Talk:Task force/Content scope
I think all the content on the Task force/Content scope page should be here at the top of the Discussion page and the content on Task force/Content scope/Project policy draft should be on the Task Force/Content page i.e. one talk page and one content page.
- [History↑]
Contents
| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Where we are now 6/5 | 2 | 13:54, 9 May 2010 |
| Next move | 8 | 09:23, 30 April 2010 |
| Reconfigure the page | 6 | 00:48, 29 April 2010 |
| Summary of what we have so far | 5 | 18:39, 17 April 2010 |
| Main page rewrite | 9 | 20:34, 12 April 2010 |
| A conversation starter | 23 | 21:08, 9 April 2010 |
| Expanding Content | 30 | 15:35, 1 April 2010 |
We have now essentially three documents that this task force is working on. These are
There has been quite a bit of work on the first two, but could we do better with the last one. I think the page could describe the incubator process as well. I think we also should discuss if the incubator maybe should be used for all new language projects to have a unified approach. And also if the incubator should be used for completely new projects as mentioned in this weeks IRC office hour and on Talk:Content_scope.
I disagree.
Process is something that can be worked out by others later. This is the Strategy wiki looking at general strategic issues.
The process page here should list out the strategic goals that the process must address (fairness, check there really is a community, others things) or achieve but I don't think we need to dictate exactly how this is done.
Eloquence proposed that we should revivie and reform the meta:New project policy, which includes process details. That is why I thought the process descriptiption should be worked on as well. In addition the question about how the incubator should be used is a strategic question that has been rised. Working on the process description might give insight into these questions.
But it is fine with me if we decide to just work on the project policy.
Okey. So there has been some time to populate the list of things that need to be free and I guess there is time to try to move on.
I merged the vision paragraph previously writen on the content scope main page with the text on What Wikimedia is. The result is now found on the project policy draft page. Can we continue working on this draft?
Also, is there any answers to Elouquence questions:
- When and how will existing external projects be adopted by WMF?
- Under what circumstances will WMF dedicate significant technical resources to a new project idea?
- How and when can we assess the success or failure of a project, beyond simply polling people?
- When and how will existing WMF projects be "spun off" to other organizations or entities (including potentially chapters)?
- Should there be a dedicated incubator wiki for new projects, not just new languages?
I think the most useful thing would be to come up with a checklist or point system that allows the foundation to figure out which ones are valuable. If they're really valuable, put resources behind it. If they're somewhat valuable, let them run without much investment. If they have mostly costs (tangible and intangible) from running, then don't do them at all.
Any ideas about what such a checklist would look like?
What about the Questions to be asked before a project is accepted on the project policy draft page? Maybe some additional points can be taken from project costs?
I took a shot at a few more broad questions, with a bunch of details. Might not be the best way to organize it, though.
Great! I made some further changes. Rearanged it, reformated it, included much of the material from project costs, and referred to the list of things that need to be free. I hope I improved it.
We lack content about closing and spining out projects. And I think some of the material about the actuall project approval process from new project policy at meta should be included.
I think including a discussion of the current new project policy is really important. It would be even better if we could make a concrete proposal for reforming that policy. (Perhaps it doesn't need reforming; a little cleanup might do.)
Looks solid to me. I guess we just want more feedback to see if there's anything controversial, or anything missing.
I think the work thus far has been really great. In terms of next steps, I think the focus should be on the Task force/Content scope/What Wikimedia is document.
Specifically, we need to do a better job of tackling some very hard questions. The question I'd like to explore is the one about how we end projects. If our approach is incubation, then the goal should be to spin out projects, not to let them live under the Wikimedia banner forever. In fact, having projects under the Wikimedia banner might actually hurt them. For example, with Wiktionary, it became clear that MediaWiki had some limitations. New software was developed, but because of the Wikimedia Foundation's limited resources, it was never integrated, and OmegaWiki forked. Was this the best thing that could have happened? What could have improved?
I think all the content on the Task force/Content scope page should be here at the top of the Discussion page and the content on Task force/Content scope/Project policy draft should be on the Task Force/Content page i.e. one talk page and one content page.
Before I do I am checking if anyone here has any strong objections.
I want to do this because I feel the discussion is going off in too many directions and we will end up with an unusable mess where any policy you care to name will have a page devoted to it somewhere. We need to start distilling down to the essential, editing and cutting out the repetition and the unclear generalities. Anyone object?
I think the way the pages are organized is clean right now. Can you give us an example of the repetition you see that your proposal will cure?
Clean is one content page with one discussion page.
That is the way every page on Wikipedia and the other wikimedia projects are laid out. Creating content forks of pages is stringly discouraged there. I'm not saying that is the only way to do things. I am saying it is the way I and wiki editors are familiar with and there is no good reason to start experimenting with other schemes here.
I have tried to contribute to the Content page but twice it has been moved out from under me and I have found myself editing the 'wrong version'.
I find the arrangement here confusing and I believe this arrangement has led to much more discussion than production.
The words on the Content page seem to be all about the process of arriving at a Content scope policy and so they would be better on the Talk page with the content page kept for the actual Content scope policy draft.
That's actually a fair point. I can't point to anything specific, but I've found my attention split between a lot of different pages, and a lot of stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Having one main talk page with one main work page is a good goal to strive for.
