Hi.
I don't know how you're going to shoehorn "we" into "Wikimedia
movement".
I guess, similar to putting the "me" in "team", it will require
transposing letters? Or perhaps dropping letters altogether (since we[!]
already have a W and several Es)? Hmm, or I suppose a careful alignment of
the two words might do it...
Wikimedia
movement
David Cuenca Tudela wrote:
During this Wikimedia Conference 2015 there was a
paradigm shift in the
way problems are expressed. It was highlighted that the wikimedia
movement is not only about gathering and sharing knowledge, but also
about the people behind it, about finding ways to enhance the
togetherness that is created by participating in our sites, no matter
which ones they are in the present, and no matter which they will be in
the future.
Not to rain on your revelation, but I hardly think this is new or a
paradigm shift. That said, I didn't attend Wikimedia Conference 2015.
That goodwill can be cultivated at upper levels too.
Sometimes there are
decisions that must be taken to improve our sites, and some of them have
created a lot of drama which maybe could have been minimized by enabling
expression spaces, where there can be some real communication happening,
that is, bidirectional, and not to force any ideas, just to foster
understanding.
Right now, the reality is that Wikipedia is massively popular without the
help of nearly anyone at the upper level of the current Wikimedia
Foundation management. In my mind, the new upper management of the
Wikimedia Foundation has a lot more to learn from the Wikimedia movement
than vice versa. Which one of them has over a decade of experience
building Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia? :-)
There's plenty of work to be done, to be sure, but I get annoyed when I
read statements such as "decisions that must be taken to improve our
sites" that created drama. Forcing software on a volunteer community is a
bad idea and many of the recent dramas seem to involve some version of
doing that. I think it says a lot that people at the Wikimedia Foundation
have been so uncomfortable with the products they've created that the
sheer awesomeness of the products alone can't attract people to want to
use them. VisualEditor, ArticleFeedbackTool, MediaViewer, etc. are all
examples of this. (VisualEditor, by the way, is a lot better now.)
It's not about open communication, exactly, it's about building products
that people want and want to have enabled, instead of trying to force
subpar products on volunteers, many of whom have limited time and patience.
If you build great products, users will want to use them and have them
enabled by default. If your users are all rejecting your product and your
product is actively damaging the sites that these volunteers care for,
your product sucks and you likely either don't understand your target
audience or you don't understand the problems you're intending to solve.
In the wikimedia movement there is a serious lack of
said expression
spaces. For instance, during the WMCON 15, it was the first time that user
groups representatives seated down together, also with some WMF employees,
to discuss user groups in an open manner. I think it is a big step forward
which paves the way in other areas too.
I very much doubt that this was the first time that Wikimedians sat down
and discussed user groups. ;-)
Problems of the past like VE deployment schedule, and
the upcoming Commons
reform could profit of the "sit-and-talk" approach.
Like Jane, I'm curious what you mean by Commons reform. Can you please
elaborate?
MZMcBride