes, deletion discussion, appointing admins, etc.; I find them logical and i wish that all Wikipedias would adopt them. But some people who dislike certain aspects of another project may consider it so important that they would dislike the whole project because of that and wouldn't even want to hear about its positive sides and learn from them. Hence, a lot of wheel reinventing happens. So maybe the foundation could try to force some global policies? Probably not: Since communities like their autonomy and many editors would retire if policies would be stuck down their throats.
The problem is that any cross project decision making process is going to be dominated by en. Result is that projects insist on their autonomy and build other walls against en which then makes communication tricky.
You have to consider, Milos, that these very real problems you identify may not be amenable to a global solution. The simplest way to solve such problems is to convince the whole community at once that there is a problem, and also that there is a specific solution. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to convince the whole community at once of either claim.
If you accept that there is no community-wide solution to these critical issues, what then is your next step? I'll suggest what I, and others, have suggested in the past. Create your own WikiCouncil.
A WikiCouncil, as previously proposed, would be composed of a number of respected editors from various projects, working together to identify and solve specific problems. Such a council can be constituted and operate without a board resolution. It may be that if there were people willing and able to make a WikiCouncil work, it would already have been created based on what the Board members and others have previously written. Perhaps not, though - if there is such a group of people, and you have an idea of who they are, then put them together in an IRC room and get to work.
The last thing to consider is that these problems may not be amenable to a solution at all, given our history, community and structure. In the (more and more distant) past on the English Wikipedia, it was seen as Jimmy's role of leadership that if the community became unable to solve pervasive problems he would take the leap to make a necessary change. There truly is no "Wikimedia Community" leadership to take that step. The Board has declined to take that role, and no one else has enough standing.
Nathan
I intended to emphasize this but didn't - much of what folks have been seeking (through a Board resolution creating the WikiCouncil, through meta proposals, etc.) is a top down solution with community input. By that I mean the attempts so far have been to start at the highest level of decision making (the Board or the entire community), and failures at this level are both common and expected. So take a page from political decision making and problem solving - start at the base, the "grass roots", and begin solving the problems you can without the intervention or imprimatur of the entire community or the Board.
Once a group of people or council has demonstrated the ability to do this, then proposals to give it a wider bailiwick will get a better response.
Nathan
Once a group of people or council has demonstrated the ability to do this, then proposals to give it a wider bailiwick will get a better response.
Nathan
Once a group of people has demonstrated such an ability, may be they do not need a Board resolution any more. May be they do not even need the Board.
Having said this, I would like to support the rest of your posts in that currently it looks like we only have bottom-up solutions, no top-down solutions.
Cheers Yaroslav
Once a group of people or council has demonstrated the ability to do this, then proposals to give it a wider bailiwick will get a better response.
Nathan
on 10/27/08 12:44 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter at putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
Once a group of people has demonstrated such an ability, may be they do not need a Board resolution any more. May be they do not even need the Board.
Having said this, I would like to support the rest of your posts in that currently it looks like we only have bottom-up solutions, no top-down solutions.
Yaroslav,
There can be no "top-down solutions" when there is no top.
I congratulate Milos' for the time and thought that went into his assessment of the current situation, and very much agree with much of it. And, as Nathan said earlier, "There truly is no "Wikimedia Community" leadership to take that step." If there are persons in the Community who are willing to take a serious look at this situation, I am willing to be a part of that effort.
Marc Riddell
2008/10/27 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
Once a group of people or council has demonstrated the ability to do this, then proposals to give it a wider bailiwick will get a better response.
Nathan
on 10/27/08 12:44 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter at putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
Once a group of people has demonstrated such an ability, may be they do not need a Board resolution any more. May be they do not even need the Board.
Having said this, I would like to support the rest of your posts in that currently it looks like we only have bottom-up solutions, no top-down solutions.
Yaroslav,
There can be no "top-down solutions" when there is no top.
I congratulate Milos' for the time and thought that went into his assessment of the current situation, and very much agree with much of it. And, as Nathan said earlier, "There truly is no "Wikimedia Community" leadership to take that step." If there are persons in the Community who are willing to take a serious look at this situation, I am willing to be a part of that effort.
Marc Riddell
I suspect at this time the best chance of increasing interwiki communication is through wikimedia commons as it is one of the few things all projects have a stake and interest in.
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 8:57 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I suspect at this time the best chance of increasing interwiki communication is through wikimedia commons as it is one of the few things all projects have a stake and interest in.
For me, and i suppose that for a lot of other people, too, commons means photos. And a lot of people don't upload photos. Hence, they don't have any reason to ever go to commons.
Of course, commons can be a place of cooperation in the matters of photos, music and copyright clearance.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni
heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com
"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
Nathan wrote:
- much of what folks have been
seeking (through a Board resolution creating the WikiCouncil, through meta proposals, etc.) is a top down solution with community input. By that I mean the attempts so far have been to start at the highest level of decision making (the Board or the entire community), and failures at this level are both common and expected. So take a page from political decision making and problem solving - start at the base, the "grass roots", and begin solving the problems you can without the intervention or imprimatur of the entire community or the Board.
Once a group of people or council has demonstrated the ability to do this, then proposals to give it a wider bailiwick will get a better response.
This view is somewhat simplistic. Neither the top-down nor bottom-up approach will work by itself. The WikiCouncil was not and never has been a top down initiative. What was within the Board's ambit was to provide cautious credibility to the undertaking. It was probably wise not make specific appointments, but it would have been wise to provide both moral and material encouragement to the efforts of a group with enough vision to recognize the problems.
Solutions from the top tend to be universally distrusted. Distrustful people are constantly expecting hidden agendas, or are prone to reject anything they don't understand. Decision making is equated with dictatorship. Millennia of watching the behaviour of people in power has bred deep-rooted cynicism, and now the grass roots have never in history had more tools at their disposal to examine the feet that are walking on the grass. The grass roots are also fearful that the root springing up next to them might be a weed root.
Grass roots fail when they lack a panoramic vision of the project scape. They find it hard to imagine that the solution that works for the community in their home project may be contrary to the solution that worked in another project. These differences are not resolved by adopting a new rule or inventing a new template to force everyone into compliance. Florence has frequently presented the mailing lists with well considered analyses of the day's issues and received amazingly little response. This kind of thing is worrying. If the grass roots are to provide the political decision makers, the grass roots must also be accountable just like any other leaders. Essential to accountability is a willingness to participate in idea formation and real consensus formation.
