[Foundation-l] Communicating effectively: Wikimedia needs clear language now

Sat Feb 18 22:33:51 UTC 2012

Hi Tom,

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:
> Since Wikipedia started in 2001, great effort has been put into
> ensuring that it is readable, clear and understandable by visitors.
> Good Wikipedia writing is clear, concise, comprehensive and
> consistent. Excellent Wikipedia writing is, according to English
> Wikipedia's featured article criteria, "engaging, even brilliant, and
> of a professional standard". Wikipedia editors work hard to remove
> buzzwords, unnecessary jargon, peacock terms, marketing-speak, weasel
> words and other similar clutter from their work.
>
> And it's not just Wikipedia: all of the Wikimedia projects aspire to
> write clearly, neutrally and factually. English Wikinews says simply:
> "Write to be easily understood, to make reading easier."
>
> Sadly, documents and communication from the Foundation, from chapters,
> from board members and so on often fall far short of these sentiments.
>
> There are certain places where it is to be expected that communication
> won't necessarily be clear: I wouldn't expect a non-programmer to be
> able to understand some of the discussions on Bugzilla or
> mediawiki.org, but the Foundation's monthly report is something
> editors should be able to understand.
>
> From January 2012, under Global development's list of department highlights...
>
> "India program: Six outreach workshops in January in partnership with
> the community as part of an effort to increase outreach and improve
> conversion to editing"
>
> An outreach workshop... to increase outreach.
The style may be less than elegant, but isn't it entirely sensible
that if you undertake a larger effort to increase outreach, you carry
out, well, outreach workshops alongside other things?

> Is that a workshop to
> train editors on how to do outreach? Or is it a workshop for newbies
> teaching them how to edit? Enquiring minds want to know.
Fair enough - but it seems to me not so much a question of style than
one regarding level of detail. Remember that you are talking about the
"highlights" for that section, i.e. telegram-style headlines which
summarize more extensive information from below (in this case the
"India Programs" subsection), and that the monthly WMF report, which
synthesizes the work of over 100 employees and contractors, is already
TLDR for many readers - which was one reason for introducing the
separate https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights .
Having said that, I think that a link to
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Outreach_Sessions
might have been useful here.

>
> Later on in the same document: "We concluded an exercise on distilling
> learnings from all Indic communities and started the process of
> seeding ideas with communities."
>
> I was bold and changed "learnings" to "lessons". What is a learning?
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learning#Noun , #3 (which cites a
quote from a New York Times article for that usage). It's not my
personal favorite word either, but honestly, I can think of worse
examples for opaque corporate lingo.

> How does one distill a learning?
Again, Wiktionary to the rescue
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/distill ): "to distill" can be used in
the general sense of "to extract the essence of". So I imagine that to
distill a learning, one sifts through a large amount of information to
extract a relevant insight. How  that was done in this particular case
is, again, a valid question, but once more, the concern would be more
about level of detail than about the style of writing.

> And "seeding ideas with communities"?
> The idea, presumably, is the soil, into which one puts each different
> community. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
>
> This one is a howler from a subpage of the movement roles discussion:
>
> "At the same time, for Wikimedia to adopt the best of the Olympic
> movement would probably raise the bar on accountabilities for chapters
> and other organizations"
>
> Accountabilities, plural? I can understand accountability, the state
> of being accountable to another. But I have no idea what
> accountabilities are. Can you collect them like Pokémon cards? And how
> would one raise the bar on accountabilities? Would that mean some
> accountabilities can't quite reach the bar? (Also, the idea that we
> could learn anything about accountability, singular or plural, from
> the Olympics strikes me as hilarious given the extensive history of
> corruption at the IOC.)
>
> If you search on Meta, it is possible to find lots and lots of other
> documents from the Foundation filled with corporate lingo. Projects
> are 'scoped', and there is a list of 'deliverables' -- not just any
> deliverables but 'specific deliverables' -- along with 'next steps' to
> deliver, err, those deliverables while 'going forward'.
>
> I can't be the only one who reads these things and whose brain stalls
> or goes into reverse. There have been numerous things where I've had
> to ask Foundation contacts to explain things in clear and simple
> language to me. I don't think I'm particularly stupid or uninformed.
> Nor do I think that the people who write in the manner I've described
> do it consciously. But we do need to fix it. If well-educated,
> informed native English speakers struggle with learnings and
> accountabilities and so on, what about those who don't natively speak
> English? When people see sloppy, buzzword-driven language, they wonder
> if this reflects sloppy, buzzword-driven thinking, or perhaps
> obfuscation. Clear writing signals the opposite: clear thinking and
> transparency.
>
> I'm not suggesting we all need to write as if we're editing Simple
> English Wikipedia. But just cut out the buzzwords and write plainly
> and straightforwardly like the best writing on Wikipedia.
>
> What can be done about this?
>
> There seem to be two possible solutions to this problem: one involves
> hiring a dominatrix with a linguistics degree to wander the San
> Francisco office with handcuffs, a bullwhip, a number of live gerbils
> and plentiful supplies of superglue, and given free reign to enforce
> the rules in whatever way she deems fit.

Minus the sexual fantasies, a lot of this is already going on at the
Foundation. Among the various communications people who help
Foundation employees/contractors to inform the community and the
public about their work, by reviewing and editing reports or blog
posts before they are published, there are in fact longtime
Wikipedians like our Technical Communications Manager Guillaume (cf.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Blog/Guidelines&diff=next&oldid=2651649#No_puffing
) and myself (whose edit summaries on Wikipedia frequently include
links to [[WP:PEACOCK]] ;). I'm not saying there is no room for
improvement, but there is a lot of that stuff which doesn't make it
into the published versions that you see.

> The other, which involves far
> fewer embarrassing carpet stains, is to empower the community to fix
> these problems. Have a nice little leaderboard on Meta, and encourage
> community members to be bold, fix up bad writing, bad grammar and
> buzzwords. Reward their efforts with barnstars and the occasional
> thank you messages on talk pages.
>
> Commit to clear writing by adopting a policy of "copyediting almost
> always welcome" for chapter wikis, Foundation documents and as close
> to everything as possible.

You mean something like the conspicuous notice saying "You are more
than welcome to edit this report for the purposes of usefulness,
presentation, etc" that has been included on the top of each of the
Foundation's monthly reports on Meta for almost two years now
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_April_2010
) ?

> There are volunteers in the movement who
> happily spend hour after hour copyediting on Wikipedia and Wikinews
> and Wikibooks and so on. Give them the opportunity to fix up the
> language used by the Foundation and the chapters.

As exemplified above, for many texts published by the Foundation, this
opportunity is already there (even those on Meta which do not carry
that explicit invitation are on a wiki for a reason). And even on the
closed Foundation wiki, many volunteers have editing rights and help
out with exactly the sort of thing you describe (example from this
week: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Draft/Staff_titles ).

So I think it is more about motivating volunteers to take up this
opportunity, rather than creating it. In fact, let me use the occasion
and thank the volunteers who have copyedited or corrected the WMF
monthly reports on Meta since I took over the task of publishing them
in August, who include Tony1, Graham87, Ainali, Peteforsyth, Mike
Peel, Jeremyb, Rich Farmbrough, Akaniji  and yourself.

>
> Remember: how can community members support and become more deeply
> involved with the work of the chapters and the Foundation if they
> can't understand what you are saying?
>

While I don't find all of your examples convincing, I fully endorse
your goal in general and am in fact grateful for your email for
entirely selfish reasons: It has the potential to facilitate my work a
bit by providing valuable ammunition ;)

> --
> Tom Morris
> <http://tommorris.org/>
>
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-- 
Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB