Expanding Content

Expanding Content

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.

Eekim00:26, 11 March 2010

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.

Randomran03:28, 11 March 2010

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.

Eekim08:43, 11 March 2010
 

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.

Stu01:07, 13 March 2010
Edited by author.
Last edit: 20:09, 17 March 2010

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.

Goldzahn01:56, 13 March 2010

What are the distinctions between a Wikimedia project and a free-licensed project that uses Mediawiki? Where should we draw our boundaries?

Eekim16:12, 17 March 2010

I´ve found at the foundation-wiki the information, that we are an educational organization. I think we should stick to it.

Goldzahn19:35, 17 March 2010

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.

Dafer4520:24, 17 March 2010
 
 
 

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.

Sj04:07, 13 March 2010

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.

Eekim16:17, 17 March 2010

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.

Goldzahn08:53, 18 March 2010
 
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?

Filceolaire15:05, 1 April 2010
 
 

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.

Stu00:54, 20 March 2010

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.

Yaroslav Blanter09:07, 20 March 2010
 
 

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.

Yaroslav Blanter17:51, 13 March 2010

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.

Sj05:42, 16 March 2010

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.

Eekim16:20, 17 March 2010
 
 

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.

80.169.89.6616:53, 17 March 2010
 

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)

Jimbo Wales16:55, 17 March 2010
 

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.

~Philippe (WMF)17:17, 17 March 2010
 

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.

Bawolff03:44, 18 March 2010

A Wiktionary chapter would be more urgent. Alexa.com

Goldzahn09:02, 18 March 2010
 

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.

Randomran23:13, 18 March 2010
 

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.

Gopher65talk02:24, 19 March 2010
 

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?

Eloquence02:14, 19 March 2010

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

Sj02:50, 19 March 2010
 

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.

Yaroslav Blanter21:43, 19 March 2010
 

"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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Randomran19:37, 20 March 2010
 

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.

KrebMarkt20:44, 20 March 2010

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.

Eloquence19:34, 22 March 2010
 
 

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.

Filceolaire15:35, 1 April 2010