What do we agree on?
What do we agree on?
Let's kick this off... what do we agree on? Maybe it makes sense to start by listing the various task force recommendations and seeing which have agreement?
Definitely a good place to start. Followed by a list of the recommendations that don't contradict anyone else's.
Let see what we agree on.
Senior Editors?
Just for context, Senior Editors was the Wikipedia Quality Task Force's second recommendation. I'm also curious to know if people agree with that idea. What would be required to make a Senior Editor status happen?
I think we should start by first READING all the recommendations (for me it will take a few days, possible up to the coming weekend), and trying indeed to compile a list. I anticipate that some of the recommendations may overlap. Another thing is to decide what to do with the issues discussed in the task forces which did not deliver the recommendations. I am not sure that reading all the task force discussions is pretty much realistic, at least not for me.
I'm not familiar with the recommendations outside of the Community Health Task Force yet, so I will aim to address that tomorrow and then give a proper response to this.
I will hopefully be able to read through all the recommendation on Saturday.
This was posted by Dafer45.
I have now read through the recommendations and my first comments are:
- Depending on implementation, WYSIWYG, social networking features and other similar inventions might interfere with the Local Language projects "minimize bandwidth requirement" recommendation.
- At the same time WYSIWYG and social networking features could increase the contributor community in the same places.
- Frank Schulenberg's comment Fight the "everythingisdone" impression: Let new editors specify their areas of interest during account creation. Then create an "articles of your interest area that need help today" feature in the Community health recommendations resonates with the Local Language projects "Local content" recommendation. (In the sense that users can be handed material of their interest that commes from the list mentioned in the Local content recommendation)
Until the week end at best and there is currently the unsourced BLP madness in the English Wikipedia.
Someone should just make a bulletted list to all the completed recommendations. e.g.:
- Community Health - Volunteer Recognition
- Community Health - Senior Editors
- Quality - Global WikiProjects
- Quality - Senior Editors
Right away, we would be able to flag the ones that are duplicated, or at least overlap.
I summarized the first five sets of recommendations. If others agree, I'll continue with the rest at the evening. I think that the initial summaries are good enough for discussion to start.
This is great. Thank you, Millosh.
We should also get one member of each Task Force to summarize the feedback so far from their recommendations. For those of you who previously served on a Task Force, could you summarize the feedback you've received so far from the Talk pages and share it in the appropriate thread that Millosh has set up?
This is a good way to summarize it, but we should centralize it at one page. (Maybe at Task force/Recommendations?)
Wikilinks to the detailed recommendations might help too.
I finished with adding summaries of recommendations, except for Arabic TF, as their recommendation page doesn't seem complete. There are, also, a five TFs which didn't finish their recommendations.
Thanks Milosh.
If the unsourced BLP drama in the English wiki can revive the Task Force Living People we may also have some recommendations from that area.
OK, I've read all the recommendations. I've basically given them a score out of 10. This is, of course, purely my subjective take on it but I felt it was the best way for me to gather my thoughts and people can agree or disagree with my list or might be inspired to do their own list which will itself show up points of agreement.
The listed items are given by Task Force name first; recommendations often didn't have a snappy title to list them by so I have then given them a "name" which would probably be adequate to identify it to anyone who has read it. I've tried to link to the recommendations but note that some links go to a page with multiple recommendations, so be sure to locate the correct one if you're using this list as any sort of guide.
Ten points
[edit]I didn't award any tens, nothing struck me as perfect :o)
Nine and eight points
[edit]These are ones that I most feel the WMF should follow up on and I feel most enthusiastic about:
- China ~ Their only recommendation, I realise Sue has already stated this won't be a priority but it still has a TF recommendation and I therefore reserve the right to express an opinion :o)
- Community Health: "Volunteer Recognition"
- Community Health: "Social Features"
- Community Health: "Tools for Community Health (WYSIWYG etc)"
- Advocacy: "Net neutrality"
- Advocacy: "Copyright/Public Domain"
- Offline: "Schools"
- Offline: "Article Selection"
- Local Languages: "Stimulate Local Content"
- Local Languages: "Minimise Bandwidth"
- Local Languages: "Outreach"
Seven and six points
[edit]These are ones that I feel positive about and would like to see actively taken up if resources allow.
- Movement Roles: "Promoting Real Life Events"
- Movement Roles: "Regional Working Groups"
- Movement Roles: "Volunteer Council"
- Community Health: "Improve consensus-building"
- Community Health: "Senior Editors"
- Financial Stability: "Increase Spending on Fundraising (Growth)"
- Financial Stability: "Endowment (Longer Term Stability)"
- Offline: "More mobile access"
Five points
[edit]These are ones I feel rather neutral about (I don't dislike them but I'm not particularly inspired by them either).
- Quality: "Core Values"
- Movement Roles: "Invest in Chapters"
- Movement Roles: "Chapters Network"
- Financial Stability: "Status Quo"
The rest I'm not keen on, except these which I just have as "do not quite understand or cannot form an opinion about"
[edit]- Movement Roles: "Universities as Chapters"
- Offline: "XML/Parsing"
- Local Languages "Mediawiki Localisation"
Yes, I'm afraid I only gave that a score of four. I only listed those I gave a five or above. Apologies if it is one that you worked on and/or are a supporter of.
