Connecting goals with Task Force work

I want to try to explain how the goals came about and how they're connected to the Task Force work, because they are very much connected. I hope this will also help us move forward in refining these goals and also identifying the opportunities to achieve them.

Let's take the Wikipedia Quality Task Force as an example, because there's been a lot of followup conversations to those recommendations. Philippe has summarized the feedback, but I'll briefly restate here. There were three recommendations:

1. Global (Wikimedia-wide) thematic projects.
2. Senior editor status.
3. Re-emphasize core values on the different Wikipedia projects.

I'll discuss these in reverse. Regarding the third recommendation, there seems to be consensus that making these core values easy to find is a good thing. There were some questions about whether or not the values are the correct ones (specifically "verifiability" vs "truth"), but that's a project-specific discussion and less relevant for a Wikimedia-wide strategic discussion.

Regarding the second recommendation, there were two concerns. First, what would be the details for picking senior editors, and would they be afforded special privileges? Second, would having a senior editor status encourage content kings?

There are a few important things to note for our purposes. I think there's consensus that there are different roles in the Wikimedia movement, and that we need to treat these roles differently. Active, experienced editors play a critical role. We need to find a way to get more active, experienced editors (goal #3). So this recommendation is one potential path to get there.

Will the basic idea work? Obviously, a lot of details need to be fleshed out, but I think the important thing to note is that we won't know for certain unless we try it. That's the point of goal #5. We need to be able to test ideas and learn from them. Otherwise, we're going to suffer from "analysis-paralysis."

Regarding the first recommendation: We don't have a goal that targets content. Part of that is because content quality is covered in the theory of change: getting better contributors will have a large-scale systemic effect on content quality. Another reason for this is that it's hard to come up with good, Wikimedia-wide metrics for quality. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, it just means it felt premature to make this a high-level goal at this point.

I think that Wikimedia-wide wikiprojects maps closest to goal #5: innovation and experimentation. The feedback suggests that wikiprojects aren't very useful right now, so Wikimedia-wide wikiprojects may not work well either. I think there's a further conversation that has to be explored about why wikiprojects don't work as well as they should, and how they could be improved. From the standpoint of movement-wide goals, I think it's fair to say that it's possible to improve them, and it's possible that global wikiprojects would have an even greater effect, and so we should have the mechanism to test this idea. (You could even argue that Task Forces on this wiki are the equivalent to global wikiprojects.)

We can go through this same exercise with all of the recommendations and show how they map to the goals. I'd encourage people to help with this at: Task force/Strategy/What we agree on. Thoughts welcome.

That's a lot to chew on, but connecting these recommendations to the goals is very important.

• 3 might seem easy. But we already have a bunch of easy value-statements: "imagine a world where something something something", "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", and so on. This recommendation only generates value if we have something a little more specific. Otherwise we're just inviting editors to continue bickering and pushing against each other. Re-emphasizing core values is important only if it can actually get people to find a common direction.

• 2 is tricky. Community health discussed this too. But since I took an easy recommendation and made it hard, I'm gonna take a hard recommendation and make it easy: will we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? If so, then let's scrap it. But if we understand that this is an important way to retain editors and create a more harmonious experience, then let's find the best scheme we can, and let editors refine it over time.

• On #1, I agree that we ought to focus more on improving Wikiprojects first. I'm not sure about quality. But in terms of community health, they've been almost universally helpful. There's a lot of scholarship that shows editors are more likely to stick around if they're part of a Wikiproject. That lines up with my experience too. There's a few instances where projects have been hijacked by people with a bias, and they're very hard to remove (Esparanza is the only one, as far as I can remember. But the real issue is getting more people to join.

Hope that helps.