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(a)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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