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

[Matthew Roth]

I don't know that anyone else really wants another example, but I'll offer
a couple thoughts. On a personal level, I'm happy that my contact
information is not public, but I'm also happy that the other staff members
have access to it if they need to get in touch with me urgently.

The primary benefit of a closed wiki that I see from my work perspective is
for upcoming press launches with partners when we need to embargo the
information prior to the release date. The most common example is Wikipedia
Zero. We regularly prepare documents, like the Q&A that goes with the
launch, on Office Wiki and then copy it to Foundation Wiki once the press
release is public. We could just do it in Google Docs, but we do need to
keep this information private until the launch (obviously, we wouldn't be
able to manage the story if the press got to it before we wanted them to).
Our PR work is often also part of the contract signed with the partner and
is one of the primary values they see in the partnership, so they are
usually quite concerned with keeping a tight lock on the info until the
release date.

There are also a number of password registrations to the various social
media accounts we manage, the various admin keys for the press release
distribution list and to the various lists like Wikimedia Announce-l that
would also need to stay private in some capacity. Office Wiki proves useful
for that, but theoretically there could be another arrangement, I'm sure.

Of the other material that is in the Communications corner on Office Wiki,
almost all of it is links to public wikis, so it doesn't do much more than
provide an easy location for organizing the links. That could happen just
as easily on Meta or elsewhere.

-Matthew




On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> Oliver Keyes, 10/04/2013 22:43:
>
>
>>     Are you speaking of yourself here? :)
>>
>>
>> As opposed to, speaking as a staffer? Well, I work for Product
>> Development. So the chances of me giving binding policy statements on
>> privacy issues are slim to none :).
>>
>
> No: as opposed to, a staffer that is also not a very active editor. :) The
> part on personal identifying information is one I understand and that's why
> I asked about it, but I don't think it should be on officewiki either; the
> other part on editor background I didn't understand, and I think staffer or
> editor is the same for that.
>
>
>> Speaking personally: I can't think of a single good reason why Victor's
>> stuff should be released. [...]
>>
>
> Neither I do. I only asked if they *require* the compartmentalisation that
> e.g. Tom described – otherwise they could as well happen in a slightly
> different context (like for instance "use the internal wiki more", given
> that's the thread we're in).
>
>
>
>> An illustration here would be: I've got my engagement strategy for what
>> became Page Curation on officewiki. It's a place where I can write and
>> rewrite it, my bosses can check it for stupid, and if there *is* stupid
>> we catch it before it causes problems.
>>
>
> This is fine. Way better than Google Docs shared with few people and then
> quickly lost!
>
>
>  Someone looking at that in
>> isolation would go "this should totally be public! It's about engagement
>> and deployment timetables,and we should be transparent about it".
>>
>
> I really can't imagine who this naïve someone could be. :)
>
>
>  And we
>> are transparent about it - because the document later became public, in
>> an altered and finalised form. But the two aren't necessarily linked
>> together, which makes this rather opaque.
>>
>> There are totally some docs on office-wiki that could do with more
>> publicity. But there are far more that are private - fully private - for
>> a good reason, and I'd imagine some of those that look ready for public
>> release were, in fact, released.
>>
>
> Again, I'm not the one arguing for a "bias towards putting information on
> public wikis" for the sake of it, in this thread. ;-)
>
> I know that some things are always going to be private, and I also think
> that we're not a totalitarian state, so even we officially disallowed
> anything to be private then people would just hide better (e.g. documents
> on private gdocs rather than private wikis; or the good old local hard disk
> + private email).
>
> Nemo
>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.**org <Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>
>



-- 

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
+1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
www.wikimediafoundation.org
*https://donate.wikimedia.org*