Ec
- The last question related to the consequences is: Have we finished
the job? Looking from the point of view of one historian from the future, I am sure that he would say that we did a great job and that we have our place in the history. But, do we think that we finished it? Are there some issues which we haven't done and we are able to do? While I have a long list of what do I think that we haven't done, this is not the question just for me, but to all of us.
If the answer is that we have finished the most important part of the job, we may conclude that should keep Wikimedia projects and that we should start to work on other sides to achieve other goals. If the answer is not, then we should try to move things forward, out of the stagnation and possible decline.
No, we did not. If nothing else, look in what state the articles on specialized issues are (in all Wikipedias). I still would like to see a decent article in any language on for instance nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) (I believe I contributed a bit to the field itself so that I do not consider myself an appropriate editor to write such an article).
Cheers Yaroslav
Milos Rancic wrote:
The problem is a systematic one, and thus very serious. While I have some clue about the problem, I don't pretend to give the full answer about causes, present problems, consequences and possible solutions. It should be analyzed by the whole (at least "meta") community not just because I am not able to gather all data, but because the whole community, or, at least, the significant part of it has to participate in the finding solution and implementing it.
The worst method which may be applied in the situations when some serious problem exists is to lie ourselves and to say that everything is fine, that we just need to interpret data differently.
== Present problems ==
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication
channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
- All groups -- global and local -- tend to close itself. If it is not
in the sense of delaying incorporation of new members, it is in the sense of making a group of persons which are self-sufficient and which don't need communication with external part of the community.
- At the project level, especially Wikipedia level, we are not anymore
in the edit war phase. Actually, edit war phase looks now as super healthy phase for the present phase. Present phase is full of much more intelligent destructive persons at the projects, and even supported by the whole and relevant communities. At the other side, people who are willing to deal with such problems don't get enough support from the upper levels.
- When one community gets into the ill situation, even we do the right
things at the right moments -- years (yes, years, one or two, at least) have to pass to put that community in the better position. As a steward I have some clue what is going on inside of some communities and, if my examples -- and there are, I think enough of examples -- are representative, I have to say that we have very significant problems in the most of the communities. Healthy community is an exception; bad relations inside of the community is the rule.
- Except the German (and probably Swiss and Polish) chapter, our
chapters are not more than the groups of Wikipedians which have a formal organization in their countries and which don't know what to do with it. This is especially important because Wikipedia is not anymore "a miracle", but "an ordinary thing" of everyday life. Like an ordinary journalist doesn't have some special need to make news about Google or IBM, an ordinary journalist doesn't have a special need to make news about Wikipedia. During the first year of Wikimedia Serbia, I didn't have to call any journalist, they called me. Today, any media appearance has to be organized. Every chapter needs a PR strategy now. And it is just about PR. What about other things? How many chapters are able to fund some project? I think two: German and Swiss. And, as far as I am introduced, we have more than 20.
Regardless of any other problems you mention (which are generally correct), and though "telling others about what they do" does not imply they actually do something, or though "not telling anything" does not imply a chapter does not do anything, I would like to point out that the only chapters you consider active and organized and able to fund something (German and Swiss) are two chapters who are actually currently failing to share with other chapters what they do and how they do it.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports
whilst several other chapters took the time to actually COLLECTIVELY write a report in ENGLISH to explain what they do to the rest of the collective.
Note that I am not blaming the german and swiss chapters in the least. I am confident both are active and will inform us in time. I have already said I do not feel every chapter should inform others every month. So, that's fine.
However, I am a bit perplex that you built your whole argument around the ability of these two chapters and the apparent inability of the others. I am not saying all chapters are a success, but in your statement, you succeeded to both alienate yourself several chapters, and fail to convince me due to a flawed argument.
Great :-)
Ant
- The situation with the software is a chaotic one. There are a lot of
basic and near-to-basic functionalities which we don't have, while we have tons of extensions which are really not necessary (in comparison with the first two groups). The worst thing here is that we don't have systematic thinking about what do we need and how to help to various projects. At the other side, WMF has enough money to fund fundamental software needs.
- Communication between projects are at the positive zero. Yes, there
are some communication, but it is more than very poor. At the other side, I don't see systematic work toward making the communication better. Without communication, we have separate projects hosted at WMF servers, nothing more.
- Besides all of those reasons, I may clearly see decadency inside of
the Wikimedian community. The same decadency which was characteristic of all big societies at the end of the golden era. Bureaucracy is an excuse for not doing things and keeping present positions; openness toward new things is around zero; glorifying of "ol' good days" is more and more common; there are more and more bizarre things; and so on.
I am sure that I may gather other present problems, as well as I am sure that others may add more problems here. The list above is consisted just of things which came into my mind during writing this email.
== Causes ==
As I said at the beginning of this email, causes of those problems are not particular. I don't think that any particular group is responsible for the present systematic problem inside of the Wikimedia community. At the other side, all of us are responsible for that problem. And this is the worst thing: when all and no one are responsible, such problems tend not to be solved.
At the other side, I may list some of the issues which caused this problem:
- WMF tends to work on their issues, related usually just to gathering
money. Presently, we have global financial crisis and I realize why it is a priority, but I also think that Wikimedia is one of the last institutions of the modern world which would loose will for support. A great part of the planet understands the significance of Wikimedia projects and they are willing to help.
- At the other side, WMF is not willing to interfere into the
community issues. As the community (or the communities) was not driven well in the previous years, today WMF Board is the only body able to make significant changes at the level of the global community.
- While transparent work is something desirable, the most of Wikimedia
community bodies are not working transparently. It seems that one thing is to add as Erik's or Sue's duties to report to the community about their work; while the completely other thing is to demand it from volunteers (while I think that no one demanded it from committees, stewards and other groups).
- Efforts to increase communication inside of the community are
partialized. When I was trying some time ago to realize which Wikimedia body has the goal related to communication between projects, I realized that we have ComCom, ComProj, as well as a number of not official communication channels, like Wikizine, Wikipedia Weekly, Not the Wikipedia Weekly and so on are.
- In relation to WMF position, we don't have any meta body which is
able to make some community-wide decision. Solving problems at some community is a matter of personal initiative of some persons. Solving problems in which two or more communities are involved is science fiction for us.
As for the previous section, I am sure that others may add here more issues.
== Consequences ==
- 2008 is the year of Wikipedia stagnation [1]. I am sure that we may
get some more precise data from other statistics, but Alexa's statistics are informative enough. We are not even at the beginning of stagnation (we were in that position at the end of the last year), we are now in very obvious stagnation.
