[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia DC Annual Plan for 2013-14

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Kirill Lokshin <
kirill.lokshin at wikimediadc.org> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> Wikimedia DC has released its Annual Plan for 2013-14.  The plan can be
> found on our wiki at http://wikimediadc.org/wiki/Annual_plan_(2013–2014);
> a
> copy will also be posted on meta shortly.
>
> As always, any comments or suggestions would be very welcome.
>
> Cheers,
> Kirill
>

Thanks for sharing this, and congrats on publishing what looks like a great
plan.

One part I think is a bit vague is the one about analytics development. At
the beginning, you give the example of using WikiMetrics to measure
outcomes of edit-a-thons and such, which is great. Then you take a second
tack later in the document, saying Wikimedia DC will support "the
development and maintenance of a stable set of online tools that can be
used by partner institutions" including creating "a single analytics report
which will aggregate statistics from various existing tools".

Analytics tool development is a complex and difficult problem. In addition
to our technical challenges, there seems to always be many competing
priorities you have to balance, even if you just focus on one end user. If
Wikimedia DC is going to venture in to this territory, I think you could be
clearer about whether you're going to first focus on measurement of your
own programs, or if building a tool(s) for partner institutions is really
something you're best placed to do. These two things have very very
different requirements when it comes to how much money you'd need, people
resources, and so on.

If you're seriously considering building an analytics report of some kind,
I would highly encourage you to reach out the Analytics team at the WMF,
for technical advice and advice from the team of research analysts. (The
public analytics mailing list is a good place to start.) They can also help
you when it comes to figuring out stakeholder analysis and collecting
concise requirements from end users of any analytics tools, since it's
something they have to do inside the Foundation.

Steven