I think your point about having a process that Wikipedians is used to is very valid and an important one. At the same time I think there needs to be a central gathering point for the task forces. The task forces are not about creating one specific content page, but to gather and synthesise information relating to the given task. And this might need the creation of more than one content page. Instead of having each Task force discussing what to research next on the village pump, I think it is a good idea to have these Task force pages as task specific village pumps, with the main page linking to all content produced and the task force discussion taking place on the talk page.
However, discussion about the specific content on each content page should for sure take place on each content page talk page, so it is not very different from Wikipedia in that sense. It's just that these few task force pages serve another purpose than ordinary article pages. Actually I wonder if this kind of structure maybe is something that should be considered if original research should take of on Wikiversity. Maybe to Wikipedia-like editing is one limiting factor there.
By the way, I apologise if I confused you by moving your content.
If over the course of editing the Content scope page we find that it would work better split into two different pages then we split it and not before. One Content Scope page with one attached discussion means we have one place to discuss Content Scope.
The output of the Task Force is a page or pages of recommendations. All the discussion needs to be centered on that. Any discussion on what to research next needs to be discussed in the context of what we need to add to the page we are working on. There is no need for a separate task force village pump until we have enough pages that coordination is required. We are not there yet.
I think we have consensus to try my way. OK?
I don't think it's useful at this point to remerge all of the content onto one page. However, if everyone else wants to do that, I won't raise an objection.
I do object, however, to merging all of this content onto Task force/Content scope. The Task Force page is a project-oriented page, not a content-oriented one.
This is an attempt at summarizing the discussion so far, and to give ideas about where to go next.
The core questions in the Expanding content thread was:
- Should we expand into new projects, what should the criteria for new projects be, and should projects be required to use MediaWiki?
- What are the project costs of supporting yet another project?
- Should the foundation choose a few projects that it can keep its focus on, and which?
- Are there new ways not considered earlier in which exciting and promising projects can be made to take of. Here with an example of spining of Wikinews to a nonprofit, comunity owned for-profit, or a venture-backed something or other, and so on.
Eloquence also proposed that this task force could try reviving and reforming the New project policy and by doing so, try to answer the questions
- When and how will existing external projects be adopted by WMF?
- Under what circumstances will WMF dedicate significant technical resources to a new project idea?
- How can we assess the success or failure of a project, beyond simply polling people?
- When and how will existing WMF projects be "spun off" to other organizations or entities (including potentially chapters)?
- Should there be a dedicated incubator wiki for new projects, not just new languages?
Eloquence also proposed that it would be important to clarifying the importance of different types of content for Wikimedia's mission.
As an answer to this, Filceolaire has begun writing what is intended to be a new Policy draft. This is found at Task force/Content scope/What Wikimedia is (should probably rename this to "New project policy" or something similar). Some initial comments from Eloquence about the cost of new projects has been written down on Task force/Content scope/Project costs. And a List of things that need to be free has begun to be populated.
So where do we go from here?
- To continue the work of reviving and reforming the New project policy at Task force/Content scope/What Wikimedia is and trying to answer Eloquence five questions is one track.
- Continuing to populate the List of things that need to be free, and evaluating which of these currently are supported by WMF, other organizations, and which can be supported by WMF, is a second track.
- And trying to quantify the project costs on Task force/Content scope/Project costs is a third track.
Can we try to work in parallel on these?
Any ideas on how to make further progress on these tracks? And any other ideas on what to do next?
Thanks for the summary.
I'm sorry to not be more helpful but i have no experience on creating a new wikimedia project from scratch.
Neither have I, but I hope people that has will join the discussion. Anyway there are other things that can be done. Gathering relevant data about costs for example, and filling in the table I created at the bottom of the List of things that need to be free page.
Okey. So I have an idea about what we can do to try to estimate the volunteer cost.
Using statistics from pages such as [1] and [2] it is possible to get an idea about when contributors have come and gone to the different projects. If we for the different projects plot graphs that shows the number of contributors, number of active contributors, etc., and compares this with the times at which new projects has been started in the same languages, it is possible to see whether the start up of new projects historicaly has led to a drain of contributors from other projects. It would also be possible to quantify to what extent that has happened.
I have written an m-file (used by for example Matlab) that uses the statistics from these pages and plots the number of contributors as well as active contributors. However, I do run Matlab on a student license and are not allowed to use this license for these purposes. I therefore wonder if someone with experience of some similar open source program or other solution would like to create such graphs.
Using Octave, I did this analysis for active contributors on 29 differenet language versions of Wikipedia. At least for Wikipedia there doesn't seem to be any correlation between new projects and a decline in growth of active contributors due to the introduction of new projects, especially since all of the projects where introduced in the time period (before 2007) when all Wikipedias anyway grew exponentially. There is however the possibility that the plateu level is dependent on the amount of projects and that is where the introduction of new projects will show up to have an effect. But that is harder to evaluate.
As I mentioned earlier, I would wait till the List of things to be free will be populated (let us say one week from now and then three days without edits), close it and start working on the draft policy. There could be some unexpected things showing up.
After reading all this I have rewritten the content page. The basic principals behind this new version is to list
- what wikimedia has done so far
- what wikimedia has previously decided not to do
- what types of things we should do in the future (which follows on from the 1 and 2 above)
- what types of things wikimedia should avoid in the future
Please go and edit there. Can I suggest we keep this page for when we actually have a disagreement about what should go there.
That is a good start!
I suggest that we create new pages for different topics, either Wikimedia-pedia pages under the wiki namespace, like List of things that need to be free. Or pages under the Content_scope namespace if it not is obvious that the topic will be of any value to anyone else than those participating in the task force (if it turns out to be, it can be moved there later). And that we uses this talk page for all kinds of task force discussions.
I think the content you created would fit well into an article /Content scope/What WikiMedia is, and what WikiMedia is supposed to be.
I moved this text to What Wikimedia is. I also added links to the documents initiated so far under "Working documents" on Task force/Content scope.
I'm afraid I disagree with you on this.
The most useful pointer to what we do in future is to look at what we have done in the past. Why did we decide to delete Nupedia, the Klingon Wikipedia and Esperanza? These were real decisions. If we don't look at what was decided then we will just go round in circles on this talk page forever reinventing the wheel and never reaching a conclusion.
Creating yet more pages does not help us arrive at a strategy which is what I thought we are here for. Edit my draft to shreds if you think you can do better but don't just dump it out the window into the street and leave it for someone else to clean up.
It is time to stop talking and draft a policy!
I've copied my notes re: project policy to Task force/Content scope/Project policy draft. Why don't we start fleshing out some of those questions, and take open questions back to the discussion page.
Sorry if I wasn't clear about the purposes of my edit. It was not at all about throwing the draft away, but about reorganizing the content. The "What Wikimedia is" page can perfectly well be renamed "new projects, policy document" if that is closer to the intensions behind it. And I hope that page is one of those that will keep being improved as we go forward here. So I hope you know that the page is
I do however also think we should take the chance of collecting as much background material as possible, at other pages, that can help making informed decissions. That means, as you say, to collect the wisdom from past decissions.
As for my part in this task force, I will neither be able to make any decissions, nor to decide what questions that are of importance. So the only thing I hope to do, is to help organizing the content.
Oops .
Sorry Dafer if I sounded grumpy. I think it's because I am a bit grumpy.
Sorry Eloquence. We seem to have had the same idea here and while you were doing one draft I did another. I would really prefer to keep this to one content page and one talk page. Too many pages will (in my opinion) just lead to too many different drafts. Lets get everyone editting the same draft right here on the Task force/Content scope page.
If there is something that is not needed then delete it!
Please go edit the page.
I guess we all are grumpy from time to time. So that's just fine :)
I still think there is value in keeping the main page clean with just links to the documents we are working on from the content scope page. So my sugestion is that we rename "What Wikimedia is" to "New projects, policy document", and incorporates the vision part that Eloquence wrote into it. And that we bold fonts the link from the content scope page to the "New projects, policy document" so that it stands out as the document for this task force.
But if it makes much more sense to everyone to write that information on the content scope page, I am perfectly fine with that. In that case I guess the text you wrote should be reinserted on the content scope page together with Elouquence vision text.
I have gone through some of the background material, and here are a few thoughts about what questions that are relevant for this task force, just to start the conversation. Is there anyone who has any answers or sugestions for these?
- What is the current process for deciding on new projects? And is it satifactory?
- What kind of projects should Wikimedia provide?
- Is it necessary that all Wikimedias projects uses MediaWiki and that all content on all projets are editable by everyone? Are there for example cases where content editing should be limited to one or a few editors? In other words, is "the sum of all knowledge" or "MediaWiki" the core concept of Wikimedia?
- Are there some new projects that should be started, and are there some that should be closed?
- What has made Wikipedia so successful. Are there ways in which the other projects can learn from Wikipedias success. Or is there any changes that has to be done to the current projects in order to make them more successful?
- What is the amount of staff time that is spent on each project.
- Does jet another project decrease the amount of contributors on the other projects, or does new projects attract new contributors?
Project specific questions:
- Given that many visitors uses Wikipedia instead of Wikinews as news site, is the difference between the two projects real, or is the need for a specific Wikinews project a product of an old fashioned view on what a news article is? In other words, is a Wikipedia article the new kind of news article? Which maybe renders a specific Wikinews project less usefull?
- Is open editing of books the optimal way of creating books. Or do books need to have only one or a few editors? Should both the possibility of restricting editing to single authors, and providing the possibility of colaborative editing be provided?
- The same question can be asked for Wikiversity courses.
Related questions
- The current projects comprises a vast amount of knowledge. But are there some way in which the content can be made more accessible to less litterate people? For example, I think that even for a high school teacher, with pretty high litteracy, it is a hard task to dig through the material at Wikibooks or Wikiversity to find content that actually would fit a course (s)he gives.
- Are there something about the projects that can be done in a different way that allows closer colaboration with other organizations, UNESCO and other governmental initiatives at providing free sources of knowledge? Or is there initiatives that can be taken straight of without changes to the current projects, that furthers the mission? Could a larger focus in this direction allow for more fundings from such partners.
See my rewrite of the content page.
I think your project specific questions above are too specific for this Strategy:Scope page and should be addressed within the projects.
The question of whether a new project decreases or increases contributions is too big for here and is, I think, part of the community development discussion.
Yes, I don't think the answers to the project specific questions are of importance here. But they serve as example questions for the more important question "Is 'the sum of all knowledge' or 'MediaWiki' the core concept of Wikimedia?".
As for the question about "whether a new project decreases or increases contributions". I think that is an essential question to discuss to be able to judge whether to aim at creating new projects, or even closing existing ones.
What I was trying to say was that whenever Wikimedia is considering a proposal to extend into a new area the first question is whether it fits our mission. If the answer to that is yes then the next question is how to do it. Do we extend the scope of one of the existing projects? Do we establish a new project? Do we decide that there is another project covering this already and decide to collaborate with them? These are important questions but they are secondary questions about the means to use. The primary question to be addressed first is whether this proposal is compatible with our aims.
Off to add this to the content page.
Thanks, Dafer, for inviting me. I'm very conservative when it comes to expanding content, just because volunteer time and resources are somewhat finite.
I think the key thing that can come out of this is some kind of criteria for deciding a project. So far, it's been a question of "is there interest among enough people to get it started?" A lot of stuff spins off from Wikipedia this way: it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, but people are interested in it, so let's do it.
If there are two criteria that should be more important, it's that we should ask "if we don't do it, will people be able to find it somewhere else?" and "what are the costs (time/energy/interface) of doing it right?"
By those two criteria, I'd even say that some projects should be discontinued.
Is there anything that is known about the actuall cost in form of staff time, volunteer effort, MediaWiki development, etc. Can we try to collect as much information as possible about what these costs are on Task force/Content scope/Project costs?
Maybe Erik Moeller could provide some insight into what the staff time cost is?
It's an excellent question.
Quantifying the cost (staff or volunteer) of new projects is very difficult. The actual immediate cost of setting up a new wiki and domain name that receives a small amount of traffic is almost negligible (that's why companies like Wikia can afford to set up many thousands of them). That is, of course, if no new technology is required. To give a counter-example, there's a proposal to set up a Wikimedia wiki using SignWriting, a complex script based on image representations. Reviewing the relevant MediaWiki extension for security, scalability and usability could easily be a multi-month effort locking down a full-time resource. That might be a good investment, but it would be a significant one, even if you apply a low standard for an initial deployment.
Once a project is launched, the costs resulting for the Wikimedia Foundation include:
- Legal costs - e.g. Wikisource running into issues around copyrightability of certain documents it hosts. The risk of legal issues obviously depends on the nature of the project.
- Technology costs - regardless of whether a project requires special software to start, it often will have specific enhancement or configuration requests that need to be managed, starting with small configuration tweaks and going up to a complex code review for some community-developed extension (examples of the latter include the proofreading extensions used by Wikisource, and the DynamicPageList extension used by Wikinews).
- Communication costs - whenever we talk about WMF's activities, both mentioning and not mentioning projects creates different kinds of costs (e.g. people complain when we omit specific or all sister projects, but ensuring that they're always correctly represented takes significant effort).
- Administrative costs - we have to ensure that domain names, trademarks, etc. are properly maintained, that people don't misuse the brand for inappropriate purposes.
- Inbound inquiries costs - any new high-level project can create an anticipation and expectation among third parties that we're interested and able to take on significant partnerships around said project. Those expectations need to be carefully managed.
- General noise - small communities often lack the critical mass to deter trolls and malcontents, and may in fact become a safe haven for people blocked elsewhere (see recent Wikiversity events). This can create noise and distraction on all levels of the organization. Improvements to process and governance may be able to help with this.
On a community level, the costs are even harder to quantify. Clearly, significant community effort is spent maintaining a consistent presence of the "Wikimedia family" in various templates, outreach resources, announcements, etc., and the general noise above often includes extensive and time-consuming community discussions. New projects of limited relevance can be a distraction from arguably more important work, especially when there's an inherent assumption in a "sister project" model that all projects are equally deserving of attention.
Putting it all together, I would say that any approved official Wikimedia project creates substantial organizational and community cost. The decision to add to our project family should not be taken lightly.
Yeah, I agree with that. To a lesser degree, I'd also add costs to Wikipedia's reputation. It's better to be the best encyclopedia than a mediocre everything-else. Having projects that are ineffective does more harm than good -- we can't just make those projects because a handful of people say they want it.
I copied most of your text to Project costs.
If anyone is able to quantify anything, lets add it to that page.
Thanks for the notice.
I was aware of that Task Force but could not see where i could given pertinent inputs.
We should make a check run on List of things that need to be free and see what already covered by the Foundation or another NGO.
For the remaining items we should evaluate what's the best between encouraging the "sources" to keep/make the said contents available for free or create and sustain a new project from scratch to fill that role.
I think that within 10 years (yea not 5), we will have a project hosting TV listings and radio programs from across the world.
My prediction:
I'm afraid I believe that in 10 years from now Tivos and IPTV and video on demand will mean TV listings no longer exist.
I'm not sure what will replace TV listings but I expect it will be 3 parts search engine and 1 part rating service and Google will be the market leader with iTunes and TVGuide/IMDB and Amazon close behind.
Wikipedia will have a page for every show there has ever been, including a link that automagically goes to a download of the show on your favourite download services (like the Geolink and ISBN templates on steroids).
All the other services will of course use info from Wikipedia in their own services.
This will never even get considered by the "New Project" review team. The wikignomes will just do it.
Making a check run on the List of things that need to be free seems to be a very good exercices. Can we collect the information into some table on the same page?
Also, is there still topics that should be added to that list?
@Filceolaire
You over-estimate the development of bandwidth. In 10 years Africa will still access Internet mostly through Dial-up connections.
@Dafer45
I think at least 89% of what should be in is listed with are only 8 editors who made edits on this list. Latter additions should not be a surprise.
Could you create a table or some other cleaver solution on that page where it is easy to fill in what kind of content that currently is covered by WMF, can be covered by WMF, is covered by other NGO, and so on? I think such a table just could be added at the end of that page.
Can we actually popularize this list on meta, in the mailing list and in the projects? I am among the 8 editors, but I am not at all sure we have covered everything important.
Seems to be a good idea. Could we write down a couple of sentences that explains the purpose of the page and send these out as soon as possible?
What about:
The Content scope Task Force at strategy.wikimedia.org is at the moment compiling a "List of things that need to be free". The purpose of this list is to list all kinds of content that ought to be available for free, to see what other organizations that provides such content, and to judge in which areas WMF can help providing such content. Any help in filling this list in would be very much appreciated.
You will find it at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_that_need_to_be_free
Even today most people in Africa don't access the internet over telephone lines because far more of them have mobile phones than have land-lines.
The mobile phone systems in Africa are probably 5 years behind the west in technology terms ( transitioning to 3G) Assuming they stay 5 years behind then in 10 years from now the more populous areas in africa (with ~75% of the population?) will have mature 4G mobile networks fast enough for streaming video.
OK maybe it will take 15 years before TV listings to be irrelevant in Africa.
One of the task forces that didn't reach recommendations was the Expanding Content Task Force. I'd like to reraise some of those core questions here to see if we can make some headway into these issues.
Should Wikimedia start/expand into new projects? By projects, I mean the 10 Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, etc.).
Why or why not?
If yes, what should the criteria be for new projects? Should new projects be required to use MediaWiki?
Looking forward to people's thoughts.
Honestly, I think there are a ton of new areas of content that Wikipedia could move into... but I think they'd all dilute the mission. I frankly think that some of the other projects are already pretty ineffective.
Sorry to be so negative.
No apologies necessary; I appreciate your frankness.
So I'd like to throw out a contention: If we're going to accept new projects, we should also be willing to kill off old ones. Ineffective projects are a drain on energy and on resources.
For one model for comparison, take a look at the notes on Apache's incubation model.
Here are some quick personal reactions to Eekim's points. My inclination is always to focus focus focus, so I believe we should be focused on closing underperforming projects as much as on entertaining new ones right now. I get quite frustrated when I look at the audience data (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia#Project_breakdown) because I feel we should NOT be wasting one single minute of staff time on the projects which have failed to get traction despite years of operating under our umbrella. Any discussions around principles for adding new ones have to address withdrawing support from old ones too. One thought i have is that we should pick a number of projects we can actively support (5?) and then limit ourselves to those plus a few others that might be in incubation mode but which we will stop supporting if they don't meet certain performance thresholds (community size, audience size, some other concrete measure of knowledge sharing value, etc.). Brutal clarity/honesty about what it takes for a project to continue getting foundation resources is really important, not only for the staff but much more importantly for the people in those communities.
On the MediaWiki question, our goal is to make knowledge freely available and in many, many cases MediaWiki will NOT be the right tool for the job. Interpreting Maslow, we have erred over past few years because "If you only have MediaWiki, everything looks like a wiki". MediaWiki should be only one of the solutions we consider, and if weighing all the issues/challenges/opportunities we decide to use/adopt another application, or start one from scratch, that's an option we must consider and should be considering far more than I think we do. As one example, DBpedia is a project we could support more aggressively which isn't coded in MediaWiki.
We could move projects to Wikia, we don´t have to close them.
My view about e.g. Wikinews is not to close this project, but to change it. News actually does work, but it works at Wikipedia (en:Wikipedia is a news-source at google-news). Wikinews therefore should be different than it is today. I think that wikipedia is a success, because an article can grow for months and years. News usually don´t have that much time and therefor only news-article witch get lots of edits in a short time will be as good as e.g. a physics-article. Maybe we should focus the topics about which we will report. I´dont know what such a topic could be. Maybe something that would help to strengthen the goals of Wikimedia.
The problem with Wikiversity is the same. Starting a wiki is no problem. Therefore a lot of organizations start their own wiki (e.g. universities). Why should they go to Wikiversity? And Wikiversity (better, Wikis used for learning) does need more extensions, in my view.
What we need is to be aware that mediawiki is used for hundreds of external projects. What are their needs? Maybe there are some external projects we could help (e.g. write new or improve some extensions) and maybe there are some projects we could change into a Wikimedia-project.
What are the distinctions between a Wikimedia project and a free-licensed project that uses Mediawiki? Where should we draw our boundaries?
I´ve found at the foundation-wiki the information, that we are an educational organization. I think we should stick to it.