This may be explained by different reasons, including the fact that we reached our reasonable top and that we are not able to go further anymore. If this is the only visible part of our stagnation, it could be interpreted like that. But, it is not. We have other projects which didn't reach their top and they are also in stagnation: Wikinews is at the same level for years; Wikibooks is in stagnation; Wikiversity shows that it has some improvement for the last two months or so -- after years of stagnation.
At the other side, stagnation for us means growing, too: we have more articles every day. But, if we want to keep us inside of this kind of "growing", we have to work extremely clever. We have to automatize a lot of things which we are doing by hand, at least. However, I don't see such moves.
- The worst and the most possible consequence of a stagnation is a
decline. I am not anymore so hard "at the field" and I am not able to see how the things are going on. However, when I went to the article about France (related to one of the previous topics at this list), I realized that during 2006 the article had around 1000 edits per ~4 months. Unlike then, the last 1000 edits were made for one year (between November 2007 and October 2008).
But, the article about France is just the top of the iceberg. It is one of ~1000 articles about which the community will take care "up to the last moment". I am wondering do we have not maintained articles now -- which were maintained fairly well during 2006 or so.
Again, it could be the consequence of the fact that we have now much more articles than we had in 2006. But, the real number about we should take care in this situation is the number of articles per (very active) editor. If the number is growing (in the case of bigger projects) -- we are in the problem: we wouldn't have enough of volunteers to keep the projects.
- World is changing very fast. Position of Wikipedia as the only
source of particular informations is not anymore untouchable. There are projects, wiki projects -- even MediaWiki based -- which have better informations about particular topics than Wikipedia. I see that as a positive tendency. Simply, it is not possible -- as well as it is not necessary -- to gather all kinds of people at one project. Of course, while the knowledge is license-compatible.
But, when people introduced in medicine, linguistics, Star Wars, OpenOffice and so on; when they make relevant sources of informations in their fields; when they cover the most of relevant fields -- Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects wouldn't be so relevant.
And this relevancy is not in the sense of seeking for the best possible information about some issue -- Wikipedia, as any other encyclopedia, is just a starting point -- it is about seeking for the general information. Why should Google, or any search engine, prefer Wikipedia about the encyclopedic informations about OpenOffice at the time when OpenOffice wiki would have better encyclopedic informations about it?
The second problem with that is decline of number of readers and, consequently, of editors. Again, about 10 millions of articles someone should take care. Do we have some relevant approximation about how many editors are enough for keeping projects consistent? What is the line for which we have to fight?
And, the third problem here is a possibility of creation of the real Wikipedia competitor. No one of the previous general purpose wiki encyclopedias are not real Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) competitors. Wikinfo has different POV-related policy, Citizendium has different organization, Knol is much more Citizendium competitor than Wikipedia competitor; there are, of course, a number of projects which cover specific topics, too.
While we may debate about is concurrency a good thing or not (in this case I think it is not because of wasting efforts two times for the same thing in open and generally transparent environment), it is not a question here. The real question is, again, related to decline of number of maintainers of more than 10 millions of articles.
- The last question related to the consequences is: Have we finished
the job? Looking from the point of view of one historian from the future, I am sure that he would say that we did a great job and that we have our place in the history. But, do we think that we finished it? Are there some issues which we haven't done and we are able to do? While I have a long list of what do I think that we haven't done, this is not the question just for me, but to all of us.
If the answer is that we have finished the most important part of the job, we may conclude that should keep Wikimedia projects and that we should start to work on other sides to achieve other goals. If the answer is not, then we should try to move things forward, out of the stagnation and possible decline.
== Possible solutions ==
I was thinking to list possible solutions, general and particular, here. However, I don't think that particular solutions have the place here.
- This is the systematic problem. It is not up to some particular
bodies to work on their own hand and to hope for the best. The only Wikimedian body which is able make a real influence is the Board. However, much wider consensus is needed; much more people than ~10 board members should be included into marking problems, thinking about them and solving them.
- I was very loud about WikiCouncil a couple of months ago. Without
community and Board support it was doomed to failure. Also, while I have to say that I met some great persons during that process, I have to say that we didn't choose each other as a group members, but we had been put together. Such group has to have a couple of persons with strong initiative to survive.
The point here is: no WikiCouncil (or whichever body which is working on the community regulation) -- no community. Yes, a number of communities with different interests exist and will exist, but any kind of cooperation on a lot of not solved global issues is and will be just a nice dream. And, without solving not solved issues, we have come in this position.
- After that, I was thinking that making a new role, global sysop
role, would be able to help in the process of communication between communities. As I mentioned a couple of times, it was the main idea behind my action (besides it is a very useful thing). People should be interested in volunteering. Saying to someone that they should just volunteer is not so motivating action. However, it didn't pass because of some number of things. Even it had a lot of support, even some redefined proposal would have much more support, I concluded that 80% of support is science fiction for any kind of such proposals.
- One more possible solution is to gather people interested in this
issue somewhere and to see their production after a couple of months or so. However, again, it seems to me that there are not so much persons interested in solving this problem. It is maybe a too hard problem for thinking about; maybe the most of Wikimedians don't see this as a problem -- I don't know. (I just know that the problem will be more and more visible.)
There is one more problem with this approach: I don't think that we have couple of months. If nothing would happen during the next couple of months, the situation will be changed. While changed situation is not the end of the world, we would have to redefine our goals. To be honest, I think that we came into the situation when just the group of professionals (at least in the sense of time which they need to spend) is needed.
And, of course, maybe someone has some other ideas...
[1] - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org
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on 10/27/08 10:53 AM, Milos Rancic at millosh@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is a systematic one, and thus very serious. While I have some clue about the problem, I don't pretend to give the full answer about causes, present problems, consequences and possible solutions. It should be analyzed by the whole (at least "meta") community not just because I am not able to gather all data, but because the whole community, or, at least, the significant part of it has to participate in the finding solution and implementing it.
<snip>
There is one more problem with this approach: I don't think that we have couple of months. If nothing would happen during the next couple of months, the situation will be changed. While changed situation is not the end of the world, we would have to redefine our goals. To be honest, I think that we came into the situation when just the group of professionals (at least in the sense of time which they need to spend) is needed.
