Greetings,
The reading team has been having a series of meetings as part of the ongoing strategy process,. We documented and clarified as much details as possible, here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process, in order to empower everyone to become part of the process, while following the same methodology.
For example, instead of saying "*The overall page views numbers are declining and thats a problem that we need to solve*" by applying our process, the suggested statement is questioned to whether this is a problem in itself or it is a result of another problem? If we picked one possible reason, what are our choices to solve the problem, and what possibilities does each choice entail? What are the concerns with each possibility and what are the tests that we need to run to justify our concerns?
Sounds complicated? :-) Not really. The key is to ask the right questions and always remain focused on the initial problem.
In our own exercise, we identified one problem that manifests itself across different indicators is our core system's lack of optimization for emerging platforms, experiences, and communities.
The team can not do this alone. We need more people to join our exercise, please check the documentation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process, make yourself familiar with the process, and think of suggesting choices https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process/Choices, generating possibilities https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process/Possibilities, and designing tests https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process/Tests. Questions and comments are welcome on the talk page.
Lets get this done, together!
Happy weekend, M
In our own exercise, we identified one problem that manifests itself across different indicators is our core system's lack of optimization for emerging platforms, experiences, and communities.
What does that even mean?
What's an emerging platform? Hardware platform (e.g. Do you mean mobile? But Its debatable whether mobile is emerging or has already emerged. Apple watch? Google glass? VR systems?)? Software platforms? Some other sort of platform?
What's an emerging experience? (I don't even have a guess as to what this means)
What's an emerging community? Emerging internally (e.g. WikiProjects)? Emerging externally (e.g. Whatever tommorow's version of reddit will be)? Sister projects? Something else?
I feel like this "problem" is so vague, it might as well be "Our software does not fully meet the needs of all our users".
I'm also unclear which of issues from step 1 fit this theme. There are some, but it seems like its less then other potential themes. Any particular reason why this theme was chosen? Is it because its the only theme that can be fixed by straight up development work, rather then mushy social issues?
--- My take away from the issues brainstormed at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process#Step_1:_IDE... would be a unifying theme of misunderstanding.
We don't seem to have a good grasp on what our users (editors or readers) actually need. We don't have a great working relationship with our user communities, and other partners within the Wikimedia movement. According to that wikipage, internally there is fractionalism within WMF.
No group can make big changes alone. We need to understand other groups inside the Wikimedia movement better, and they need to understand "us" better. I simply do not believe we will succeed at solving our other problems until this problem is solved.
Obviously this is larger than just the reading group.
-- -bawolff
p.s. Please keep in mind, that the goal is to create "a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", not necessarily to drive traffic to Wikimedia web properties. Users accessing content through third parties, is not a bad thing, but actually a sign of success.
On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 9:28 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
In our own exercise, we identified one problem that manifests itself
across
different indicators is our core system's lack of optimization for
emerging
platforms, experiences, and communities.
What does that even mean?
Just for the record, I commented similarly at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process#Defini... before seeing your message here.
Let's consider one of my pet bugbears: Chinese wikipedia. Our readership numbers are way below what we'd like, and as I understand it, total # of editors and articles is low as well. So obviously a problem for the reading team, right?
However, a solution needs to grapple with the problem of creating content for zhwiki, which would involve language engineering and the editing team. Handling language variants better for reading would be good, too, but (AFAIK) we don't have a single active member of zhwiki on staff (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_engagement/Staff_involvement), and just a single engineer fluent in Mandarin (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/HR_Corner/Languages). [My numbers could be slightly off here, forgive me if so. But clearly we don't have a *huge presence* from zhwiki on-staff, the way we do for, say, enwiki.] So maybe we need to involve HR?
There are politics involved, too: perhaps the solution would involve the Community Engagement team, to try to build up the local wikipedia community and navigate the politics?
My point is that even a narrow focus on increasing page views fails to address the more fundamental issues responsible, which spill outside of the team silo. So a strategy session isolated to the reading team risks either missing the forest for the trees (concentrating only on problems solvable locally), or else generating a lot of problems and discussion on issues which can't be addressed without involving the wider organization. (I rather expected to see the former, but most of the issues currently on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process seem to be the latter.)
I think a strategy process probably needs a mix of both near- and far-sightedness. Identifying issues which can be solved by the team itself (better engagement with users, for example), but also having a process for escalating issues that require a more organizational response. The latter seems especially important for a team composed mostly of remote workers, since there aren't the same informal watercooler-talk mechanisms available for building awareness of broader needs. --scott
Thanks for those thoughts, C. Scott. I, for the most part agree, but want to add some context and some thinking around this issue exactly as it has come up a bit. Though involved in the process, the thoughts below are my own interpretation.
For expediency's sake, this process started with the reading team, with a focus on what 'we' as a team should do (the trees). But as we embarked on the strategic process, we quickly uncovered that our primary strategic problems (the forest) were probably not ones we could solve by ourselves. I think artificially limiting ourselves to this footprint would have shut down creative thinking quite a bit and I, at least, felt it was necessary that we understand and have ideas around the larger issues impacting our readers. As a team, collectively identifying the forces that impact our work, whether in our control or not, was incredibly powerful and enlightening.
So, I think you're right that most meaningful strategies we would consider would involve collaboration with (or even ownership by) other teams. For this reason, and others, a very important part of this process is communicating out our findings and our assumptions and then collaborating with other team's as necessary.
For example, *if*, as part of our process, we suspected that the strategy that would impact our readers the most would be to include more videos on the site, *one* of the 'tests' of this strategy would be: is this something we can solve or is this something we could have a meaningful impact on. We would welcome external input on how to answer this. If the answer is 'no', we would tell everyone "hey, this is not going to be 'Reading's' strategy, but we think it is a killer strategy for readers that we would like to support editing/community/etc. on..."
Let me know how that sits. I'm going to be offline until Monday, so expect a delayed response on my part. -J
On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 9:35 AM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:
Let's consider one of my pet bugbears: Chinese wikipedia. Our readership numbers are way below what we'd like, and as I understand it, total # of editors and articles is low as well. So obviously a problem for the reading team, right?
However, a solution needs to grapple with the problem of creating content for zhwiki, which would involve language engineering and the editing team. Handling language variants better for reading would be good, too, but (AFAIK) we don't have a single active member of zhwiki on staff (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_engagement/Staff_involvement), and just a single engineer fluent in Mandarin (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/HR_Corner/Languages). [My numbers could be slightly off here, forgive me if so. But clearly we don't have a *huge presence* from zhwiki on-staff, the way we do for, say, enwiki.] So maybe we need to involve HR?
There are politics involved, too: perhaps the solution would involve the Community Engagement team, to try to build up the local wikipedia community and navigate the politics?
My point is that even a narrow focus on increasing page views fails to address the more fundamental issues responsible, which spill outside of the team silo. So a strategy session isolated to the reading team risks either missing the forest for the trees (concentrating only on problems solvable locally), or else generating a lot of problems and discussion on issues which can't be addressed without involving the wider organization. (I rather expected to see the former, but most of the issues currently on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process seem to be the latter.)
I think a strategy process probably needs a mix of both near- and far-sightedness. Identifying issues which can be solved by the team itself (better engagement with users, for example), but also having a process for escalating issues that require a more organizational response. The latter seems especially important for a team composed mostly of remote workers, since there aren't the same informal watercooler-talk mechanisms available for building awareness of broader needs. --scott
-- (http://cscott.net)
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