A good guideline. Are there any new projects that could fit under this principle. Or are there some projects that could be operated in different ways for that purpose?
For example I think that the creation of new article pages that are searchable are a perfectly good way for achiveing the purposes of Wikipedia and Wiktionary. But for a project like Wikiversity I think that ain't enough. It is to difficult to navigate for most potential users. If I where a teacher that intended to build my courses around Wikiversity material, I think I would have needed a better way of finding what courses that fulfilled the course requirements for the course I intended to give. In a project like Wikiversity I think a higher layer of structure is needed, there is a need to compile coursepackages that teachers can trust to cover all the areas their students are supposed to learn.
At the moment I don't realy know if there is material on Wikiversity that is of high quality enough to serve as course literature at any level, but anyway I don't think the quality is the main problem, but rather that it is to hard for the teacher to evaluate what material that has the needed quality. Wikiversity might already serve the purpose of providing free courses that can be used to educate an interested individual. But if a higher level of evaluation of the courses could be implemented, then proposals like Proposal:Supporting_Third_world_education could be served at a few clicks on the mouse.
So I think it also is important to consider whether some projects could be operated in a slightly different way.
Stu -- what Foundation resources do small Projects draw? Most projects run MediaWiki with minimal customization, and are not visibly drawing any resources beyond server time and bandwidth. Server and bandwidth usage are proportional to popularity, which is the standard metric for projct success... so projects are either successful or inexpensive. I don't see a compelling 'foundation resource use' reason to shut them down.
There may be other concerns - a draw on community resources seems plausible, and is one of the reasons we try to keep tiny new language-editions on a shared incubator until they have reached a certain initial size. And focus is important; perhaps that should limit the number of kinds of Projects that we can host and actively support with feature development. But we currently are pretty slow in terms of innovation and new feature development -- if we decided to Focus on 3-5 Projects, that would mean an increase from the 2 we currently support in any meaningful way (WP and Commons).
- Brutal clarity/honesty about what it takes for a project to continue getting foundation resources is really important, not only for the staff but much more importantly for the people in those communities.
Clarity is key. It need not be brutal... we could do much better, but most projects are used to getting by with a basic all-purpose tool. Currently the Foundation provides technical, usability, and other support to Wikipedia and Commons, and other projects get very limited attention. Wiktionary does not receive attention compared to its popularity and universality. The other projects expect little that they can't build themselves, so it would be joyful and not brutal for the Foundation to define a set of projects that would be taken into consideration when setting technical, promotion, and other priorities.
It would be interesting to try to quantify Foundation resources required to support all projects. Every additional project means dealing with more tech requests and general support calls. I don't think the tech resources are trivial. They could easily occupy a single, full-time person, which, when you only have 15 tech people, is a significant percentage.
The bigger problem is the energy around lack of focus and clarity. The more projects you have, the harder it is to explain what Wikimedia is about. The fact that we haven't already articulated the criteria around what constitutes a Wikimedia project indicates the strategic challenge around this.
That is both a Foundation issue and a movement-wide concern.
Why couldn´t we strengthen the tech-volunteers? I know for example that there is one Foundation person (brian?) who is looking into the extensions, if there is one that could be used by our projects.
About focus and clarity: The same problem is if wikipedia should be open to as much articles as possible or should wikipedia stick to the more high level articles. I don´t want to discuss what the focus should be, I would rather ask how should we decide those type of questions. Is the board the one who decide this, is it the local community or should we decide it in a way we changed from GFDL to Creative Commons?
By the way, at meta there is meta:Proposals for new projects.
To make all of human culture and knowledge available to everyone, everywhere, forever. That is the foundation of the wikimedia projects.
Hows that for focus and clarity?
SJ, my concerns are less about any specific project or even resources than they are about a strong view on my part that success comes from focus and that every project, no matter how small it seems, ends up taking board/management/staff/technical/volunteer resources so we have got to have some sense of prioritization and system for making tradeoffs. Otherwise we'll end up spreading our resources too thin to succeed where it really counts. Everything is finite -- even volunteer energy! Of course I recognize the calculus is very different in a volunteer-driven organization where we could arguably have a huge amount of volunteers left to inspire/evangelize, but even the act of inspiration/evangelism requires finite resources (e.g. outreach) so we have to pick and choose carefully to try our best to ensure maximum achievement of the mission.
Actually, I would even more worry about volunteer resources. An interesting question is the following. Imagine someone (typically a WP editor) wants to create a certain project, but the creation withing the WMF umbrella is impossible. What happens then? He/she stays on WP; creates a project outside WMF and leaves WP for the lack of time; creates a project outside WMF and shares his/her time between the project and WP? Would this change if the problem could be created inside WMF? I do not know the answers.
Well, several years ago I would answer - yes, definitely, we need new projects. Just to give an example - I like the idea of Wikitravel, and it could be a good addition of a project which deals with pretty special information (like Wikispecies) and could have a success. But Wikitravel already exists, and, do we like it or not, we are not going to have the second Wikitravel under the WMF umbrella. Same with wikia project: it could be a good idea to have a separate WMF project for say manga fans, which could have more relaxed verifiability rules than WP, and then move a number of articles which get deleted from WP over there - but (presumably) this project already exists on wikia, and I do not see any point of moving it from commercial server to a non-commercial one. Thus, I agree with the majority: only if we have a brilliant idea for a project of smth which does not yet exist and is compatible with the WMF mission - we should create it, otherwise let it flourish on wikia.