Thank you for all of this, Milos. And thank you for all of the time and thought that went into it. Of course any attempt at formalizing the organizational structure of (at least) the English Wikipedia is going to be met with strong resistance by the self-appointed "leaders" who have insinuated themselves into the equation. But it is time to stop tap dancing on airplane wings and realize that the plane has taken off.
Marc Riddell
Hm. From time to time I live in illusion that I may point to some problem and that someone else would be willing to solve it. To be honest, I wrote the initial email with such intention :) as well as I didn't expect that much of reaction. And I think that it is really great that at least 'meta' community is interested in this issue.
There are two kinds of comments in the thread: one kind is related to the particular issues (inside of my email and related to the solutions of particular problems), the other is related to the general ones. This mail is about the particular issues. I'll try to summarize the global issues in the next mail, probably tomorrow.
== About some of my arguments ==
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
Actually, the number of edits per year is irrelevant: if the article is being written, it gets a huge number of edits, but when it is almost completed, only numbers have to be updated, and I do not see any problem about it.
Yes, it may be true. Separately from this issue, I was discussing tonight with one my friend, a cognitive psychologist, who said to me that this (lesser number of edits) is (one of) the most important signs that one article came into the 'stable phase'.
Besides that I would like to see some statistics about activity around France-as-the-state related articles, there is one more important issues which may contribute to the decline of the number of editors; this time a very natural one, but still a problem for us:
If editors treat some article as 'completed', 'stable', or whatever, they are less motivated to see that article again. If some of them come into the position that 'they finished the job at Wikipedia', again, we have less editors.
It produces the same problem which is, generally, our most important worry: What is the ratio of number of articles per editor.
This shows one more systematic problem. While some systematic problems may be solved 'just' with more organization because their origin is inside of very predictable specter of social relations, there are other problems, not so predictable, not so obvious -- about which we need to take care.
At this point I may just have fantasies about making such kind of analysis which are not a product of coincidence: I told something which is not so important, you pointed that and I realized one other issue here right now.
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
You have to consider, Milos, that these very real problems you identify may not be amenable to a global solution.
There is one important issue which I missed to emphasize. I haven't listed the problems which we should solve after which we would be fine. I've listed the problems which are produced by the systematic problem, which may be worded as 'we don't care a lot'. The part of that systematic problem from the past -- we didn't care a lot -- brought us to the situation where we are not able to list our functional problems.
So, I don't think that we have to start to work on particular problems (if they are not urgent). We have to start to work on the systematic problem.
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
However, I am a bit perplex that you built your whole argument around the ability of these two chapters and the apparent inability of the others. I am not saying all chapters are a success, but in your statement, you succeeded to both alienate yourself several chapters, and fail to convince me due to a flawed argument.
Thanks to pointing that :)
As I said, I don't think that any of mentioned issues are problems of particular groups. In this case, it is not a problem with chapters, it is not a problem with ChapCom, it is not a problem with the Board. Everybody gives the best of themselves in that process (creating of chapter and functioning of chapter).
But, I realized, for example, that Wikimedia Serbia and future Wikimedia Croatia are really happy entities because they had luck that I knew the right persons in Belgrade and Zagreb and that I shared those informations with them. Chapters from a lot of countries don't have their places for their gatherings.
And, chapter members are not responsible for that. They are just volunteers who are willing to make a chapter. ChapCom has very limited human resources and it is not its responsibility to make local connections. Board, for sure, doesn't have a time to deal with every chapter. So, problem exists, no one is responsible for saying how to make something at the field, chapter members are not business persons who are able to find whatever their chapter needs... And we've got a systematic problem: there is a problem, no one is particularly responsible, everybody are responsible as a whole (at least, I don't see a responsible entity out of those inside of the process) and, finally, no one is solving it.
So, the issue was not related to the ability of chapter members, but to one kind of systematic problems.
== About some other issues ==
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
Foundation-l should be separated split in two: One list for all WMF projects and one for the internal issues of the WMF. (I, for one, would be interested in the "all projects" emails, and not interested in internal WMF issues.) Furthermore, sending to Foundation-l emails that should go Wikipedia-l must be frowned upon, until the senders learn what is on topic and what is not. The mixing of all those things often makes me want to unsubscribe from them all.
Maybe it is good to change an approach of separating lists. This one was and is used for community issues. The community is much bigger than WMF, so it may be good to move WMF list to, let's say wmf-l@lists.wikimedia.org and leave this list for the community. (Note: If anyone wants to discuss about this issue, let them separate the thread.)
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 7:57 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I suspect at this time the best chance of increasing interwiki communication is through wikimedia commons as it is one of the few things all projects have a stake and interest in.
Yes, it may be a good starting point. Some time ago, there were a discussion about moving all images to Commons (including fair use ones) or some sister project ('non-free.wikimedia.org'), while some people strictly opposed that. Having *all* images at some common place means that people will have to cooperate about this particular (but, important if no project has a repository) issue.
--- On Mon, 10/27/08, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
You have to consider, Milos, that these very real
problems you identify may
not be amenable to a global solution.
There is one important issue which I missed to emphasize. I haven't listed the problems which we should solve after which we would be fine. I've listed the problems which are produced by the systematic problem, which may be worded as 'we don't care a lot'. The part of that systematic problem from the past -- we didn't care a lot -- brought us to the situation where we are not able to list our functional problems.
So, I don't think that we have to start to work on particular problems (if they are not urgent). We have to start to work on the systematic problem.
I must disagree that the systematic problem is that we don't care enough. I would say it is that we cannot communicate effectively. The barriers to communication throughout Wikimedia are real and not just due to some lack of caring.
Birgitte SB
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:05 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I must disagree that the systematic problem is that we don't care enough. I would say it is that we cannot communicate effectively. The barriers to communication throughout Wikimedia are real and not just due to some lack of caring.
From my experience, a lot of Wikimedians don't know for this list.
When I am the first person who introduces a Wikimedian with 2 years of experience (and I didn't do that just once) that this list exists and that it is the right place for talking about general issues -- I may conclude that we have a [systematic] communication problem.
If you think about languages as barriers, they are not *so* significant to become a "real problem". The most of Wikimedians are able to read English. Also, there is no need that every Wikimedian knows English, there is a need for just one or few of them per community.
And "caring enough" may mean different things than just passive involvement: - Analyzing which communities are under-represented at the common communication channels (foundation-l, Meta, even English language Planet Wikimedia) - Finding interested persons and educate them how to participate in the global matters. - Taking care that this process is going well.
