[Foundation-l] Five-year WMF targets exclude non-Wikipedia projects

[Erik Moeller]

2010/10/14 Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>:
> A very small improvement to Wikipedia may cost much, much more than a
> huge improvement to projects where we've never invested almost anything.
> And I could give you a list of examples (from the past) and proposals
> (for the future), but we would be OT.

I think you're neglecting an important dimension of strategy here,
which is risk analysis. It's absolutely not clear to me (and I don't
think anyone) that a focused investment in, say, textbook development
is actually going to result in predictable payoff in a
transformatively larger number of sustainable content contributors.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a potential for such an investment
to be successful, and it doesn't mean that it's not a risk worth
taking.

Principally, I think it would be fair to say that WMF's investment
priorities so far have been focused on achieving high impact with
manageable risk. We've made higher risk investments primarily through
processes like the chapters grants process, where risk is distributed
across a large number of smaller projects and players, and focused
larger technological investments on obviously needed improvements
(e.g. usability, operations infrastructure, etc.) and community
investments on capacity development and shared resources (e.g. chapter
development, outreach bookshelf, etc.). Many of these efforts should
help all our projects, but obviously, there are very specific
improvements that are justifiable for both existing and hypothetical
projects.

I've tried to do a bit of an assessment of the different projects and
associated investment risks in my Wikimania presentation this year --
that's just my own take, of course:
http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Beyond_the_Encyclopedia:_The_Frontiers_of_Free_Knowledge

I do think it's absolutely important to have a conversation about what
calculated higher risk investments would be worth prioritizing. I
think better improved structured data support across the board would
be one of the first higher-risk technology projects that would make
sense, and would support all our projects -- that's why we're doing a
data summit later this year to identify possible partners for work in
this area. But let's not kid ourselves -- transformatively increasing
the productivity and success of efforts like Wiktionary, Wikibooks,
and Wikisource is not just a matter of tiny injections of bugfixes and
extensions here and there. It's a matter of serious assessment of all
underlying processes and developing social and technical architectures
to support them. I hope that we'll eventually be able to make such
investments, but I also think it's entirely reasonable to prioritize
lower risk investments.

For the purpose of the five-year targets, we've given a fairly
comprehensive explanation why we ended up with this particular target,
in full understanding of the fact that it gives an incomplete picture.
As we've emphasized, these aren't the only targets and indicators that
we're using. And so far I haven't seen any great alternatives for the
five audacious call-outs that both reflect an actual shared
understanding of what we want to accomplish and don't suffer from
multiplied definitional problems. What would you do instead?

All best,
Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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