I see the question as "what types of knowledge should we make sure is free", with "who hosts it" being a minor secondary question. We are considering long-term strategy for supporting our movement and the world's knowledge -- we should have a list of essential knowledge that should be free, and that can be built collaboratively. Something like Jimbo's "ten things that should be free", refined with time. If noone is addressing one of those issues in a free way, we should consider starting a project for it. If others are doing a good job, but not matching one or two of our core principles, we should work to help them improve their policies. If someone is doing a good job outside of WMF's umbrella, we should consider ways we can support them as a partner; and should work to making linking across our projects trivial.
Yes, projects should flourish wherever they have taken root -- the great thing about the movement we are part of is that it doesn't matter who hosts a project! But at the same time we can build a shared understanding of what the freely sharable knowledge in the world should look like in ten years. And if a project that we openly support / that is part of that long-term mission needs help in the future, or loses its current support or host, we should be in a position to embrace them under Wikimedia's umbrella.
I love this as a frame, SJ. Let's start populating 10 things that need to be free and use this to do this analysis.
I am keenly interested in exciting and promising projects that the Foundation has failed to support properly (and usually for the very good reason of being overwhelmed at just keeping Wikipedia running) - and in drawing lessons from those in our thoughts about the future.
My best example is Wikinews. The concept is exciting, the community is great, and yet the project has quite simply not lived up to the potential. Wikinews is not becoming *a* mainstream news source, much less a major news source that changes the way people think about quality journalism.
There are a lot of reasons for this. The software hasn't been adapted to their needs. Funding has not been available to build critical mass. People often prefer to write for Wikipedia because the audience at Wikipedia is bigger. And so on. The participants of Wikinews can better catalog the reasons that it is has struggled than I can.
So for me, the thought naturally arises: how to fix this? What can we do for Wikinews that will resolve what I see as the core structural issues. My own view, put forward only tentatively and quietly until now (and even now I offer it only with quiet humility as a cautious idea), is that we should consider spinning it off with some funding from Wikimedia, some traffic promises in terms of linking to it from the home page or something like that, and support in the form of PR and communications. I'm agnostic as to whether it should be spun off to a nonprofit, or a community-owned for-profit, or a venture-backed something or other, or or or. I have no strong opinions about that.
But I do wonder if an organization with it's own CEO, own programming staff, etc., couldn't push forward the goals of Wikinews much better than the Wikimedia Foundation ever will. I don't know. I merely raise the issue for contemplation.
The previous note was from me. I forgot to log in. I don't know how to edit my post using LiquidThreads. :)--Jimbo Wales 16:55, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
Under the "more" button on the lower right, you can find an "edit" option. :) Can't correct the auto-sig yet (next release, I think), but you can add your own sig.
But I do wonder if an organization with it's own CEO, own programming staff, etc., couldn't push forward the goals of Wikinews much better than the Wikimedia Foundation ever will. I don't know. I merely raise the issue for contemplation.
If such an idea was to be prusued, I think it would be much better to have a Wikinews chapter, with the mission of promoting wikinews interests, well still being part of the foundation. There are probably some places where wikinews could use special attention, that the foundation is not in a position to provide, but its also very beneficial to be under the umbrella of the foundation.
I'm just not sure that it makes sense to operate all this stuff under one banner. There's no economy of scale. It's not like operating WikiNews AND Wikipedia will make both better. Quite the contrary. Either Wikipedia is the elephant hogging all the peanuts, or you have people leaving Wikipedia when it still needs talented people.
The only other alternative is that they're both independent, each with their own set of volunteers and mission. But then there's definitely no reason for the Wikimedia foundation to run both. If you want to attract two different kinds of volunteers, you want to have two different brands.
And then you factor in that you want each one to utilize different technology?
It's not that I don't think there is some merit to some of these other projects. But I just don't see the merit in operating all of them under Wikimedia.
In my opinion Bawolff is correct. There are two competing forces at work here:
1) There are substantial benefits to operating Wikinews (not WikiNews.com, btw. That site is controlled by an anti-WMF fanatic:P) under the banner of the WMF, not the least of which is the partial protection our explicit association Wikipedia occasionally lends us (IE, against government censors). Having an implied association ("Oh sure, we're friendly with the WMF. Look, we even use Commons!") just wouldn't be the same when combating problems that are common to both Wikipedia and Wikinews. To be Henry (Frank is in my bad books right now) Wikinews isn't big enough to fight these problems on its own.
2) As Jimbo pointed out, Wikinews is having trouble thriving in the current 'pedia dominated climate of the WMF. The WMF (rightly) directs most of its resources at its biggest projects, most of which are incarnations of Wikipedia. Everything from the software development to the hardware selected for the servers is controlled by the needs of Wikipedia. And you know what? That's not wrong. Wikipedia is big, and it needs a lot of time and effort put into it in order to for it to be maintained and grown. But Wikinews needs some lovin' too if we're ever going to achieve anything. So does Wiktionary, and every other project as well.