Whenever I am able, I am trying to educate Wikimedians how to become more involved in global matters. The problem about that is that I am able to have such communication with not so significant number of them. Every of them is a person and I am a person :) We are making personal relations and it is not possible to make infinite number of personal relations; actually, possible number is very low in comparison with the size of the Wikimedian community.
This means that we need more involved Wikimedians to work on that, as well as we need to educate "new" Wikimedians to be able to educate others. This is a hard and long term work, but I don't see better way. Yes, there are more efficient ways which should be helping tools (at least, the whole Wikimedia is about education). However, if we don't know a particular community, if we don't know their problems, we are not able to tell them the right advice.
--- On Tue, 10/28/08, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
From: Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] We have the problem To: birgitte_sb@yahoo.com, "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2008, 7:15 AM On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:05 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I must disagree that the systematic problem is that we
don't care enough. I would say it is that we cannot communicate effectively. The barriers to communication throughout Wikimedia are real and not just due to some lack of caring.
From my experience, a lot of Wikimedians don't know for this list. When I am the first person who introduces a Wikimedian with 2 years of experience (and I didn't do that just once) that this list exists and that it is the right place for talking about general issues -- I may conclude that we have a [systematic] communication problem.
If you think about languages as barriers, they are not *so* significant to become a "real problem". The most of Wikimedians are able to read English. Also, there is no need that every Wikimedian knows English, there is a need for just one or few of them per community.
I don't think languages alone are the main barrier to communication and I did not mention language in my email. When someone picks on the exact words someone like Gerard M or Anthere uses in a second languages to dismiss the more general message they write we are not communicating effectively. When people approach an issue from either a position of condescension or one of mistrust they will not communicate effectively. I personally struggle to effectively communicate with native English speaking developers. Communication amoung people who care is a problem outside what languages they speak.
Birgitte SB
--- On Mon, 10/27/08, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
You have to consider, Milos, that these very real
problems you identify may
not be amenable to a global solution.
There is one important issue which I missed to emphasize. I haven't listed the problems which we should solve after which we would be fine. I've listed the problems which are produced by the systematic problem, which may be worded as 'we don't care a lot'. The part of that systematic problem from the past -- we didn't care a lot -- brought us to the situation where we are not able to list our functional problems.
So, I don't think that we have to start to work on particular problems (if they are not urgent). We have to start to work on the systematic problem.
on 10/27/08 11:05 PM, Birgitte SB at birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I must disagree that the systematic problem is that we don't care enough. I would say it is that we cannot communicate effectively. The barriers to communication throughout Wikimedia are real and not just due to some lack of caring.
Birgitte,
Several attempts have been made to help improve communication skills in the Project; including something I tried to get going called "Discussion Camp" where individuals could practice and sharpen their communication skills. It was met with apathy.
The culture of the Wikipedia Community was set from the very beginning; and is, to this day, perpetuated by the disciples. That is what needs to change.
Marc Riddell
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication
channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
I made a tool for analyzing activity on the lists. It is not complete (there are a lot of data which may be used), but here are the first results:
October will be finished as the October with lowest number of messages for all years. July and September are at three years minimums, while August last year is just slightly lower than it was this year. Not so good indicator is also a tendency that, out of the first year (2004), number of emails tended to raise at the last quarter of the year. This year we have decline in number of emails from September to October.
Numbers confirm that the best year was 2006.
Numbers represent number of messages per month. Use fixed font for better look.
2004 xxx xxx xxx 64 532 506 474 242 462 650 276 282 2005 630 760 642 574 690 438 396 684 488 758 1074 672 2006 514 506 860 588 910 1666 1262 1670 2180 1206 1116 2530 2007 1138 624 665 1042 798 407 1163 471 791 1072 1030 1260 2008 1497 688 1679 1675 1131 942 609 501 699 506 xxx xxx
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:13 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication
channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
I made a tool for analyzing activity on the lists. It is not complete (there are a lot of data which may be used), but here are the first results:
October will be finished as the October with lowest number of messages for all years. July and September are at three years minimums, while August last year is just slightly lower than it was this year. Not so good indicator is also a tendency that, out of the first year (2004), number of emails tended to raise at the last quarter of the year. This year we have decline in number of emails from September to October.
Numbers confirm that the best year was 2006.
Numbers represent number of messages per month. Use fixed font for better look.
2004 xxx xxx xxx 64 532 506 474 242 462 650 276 282 2005 630 760 642 574 690 438 396 684 488 758 1074 672 2006 514 506 860 588 910 1666 1262 1670 2180 1206 1116 2530 2007 1138 624 665 1042 798 407 1163 471 791 1072 1030 1260 2008 1497 688 1679 1675 1131 942 609 501 699 506 xxx xxx
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Alternatively, we've learn not to go into long long nitpicking threads. So this is better, less volume, but signal/noise increases.
I'm even reading some threads now instead of automatically canning them.
Beware of the emailpostcountitis!
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
Alternatively, we've learn not to go into long long nitpicking threads. So this is better, less volume, but signal/noise increases.
I'm even reading some threads now instead of automatically canning them.
Beware of the emailpostcountitis!
I agree with this, especially as it relates to recent activity. My sense is that recent discussions on this list have been very useful (including this thread), quite a bit more than they were roughly a year ago. Anyway, using my rough impressions as a guide, I find basically no correlation between the volume of messages and the quality.
This is not to say that activity levels aren't something to be concerned about, although I might want to start with a focus on something other than this mailing list. But sometimes lots of visible activity reflects (or promotes) lots of productive work; sometimes lots of activity simply means we're bogged down in things that are keeping us from productivity; sometimes visible activity is lower because we're busy being productive in other ways; and sometimes activity is lower because we're not as involved in the projects. Using a two-directional measurement to describe phenomena with at least four possible compass points will only be a very small start, from an analytical perspective.
--Michael Snow
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
Alternatively, we've learn not to go into long long nitpicking threads. So this is better, less volume, but signal/noise increases.
I'm even reading some threads now instead of automatically canning them.
Beware of the emailpostcountitis!
I agree with this, especially as it relates to recent activity. My sense is that recent discussions on this list have been very useful (including this thread), quite a bit more than they were roughly a year ago. Anyway, using my rough impressions as a guide, I find basically no correlation between the volume of messages and the quality.
