Expanding Content

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.