These two competing forces aren't going to go away. The only solution that I can think of that makes sense is something like what Bawolff suggested: keep Wikinews as part of the WMF, but spin it off into a partially autonomous organization that focuses entirely on Wikinews community & software development, with its own mini-leadership council that reports to the WMF board of directors.
Whatever happens Wikinews should be kept non-profit.
Hello all,
this is an important issue and I'm glad that such a rich conversation is happening about it. While I believe the instrument of a "Wikimedia project" (that is, a new brand identity, new wiki, new community) isn't the only instrument of expanding content or even the most significant, it's a powerful one.
I think there are at least two concrete action points that the Wikimedia movement could tackle here:
- Reviving and reforming the New project policy.
I believe it was the first concrete articulation of a process for starting and closing projects. It's currently simply marked out of date, and I think an iteration of this policy and associated process would allow us deal with some open questions:- When and how will existing external projects be adopted by WMF?
- Under what circumstances will WMF dedicate significant technical resources to a new project idea?
- How can we assess the success or failure of a project, beyond simply polling people?
- When and how will existing WMF projects be "spun off" to other organizations or entities (including potentially chapters)?
- Should there be a dedicated incubator wiki for new projects, not just new languages?
- Clarifying the importance of different types of content for Wikimedia's mission.
So far, WMF has dedicated the bulk of its resources to support the highest impact projects (Wikipedia, Commons, MediaWiki). Clearly, not all other initiatives are equally important.- Should WMF, for example, make it a product priority to build a world-class multilingual dictionary and thesaurus? If so, it would need to shift dramatically more resources towards Wiktionary (or a new project) than it has done so far.
- What resources are the most in global demand, the most potentially transformative, and the most suitable to Wikimedia's models for collaboration? This is a great opportunity for research.
I believe that both of these are ultimately Board decisions. I do think significant work could be done here on StrategyWiki to advance our thinking on those two actionable points and deliver recommendations to the Board. Does that make sense, and if so, would this be something people would be interested in helping with?
Eloquence,
I agree the New Project Policy simply needs revisiting and improvement to address many of the basic questions here. And there is a part of this conversation that informs the new language policy as well -- we must consider whether "to each person in their own language" is still essential, and how much we care when a Wikipedia in a minor language becomes the most significant and useful corpus of text available online. [Some people and organizations certainly care a great deal about that.]
I would be most interested to help with focused work here on these questions, including research, discussion of demands and interests, and analysis of how other organizations handle the "umbrella vs. orchard" question. I mentioned the idea of having a task force dedicated to these questions today on the en:wv Colloquium, as it is relevant to their ongoing refinement of their scope and inclusion policies. Sj
Additionally: are we going to always have a double split: by project class and by language, or are we going to have multilingual projects? For instance, Wictionary could be a good candidate to become a unified (multilingual) project, but definitely for eventual projects to be accepted we could either consider a multilingual option or to exclude it from the very beginning.
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
That's the mission of the Wikimedia foundation.
I have to ask ... what's the point of being one of the world's least popular news sites? I could see the point if they were the only free news site in a world full of economic barriers. But news is already free. The economics of information force it to be free.
My conclusions:
- That's why Wikipedia has taken off and Wikinews has not. Wikipedia has a unique value proposition: a free encyclopedia. There is nothing unique about free news.
- The best way for the Wikimedia Foundation to further its mission of "freely sharing in the sum of all knowledge" is to support free access to news at other sites rather than providing a site itself. This also means supporting blogs and twitter and other media that allows people to stay up to date.
Anything other conclusion is an ego trip. It's a refusal to admit that there are some situations where other organizations are already doing a pretty good job of fulfilling Wikimedia's mission. Environmental and poverty organizations understand this. If no one else is working on it, you fill the gap yourself. If other people are working on it, you support them and conserve your resources.
Blinking twice.
I think that we should not overstretch ourselves in too many projects. Keeping those existing ones is already difficult enough. I know that creating new project has an immediate feel good perception and is positive for Public Relation but when you start looking at the unkeep to run that new project that another story altogether. So Wikipedia should commit sparingly its Key resource, the time & good will of its volunteers, into new project. Don't do it if you can't afford it and cant commit enough resources to make it a hit.
I'm rejoining Randomran position as Wikipedia should pick up "good fights" that no one else is taking while providing support to others groups/organizations doing well their job on their areas instead of entering in concurrence with them.
I'm not sure if we're in disagreement here.
There are a number of important initiatives out there (e.g. OpenStreetMap) which are doing perfectly fine on their own, and there's no point in us trying to replicate or absorb them.
There may be important initiatives that are struggling, which would like to be considered as official Wikimedia Foundation projects.
There may be existing Wikimedia Foundation projects that would be better off on their own, or even to be closed completely.
And there may be things that need to be free that currently nobody is making a serious effort to provide, and that should be of priority interest to the Wikimedia Foundation.
I'm not arguing that we should dramatically expand the scope of what we're doing. I think we should clarify our processes, and determine if WMF should specifically dedicate resources to any content areas that it currently isn't, in order to serve its mission.
Lots of thoughts in the discussion but not much that can be added to the topic page. I'm going to do some editting there.