This is not to say that activity levels aren't something to be concerned about, although I might want to start with a focus on something other than this mailing list. But sometimes lots of visible activity reflects (or promotes) lots of productive work; sometimes lots of activity simply means we're bogged down in things that are keeping us from productivity; sometimes visible activity is lower because we're busy being productive in other ways; and sometimes activity is lower because we're not as involved in the projects. Using a two-directional measurement to describe phenomena with at least four possible compass points will only be a very small start, from an analytical perspective.
Pedro's email is very subjective and as such is a part of widespread problem (just one digression: I was the part of that problem, too; especially during the previous years, so, this is not a personal attack): we tend to lie ourselves and to interpret data as everything is going on fine -- while it is far from truth. The most "objective" part was not proven: signal/noise ratio may or may not increase with the less volume of emails. It is related just to ability of some persons to handle such amount of emails (which is other type of problems, while it is still a problem).
At the other side, (I have to say) after the second reading, I realized that Michael's second paragraph is, at least, in a good direction. While I would like to see suggestions what to measure, generally asking for deeper analysis is a step forward.
There are a number of possible indicators which may be measured very easy. This time, I made a statistics of new persons on foundation-l list per month. It is worst than the previous results: October has two times less new persons at the list than the next worst October (2004) had. Actually, it is the worst month *at all* -- after August of 2004 (6) and July of this year (7). September is the worst September for all years. August is slightly better than August 2004, July is the worst July ever, May and June are somewhat better than the the worst May and June (2005).
And, again, numbers of new participants of this list tend to be higher in the second part of the year, while this October has the lowest number of new users for this year (and not just for this year, as I said before).
2004 xxx xxx xxx 13 31 25 13 6 22 9 8 9 2005 17 21 10 8 9 9 8 18 15 10 15 16 2006 21 12 18 16 18 20 15 28 25 17 20 28 2007 19 26 13 21 22 18 18 19 14 15 21 19 2008 23 11 24 15 12 11 7 8 12 4 xxx xxx
milos, this is indeed a pressing problem, thank you for writing about it at such length. my added concerns:
+ if the wikipedia we know wanes, the memory of how we accomplished it may wane as well. note that similarly effective projects have not sprung up in other areas where they miht naturally do so.
+ we are not addingnew faets to the projects, though there are dozens if not hundreds to be added.new topicsets, new sources of raw data, more efficient feeds from news, publishers, &c.
+ we are not talking so seriously these days about improving accessibility. it would be great to have roadmaps for better automatically-or-other spoken articles, simple creation of offline collections, automatic-or-other language-simplificatino for less advanced speakers/readers... this used to take up proportionally much more of our time.
+ we are not talking uch about the philosophy of wiki and collaboration.again, thisused to take up fully 10% of the time spent on the project, and the dilemmas and concerns facing collaboration on our new million-persn scales are equally danting and amazing starting from knowledge of solutionsto 1000-person problems as the original problems were. community members dont feel free to experiment with philosophy the way they once were, and perhaps we are not as a social group as attracive apace to have those debates as before.
birgitte, you are right that this is a real communication dilemma, without a simple solution such as 'just making more of an effort'.
sj, in peru, thinking about culture gaps in communication [I just visited the national library in lima, where they are great fans of wikipedia...]
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:06 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
Pedro Sanchez wrote:
Alternatively, we've learn not to go into long long nitpicking threads. So this is better, less volume, but signal/noise increases.
I'm even reading some threads now instead of automatically canning them.
Beware of the emailpostcountitis!
I agree with this, especially as it relates to recent activity. My sense is that recent discussions on this list have been very useful (including this thread), quite a bit more than they were roughly a year ago. Anyway, using my rough impressions as a guide, I find basically no correlation between the volume of messages and the quality.
This is not to say that activity levels aren't something to be concerned about, although I might want to start with a focus on something other than this mailing list. But sometimes lots of visible activity reflects (or promotes) lots of productive work; sometimes lots of activity simply means we're bogged down in things that are keeping us from productivity; sometimes visible activity is lower because we're busy being productive in other ways; and sometimes activity is lower because we're not as involved in the projects. Using a two-directional measurement to describe phenomena with at least four possible compass points will only be a very small start, from an analytical perspective.
Pedro's email is very subjective and as such is a part of widespread problem (just one digression: I was the part of that problem, too; especially during the previous years, so, this is not a personal attack): we tend to lie ourselves and to interpret data as everything is going on fine -- while it is far from truth. The most "objective" part was not proven: signal/noise ratio may or may not increase with the less volume of emails. It is related just to ability of some persons to handle such amount of emails (which is other type of problems, while it is still a problem).
At the other side, (I have to say) after the second reading, I realized that Michael's second paragraph is, at least, in a good direction. While I would like to see suggestions what to measure, generally asking for deeper analysis is a step forward.
There are a number of possible indicators which may be measured very easy. This time, I made a statistics of new persons on foundation-l list per month. It is worst than the previous results: October has two times less new persons at the list than the next worst October (2004) had. Actually, it is the worst month *at all* -- after August of 2004 (6) and July of this year (7). September is the worst September for all years. August is slightly better than August 2004, July is the worst July ever, May and June are somewhat better than the the worst May and June (2005).
And, again, numbers of new participants of this list tend to be higher in the second part of the year, while this October has the lowest number of new users for this year (and not just for this year, as I said before).
2004 xxx xxx xxx 13 31 25 13 6 22 9 8 9 2005 17 21 10 8 9 9 8 18 15 10 15 16 2006 21 12 18 16 18 20 15 28 25 17 20 28 2007 19 26 13 21 22 18 18 19 14 15 21 19 2008 23 11 24 15 12 11 7 8 12 4 xxx xxx
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Hoi, I have been listening an watching and I agree with much of what you say. What i find is that even though I am interested in the meta running of the WMF and its projects and communities, I both do not have the time nor the inclination to involve me in all of it. I am looking for a platform for the things that I care for, the things I spend my time on.
When you look at things several meta projects / committees exist that work to the benefit of all. The language committee, the Betawiki project, Wikivoices now becoming a meta effort are all examples of this. They are mosty single issue efforts but their impact is high. I think this is rightly so because they walk their talk. I think they are a success because they have a limited scope and they attract people that share a need.
When you talk in terms of all singing and dancing council, you talk about people who are to be involved in EVERYTHiNG. I feel uncomfortable with this notion as it feels like yet another talking shop first and foremost. Compare this with how Betawiki works for instance; a new extension is seen as being relevant and the people at Betawiki do triage on the software; they make it fit the Betawiki environment. A good example is the software Jan-Bart spoke about at the WikiMedia Conferentie Nederland from the UNESCO, Siebrand spend a lot of time on it already.
