[Wikimedia-l] Proposal to use the internal wiki more

Wed Apr 10 17:22:42 UTC 2013

>From my perspective:

In my role as storyteller I conduct many personal interviews with Wikimedia
volunteers, donors and staff.

I have several pages of interviews and photos of volunteers and donors(!)
that have been gracious enough to share their story with me and the
WMF. Each person who has been interviewed as part of my role has signed a
legal release to 'share their story'. I keep the raw, unpolished interviews
on pages on the password protected:
https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Stories knowing that they are
available only to myself and staff at the WMF. I use that raw material to
release polished works like this:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Thank_You_All . During the course of an
interview, people sometimes say things that when reviewed later, they wish
they hadn't. Out of respect and decency for those interviewed, I want each
person alerted every time WMF plans to use their story, should that person
not want that information released. I won't 'hide' behind a legal waiver
and do whatever when someone shares a story with the WMF.

I also need to be able to share the interviews with others at WMF because
they may have instances when they need to illustrate something with a
personal story (that is my job) and it can be more convenient for them to
review these stories on an organized page than to have to ask me to be a
librarian for them and suggest a story.

Privacy is very important, and I have to take it seriously. I could remove
all the interviews from the office wiki and keep them offline, but I would
not feel comfortable making the material public without passing it by all
those interviewed first, which would take a lot of time to do, since I'm
nearing almost 2 years of interviews.

All this said, I am all in favor of making as much content as possible on
https://collab.wikimedia.org/ and https://office.wikimedia.org/  public.

Victor

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 8:07 AM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <
tom at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi Phoebe and all,
>
> I am not say if saying this is wrong or brakes the confidentiality contract
> I've signed as a contractor. My apologies if it is wrong, but I think it is
> not. I am sorry to say there are some documents of projects I have been
> working on that I believe could be done directly on meta or some other
> public wiki. There are some cases, yes, some more elaborated document
> should be done to be released in public, but I don't think it is always the
> case.
>
> I believe we are wasting resources and energy in some cases not using the
> community intelligence and knowledge, even having very high qualified
> professionals working on this documents, as it is the case I have seen so
> far. Closed mailing lists, closed wikis, closed working groups, closed
> meetings... all this doesn't make me feel comfortable, to be honest.
>
> I don't want create a pandemonium here. My opinion here is just to share
> one thing I've felt that can diminish the power of crowdsourcing we are all
> used to and I believe we have to think ways to improve that.
> Wikimediaworld it too complex, there is too much information, projects
> and opinions
> going on and it is really difficult to organize all that.
>
> For instance, there is this https://collab.wikimedia.org What is this
> for?!
> I have receive (maybe?) one e-mail about this wiki and once I've seen a lot
> of crucial and important answers for the Brazil program were there. I
> cannot understand why it is not public. Really. Just to you have an idea,
> I've asked in December to have this collab (Collab of collaboration?) wiki
> to be on the main page of office wiki, but no answer so far.
>
> The organization has grown too fast and maybe it is time to rethink our
> best practices and how we operate, analysing everything we are using,
> creating a kind of guide, mainly for those professionals that will arrive?
> If I am not wrong, how can we do that?
>
> I love this from another group
>
> "Running through all of our activities is a strong emphasis on
> *decentralized
> collaboration*. In particular, a primary aim is to help others develop open
> material as well as creating it ourselves. We believe that the future lies
> in collaboration between a multitude of different groups and that *no one
> group or organisation can, or should try to, “do it all*”. It is when we
> work together that we are the strongest."
>
> and I am not saying it is easy to implement it. But we have to be self
> critical on how to achieve this, for those who agree it is a better way to
> work.
>
> Tom
>
> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 5:39 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > You're being snarky, but I am going to take this as a good-faith
> > question....
> >
> > I have access to the office wiki, left-over from being a board member,
> > though I do not edit there and have only accessed it a couple of times
> over
> > the years. I think I can safely say without violating confidentiality
> that
> > it is mainly used as a tool to run a discrete, physical, boring office.
> It
> > is where you will find things like staff phone numbers, info on the
> > employee health plans, how to send to the office printers, and how to
> > submit an expense report.
> >
> > As on internal, there's also lots of outdated stuff, like old notes from
> > 2008 staff meetings; there are scratchpad idea pages that probably could
> be
> > elsewhere, and there are some pages about department functions and
> project
> > drafts that I'm sure no one would mind being on meta, but much of the
> > interesting stuff is public (the annual plan, the communications
> calendar),
> > and as far as I can see with a quick scan there are not large-scale
> > discussions happening there.
> >
> > So, back to the start of the thread: using a wiki effectively does seem
> > like a scoping question, yes, and I think internal (and any other
> > internal/private wiki) would benefit from specific scoping like Mike
> > proposes; his suggestions seem reasonable to me. I think I can also say
> > without violating confidentiality that almost all of the mail to the
> > internal list in the last few months has not been discussion focused, but
> > rather has been notices of chapter board elections, meetings and reports,
> > and I would love to see all that traffic be public (even if it's on a
> > separate list so not everyone has to get the notices if they're not
> > interested) -- there's nothing inherently confidential about it, and it
> > would be nice for that info to be easily findable.
> >
> > -- phoebe
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
> "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
> than a life spent doing nothing."
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>

-- 

*Victor Grigas*
Storyteller <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knv6D6Thi0>
Wikimedia Foundation
vgrigas at wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839-6885 x 6773
149 New Montgomery Street 6th floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
https://donate.wikimedia.org/