[Foundation-l] Making wikimediafoundation.org more open to contributions

[Stephanie Daugherty]

I think one thing that would help tremendously would be to decide on a
convention, be it subpages, or pseudo-namespaces, or a combination of the
two for grouping related content on meta and stick to it. When
a separate wiki is needed for technology demonstration, figure out (probably
through an extension) how to mirror the content between meta and the
separate wiki. This keeps everything together, and would improve the long
term participation and visibility.

As far as the development and planning being largely English only, it's a
matter more so of convenience and practicality to have a common language for
the development and inter-project collaboration, and this is largely a
healthy thing - it's unfortunate. but in this case we have to choose between
having a common language for this purpose and excluding non-English speakers
or collaborating in native tongues and fragmenting the WMF community as a
whole. Translations should happen - and this is an area where we need
ambassadors to make sure that non-English communities are reached not only
with messages of outreach, but also kept informed and given opportunities to
participate in their native language by insuring that meaningful comments
get translated back and included in the conversation.

Where it's beneficial just for visibility of a particular area, such as
outreach, how hard would it be technologically to engineer extensions to
give a namespace-restricted view of the outreach content on Meta - in other
words, if we had an Outreach namespace, and
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/just pulled it's entire content from
this namespace - any links outside the
namespace get translated to "interwiki" links when viewed on Outreach, and
Outreach:Main Page on Meta becomes the main page on outreach. This solves
the best interests of both consolidation and centralization, as well as the
positive benefits of having it's own wiki.

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 12:13 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 2011/1/29 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>:
> > Having many wikis is an ongoing source of irritation for many, and it
> > would be great to resolve this issue. Are there good arguments *for*
> > having separate sites?
>
> Yes, and I think most people generally underestimate the complexity of
> the issue. The reasons for WMF to spin up separate sites have varied,
> but to try to put it as simply as possible, a dedicated wiki, in all
> technical and social respects, focuses collaborative activity, which
> can enhance productivity and reduce barriers to participation. In the
> case of e.g. StrategyWiki, it also allowed us to try some radical
> changes (like using LQT on all pages, or receiving hundreds of
> proposals as new page creations) without disrupting some surrounding
> context. I have absolutely no regrets about our decision to launch
> StrategyWiki, for example -- I think it was the right decision, with
> exactly the expected benefits.
>
> Meta itself has grown organically to support various community
> activities and interests that had no other place to go. It has never
> been significantly constrained by its mission statement. The "What
> Meta is not" page only enumerates two examples of unacceptable use:
>
> 1. A disposal site for uncorrectable articles from the different
> Wikipedias, and it is not a hosting service for personal essays of all
> types.
> 2. A place to describe the MediaWiki software.
>
> Its information architecture, in spite of many revisions, has never
> kept up with this organic growth, making Meta a very confusing and
> intimidating place for many, especially when one wants to explore or
> use the place beyond some specific reason to go there (vote in an
> election, nominate a URL for the spam blacklist, write a translation).
>
> So, let's take the example of OutreachWiki as a simple case study to
> describe the differences between the two wikis.
>
> 1) The wiki's main page and sidebar are optimized for its stated purpose;
> 2) As a new user, you receive a welcome message that's specifically
> about ways you can support public outreach (
> http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome )
> 3) All special pages remain useful to track relevant activity or
> content without applying further constraints;
> 4) Userboxes and user profiles can be optimized for the stated purpose
> (e.g. http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Languages_and_skills )
> 5) There's very little that's confusing or intimidating -- the content
> is clean, simple, and organized.
> 6) If the OutreachWiki community wants to activate some site-wide
> extension, it can do so, focusing only on its own needs.
>
> On the other hand:
>
> 1) Activity is very low;
> 2) The wiki is largely in English;
> 3) Meta has a long tradition of hosting outreach-related content, and
> many pages still reside there or are created there.
> 4) The existence of yet-another-wiki brings tons of baggage and
> frustration (more dispersed change-tracking for users who want to keep
> up with all activity, more creation of meta/user page/template
> structures, more setup of policies and cross-wiki tools, etc.).
>
> It's not a given that 1) and 2) are a function of having a separate
> wiki. As we've seen with StrategyWiki, activity is largely the result
> of focused activation of the community. The small sub-community that
> cares about public outreach on Meta is ridiculously tiny compared with
> the vast global community that could potentially be activated to get
> involved through centralnotices, village pumps, email announcements,
> etc. So the low level of activity on OutreachWiki is arguably "only" a
> failure of WMF to engage more people, not a failure of a separate
> wiki. (It certainly makes all the associated baggage much harder to
> justify.)
>
> But, I think the disadvantages of working within a single system can
> be rectified for at least the four most closely related backstage
> wikis (Meta/WMF/Strategy/Outreach). I do think working towards a
> www.wikimedia.org wiki is the way to do that, importing content in
> stages, with a carefully considered information architecture that's
> built around the needs of the Wikimedia movement, a very crisp mission
> statement and list of permitted and excluded activities, a WikiProject
> approach to organizing related activity, etc. But it also would need
> to include consideration for needed technological and configuration
> changes, in descending importance:
>
> - namespaces (e.g. for essays, proposals, public outreach resources,
> historical content)
> - template and JS setup to support multiple languages well (e.g.
> mirroring some of the enhancements made to Commons)
> - access controls (e.g. for HTML pages)
> - FlaggedRevs/Pending Changes (e.g. for official WMF or chapter
> information)
> - LiquidThreads (e.g. for a movement-wide forum that could
> increasingly subsume listservs)
> - Semantic MediaWiki/Semantic Forms (e.g. for event calendars)
>
> To simplify security considerations, we might want to have all
> fundraising-related content elsewhere (e.g. donate.wikimedia.org).
>
> An alternative strategy, of course, is to focus on making the
> distinction between different wikis as irrelevant as possible by
> vastly improving cross-wiki tools, but the former approach seems more
> viable in the not too distant future. I don't think "just move it all
> to Meta" is the correct answer.
>
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
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