If I were to start something new, it would be a "council for language support" call it "Wikilanguage". There are several issues that currently do not have a home. if anything issues are talked about at many places and it is hard to get sufficient focus and attention to make a difference. At this moment there are three issues with Unicode support that I am aware off. The Javanese would like to have a Wikisource but Unicode does not (yet) support the Javanese script, the support for SignWriting is not even on the Unicode map yet. For Ripuarian several characters are currently not in Unicode. Only a third of the languages we support in MediaWiki have basic localisation support how can we support the other two thirds better?
There are many people who care about languages or who care about issues with their language. The language committee is because of its charter NOT the place for these issues, so who is to address them? Should we wait for a council? Or should we as is suggested just get people together and make an impact ? Having such a Wikilanguage as part of a council sure, why not, but this is an effort where people do when they do it is not that lack of visibility is a reason for disqualification. Yes, such a Wikilanguage should be open to everyone; when we get things done, more people will come and more issues will find a home.
The most important message comming from such a "wikilanguage" is that we care about these language issues. Thanks, GerardM
PS Yes, we need people helping us localise the UNESCO extension, and all other extensions too. :)
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is a systematic one, and thus very serious. While I have some clue about the problem, I don't pretend to give the full answer about causes, present problems, consequences and possible solutions. It should be analyzed by the whole (at least "meta") community not just because I am not able to gather all data, but because the whole community, or, at least, the significant part of it has to participate in the finding solution and implementing it.
The worst method which may be applied in the situations when some serious problem exists is to lie ourselves and to say that everything is fine, that we just need to interpret data differently.
== Present problems ==
- Communication at this list, as well as other common communication
channels (except blogs!), tends to decline. I am sending this message after two days without any email. While it may be explained with weekend days or so, it is definitely not so usual. One day without emails is usual just for holidays.
- All groups -- global and local -- tend to close itself. If it is not
in the sense of delaying incorporation of new members, it is in the sense of making a group of persons which are self-sufficient and which don't need communication with external part of the community.
- At the project level, especially Wikipedia level, we are not anymore
in the edit war phase. Actually, edit war phase looks now as super healthy phase for the present phase. Present phase is full of much more intelligent destructive persons at the projects, and even supported by the whole and relevant communities. At the other side, people who are willing to deal with such problems don't get enough support from the upper levels.
- When one community gets into the ill situation, even we do the right
things at the right moments -- years (yes, years, one or two, at least) have to pass to put that community in the better position. As a steward I have some clue what is going on inside of some communities and, if my examples -- and there are, I think enough of examples -- are representative, I have to say that we have very significant problems in the most of the communities. Healthy community is an exception; bad relations inside of the community is the rule.
- Except the German (and probably Swiss and Polish) chapter, our
chapters are not more than the groups of Wikipedians which have a formal organization in their countries and which don't know what to do with it. This is especially important because Wikipedia is not anymore "a miracle", but "an ordinary thing" of everyday life. Like an ordinary journalist doesn't have some special need to make news about Google or IBM, an ordinary journalist doesn't have a special need to make news about Wikipedia. During the first year of Wikimedia Serbia, I didn't have to call any journalist, they called me. Today, any media appearance has to be organized. Every chapter needs a PR strategy now. And it is just about PR. What about other things? How many chapters are able to fund some project? I think two: German and Swiss. And, as far as I am introduced, we have more than 20.
- The situation with the software is a chaotic one. There are a lot of
basic and near-to-basic functionalities which we don't have, while we have tons of extensions which are really not necessary (in comparison with the first two groups). The worst thing here is that we don't have systematic thinking about what do we need and how to help to various projects. At the other side, WMF has enough money to fund fundamental software needs.
- Communication between projects are at the positive zero. Yes, there
are some communication, but it is more than very poor. At the other side, I don't see systematic work toward making the communication better. Without communication, we have separate projects hosted at WMF servers, nothing more.
- Besides all of those reasons, I may clearly see decadency inside of
the Wikimedian community. The same decadency which was characteristic of all big societies at the end of the golden era. Bureaucracy is an excuse for not doing things and keeping present positions; openness toward new things is around zero; glorifying of "ol' good days" is more and more common; there are more and more bizarre things; and so on.
I am sure that I may gather other present problems, as well as I am sure that others may add more problems here. The list above is consisted just of things which came into my mind during writing this email.
== Causes ==
As I said at the beginning of this email, causes of those problems are not particular. I don't think that any particular group is responsible for the present systematic problem inside of the Wikimedia community. At the other side, all of us are responsible for that problem. And this is the worst thing: when all and no one are responsible, such problems tend not to be solved.
At the other side, I may list some of the issues which caused this problem:
- WMF tends to work on their issues, related usually just to gathering
money. Presently, we have global financial crisis and I realize why it is a priority, but I also think that Wikimedia is one of the last institutions of the modern world which would loose will for support. A great part of the planet understands the significance of Wikimedia projects and they are willing to help.
- At the other side, WMF is not willing to interfere into the
community issues. As the community (or the communities) was not driven well in the previous years, today WMF Board is the only body able to make significant changes at the level of the global community.
- While transparent work is something desirable, the most of Wikimedia
community bodies are not working transparently. It seems that one thing is to add as Erik's or Sue's duties to report to the community about their work; while the completely other thing is to demand it from volunteers (while I think that no one demanded it from committees, stewards and other groups).
- Efforts to increase communication inside of the community are
partialized. When I was trying some time ago to realize which Wikimedia body has the goal related to communication between projects, I realized that we have ComCom, ComProj, as well as a number of not official communication channels, like Wikizine, Wikipedia Weekly, Not the Wikipedia Weekly and so on are.
- In relation to WMF position, we don't have any meta body which is
able to make some community-wide decision. Solving problems at some community is a matter of personal initiative of some persons. Solving problems in which two or more communities are involved is science fiction for us.
As for the previous section, I am sure that others may add here more issues.
== Consequences ==
- 2008 is the year of Wikipedia stagnation [1]. I am sure that we may
get some more precise data from other statistics, but Alexa's statistics are informative enough. We are not even at the beginning of stagnation (we were in that position at the end of the last year), we are now in very obvious stagnation.
This may be explained by different reasons, including the fact that we reached our reasonable top and that we are not able to go further anymore. If this is the only visible part of our stagnation, it could be interpreted like that. But, it is not. We have other projects which didn't reach their top and they are also in stagnation: Wikinews is at the same level for years; Wikibooks is in stagnation; Wikiversity shows that it has some improvement for the last two months or so -- after years of stagnation.
At the other side, stagnation for us means growing, too: we have more articles every day. But, if we want to keep us inside of this kind of "growing", we have to work extremely clever. We have to automatize a lot of things which we are doing by hand, at least. However, I don't see such moves.
- The worst and the most possible consequence of a stagnation is a
decline. I am not anymore so hard "at the field" and I am not able to see how the things are going on. However, when I went to the article about France (related to one of the previous topics at this list), I realized that during 2006 the article had around 1000 edits per ~4 months. Unlike then, the last 1000 edits were made for one year (between November 2007 and October 2008).
But, the article about France is just the top of the iceberg. It is one of ~1000 articles about which the community will take care "up to the last moment". I am wondering do we have not maintained articles now -- which were maintained fairly well during 2006 or so.
Again, it could be the consequence of the fact that we have now much more articles than we had in 2006. But, the real number about we should take care in this situation is the number of articles per (very active) editor. If the number is growing (in the case of bigger projects) -- we are in the problem: we wouldn't have enough of volunteers to keep the projects.
- World is changing very fast. Position of Wikipedia as the only
source of particular informations is not anymore untouchable. There are projects, wiki projects -- even MediaWiki based -- which have better informations about particular topics than Wikipedia. I see that as a positive tendency. Simply, it is not possible -- as well as it is not necessary -- to gather all kinds of people at one project. Of course, while the knowledge is license-compatible.
But, when people introduced in medicine, linguistics, Star Wars, OpenOffice and so on; when they make relevant sources of informations in their fields; when they cover the most of relevant fields -- Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects wouldn't be so relevant.
And this relevancy is not in the sense of seeking for the best possible information about some issue -- Wikipedia, as any other encyclopedia, is just a starting point -- it is about seeking for the general information. Why should Google, or any search engine, prefer Wikipedia about the encyclopedic informations about OpenOffice at the time when OpenOffice wiki would have better encyclopedic informations about it?
The second problem with that is decline of number of readers and, consequently, of editors. Again, about 10 millions of articles someone should take care. Do we have some relevant approximation about how many editors are enough for keeping projects consistent? What is the line for which we have to fight?
And, the third problem here is a possibility of creation of the real Wikipedia competitor. No one of the previous general purpose wiki encyclopedias are not real Wikipedia (and Wikimedia) competitors. Wikinfo has different POV-related policy, Citizendium has different organization, Knol is much more Citizendium competitor than Wikipedia competitor; there are, of course, a number of projects which cover specific topics, too.
While we may debate about is concurrency a good thing or not (in this case I think it is not because of wasting efforts two times for the same thing in open and generally transparent environment), it is not a question here. The real question is, again, related to decline of number of maintainers of more than 10 millions of articles.
- The last question related to the consequences is: Have we finished
the job? Looking from the point of view of one historian from the future, I am sure that he would say that we did a great job and that we have our place in the history. But, do we think that we finished it? Are there some issues which we haven't done and we are able to do? While I have a long list of what do I think that we haven't done, this is not the question just for me, but to all of us.
If the answer is that we have finished the most important part of the job, we may conclude that should keep Wikimedia projects and that we should start to work on other sides to achieve other goals. If the answer is not, then we should try to move things forward, out of the stagnation and possible decline.
== Possible solutions ==
I was thinking to list possible solutions, general and particular, here. However, I don't think that particular solutions have the place here.
- This is the systematic problem. It is not up to some particular
bodies to work on their own hand and to hope for the best. The only Wikimedian body which is able make a real influence is the Board. However, much wider consensus is needed; much more people than ~10 board members should be included into marking problems, thinking about them and solving them.
- I was very loud about WikiCouncil a couple of months ago. Without
community and Board support it was doomed to failure. Also, while I have to say that I met some great persons during that process, I have to say that we didn't choose each other as a group members, but we had been put together. Such group has to have a couple of persons with strong initiative to survive.
The point here is: no WikiCouncil (or whichever body which is working on the community regulation) -- no community. Yes, a number of communities with different interests exist and will exist, but any kind of cooperation on a lot of not solved global issues is and will be just a nice dream. And, without solving not solved issues, we have come in this position.
- After that, I was thinking that making a new role, global sysop
role, would be able to help in the process of communication between communities. As I mentioned a couple of times, it was the main idea behind my action (besides it is a very useful thing). People should be interested in volunteering. Saying to someone that they should just volunteer is not so motivating action. However, it didn't pass because of some number of things. Even it had a lot of support, even some redefined proposal would have much more support, I concluded that 80% of support is science fiction for any kind of such proposals.
- One more possible solution is to gather people interested in this
issue somewhere and to see their production after a couple of months or so. However, again, it seems to me that there are not so much persons interested in solving this problem. It is maybe a too hard problem for thinking about; maybe the most of Wikimedians don't see this as a problem -- I don't know. (I just know that the problem will be more and more visible.)
There is one more problem with this approach: I don't think that we have couple of months. If nothing would happen during the next couple of months, the situation will be changed. While changed situation is not the end of the world, we would have to redefine our goals. To be honest, I think that we came into the situation when just the group of professionals (at least in the sense of time which they need to spend) is needed.
And, of course, maybe someone has some other ideas...
[1] - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/wikipedia.org
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On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
When you talk in terms of all singing and dancing council, you talk about people who are to be involved in EVERYTHiNG. I feel uncomfortable with this notion as it feels like yet another talking shop first and foremost. Compare this with how Betawiki works for instance; a new extension is seen as being relevant and the people at Betawiki do triage on the software; they make it fit the Betawiki environment. A good example is the software Jan-Bart spoke about at the WikiMedia Conferentie Nederland from the UNESCO, Siebrand spend a lot of time on it already.
A short answer here. There are two different things:
One is related to addressing problems which are not anyone's business. We built some institutions, some of them we didn't. So, anyone who is asking for some kind of help has to have luck: is their problem of the type which has some institution for solving or not. So, there should be a place and group of people which support that place -- which would deal with "the rest of the issues".
The other thing is do we need a centralized place for decisions which affect all projects and communities. I think yes, but it seems that my view is a minority one. So, as we don't have such place, Wikimedians are not able to make decisions at that level. As it is a majority view (majority wants that someone else is making decisions instead of themselves), practically, I don't have anything against the present situation.
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