My feeling about it is that firstly we already have inter-wiki links so that people can navigate between languages and translate if they're able. Secondly I was concerned that it would generate Yet Another Wiki when it is not at all certain we have the manpower to support one along those lines. The Strategy process was supposed to be international and I know there has been a translation effort and an attempt to support foreign speakers but I would be surprised if anyone felt that had been truly successful here. My prediction would be that such a global wiki would be virtually unused.
As you can see from some of the recommendations I've rated more highly, I'm very keen to see action to "conquer the world" as it were, but I don't feel the Global Thematic recommendation is going to help with that.
No problem beside i return you the favor by being not a big fan of Social Network Features. Not that it would help me much to fix +600 Japanese voice actors articles in the English wiki :p
I'm rather supportive of the global wiki project as out of batch of recommendations it was the only one to potentially do some good on inherent wikipedia systemic bias issue.
Yes, i know that the Big wall is the lack of personals but i think to start small first with just exchange of resources. That will be enough as a carrot. --KrebMarkt 21:15, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
I like the idea of cross wiki theme based projects. I think it has the potential to address systemic bias, and to also greatly improve the quality of articles. Some topics such as BLP about Olympians would be much better if done by an internal project that shared resources.
It is a strength of WMF that it has an international reach and I think we need to utilize this in a different way in the next decade.
I am not quite sure where this my remark would be appropriate, but I think that in the end of the day, we should not just give a bunch of recommendations, but also indicate (attach to each recommendations) the level at which the recommendation can be implemented (as an example of levels, without thinking too much: imposed on the projects; to be voted on by the projects; endorsed by WMF and then voted; etc).
Rated by: Gain/Cost/Feasibility?
I think it could be a good idea to evaluate the recommendations on these or some similar criterias now.
Maybe on the following criterias.
- Gain: How large impact will the strategy have?
- Cost: How much money will it cost?
- Required volunteer effort: How much volunteer effort is needed to be put into this strategy?
- Volunteer support: How many volunteers are likely to support this strategy. For example MediaWiki development might have high potential gain, low cost and low volunteer effort, while the strategy still gets complicated because there is a restricted amount of volunteers that are able to contribute.
- Feasibility: Is there any other obstacles that makes the strategy hard to implement.
Or may be in the first run just split them into two groups: those which can be realized within the framework of existing WMF-wide policies and those which may require changes in the policies.
Some things we should be thinking about for long-term strategy:
- what are the major opportunities and risks?
- what is the short-term and sustaining/long-term cost? (in effort, funds, partnerships, &c)
- how much of the implementation is known? are there incremental measures of success?
- what is the overall time-frame? (and will the effect be felt forever, or will it be eclipsed later?)
- will the desired result happen anyway, but perhaps more slowly, without this strategy?
- I'm not sure that 'cost' and 'volunteer effort' need to be separated too strongly.
- I wouldn't place too high a value on what estimates for 'volunteer support' -- and while we may estimate that within the current active community, there are 1000 happy users for every member of the current group of active editors [and they are willing to help with strategy, as evidenced by the flood of support we got after the first site notice!]
I would like some clarification from Eekim and/or Philippe about what we're trying to achieve in terms of the recommendations.
I had assumed, perhaps completely foolishly, that all the recommendations from the TFs would be going to the board. But the nature of this conversation thus far gives the impression that what we have is the 'long list' and that we're now being encouraged to reduce this to a short list.
My preference would be that the WMF board gets to see all of them. OK, I know that's a lot of recommendations, however my feeling is that the TFs put in a lot of work to get their recommendations out and I would feel a little heartless being part of a process that now essentially kicks them to the kerb.
Along a similar line of thinking, the recommendations have already been part of a distillation of hundreds of proposals, many of which have already withered on the vine... in part that was bound to happen due to the sheer number of them, very few of us could be expected to give them all due care and attention; the point I make now is that I fear that we're perhaps moving into yet another process of shelving ideas.
Personally I would prefer the WMF to be presented with a broad range from which to choose and to which they can apply their insider-knowledge in terms of feasibility, staffing requirements, funding and so on. To put it another way, I would rather see the WMF's meeting end with "OK, we've run out of time and we still have 50% of the recommendations to discuss, so we'll meet again on..." rather than "well, this meeting didn't take long, I guess the Strategy Process wasn't very successful at generating ideas, huh?"
So I would like to hear some direction from Eekim and Philippe about what they want us good members of the Strategy Task Force to be achieving in this context.
The Board has the same access to the wiki that all of us have, and I can assure you they've been pointed to the recommendations. :)
But yes, we're now asking for some synthesis on the recommendations to get us to a point where we determine which are practical, which are realistic, which are low hanging fruit, etc.
Proposals have not, repeat not, withered on the vine. They continue to be a major source of discussion for people here on the wiki and also in our meetings offline. I hope to bring a couple of ideas here soon to see what people think about them and so we can chart how best to get started on the proposals.
Nobody has said the strategy process isn't successful in generating ideas; quite the opposite. From the Board to the staff to outside observers, we've consistently heard people being impressed with the work of the task forces and individuals on this wiki. In some ways the number of ideas is almost overwhelming.
Thanks for the clarification Philippe.
In general terms I think I find all the recommendations achievable. Certainly some require greatly more effort than others but I don't recall reading any aghast and thinking "this will never work!" or "this is outrageously expensive!" or other such damning exclamations.
I'm not sure any of my favourites strike me as low hanging fruit; I still have the fault of having a parochial en:wp mindset but even with that we are talking about changes effecting a substantial community of people. The old image of steering an oil tanker comes to mind; I think almost any change will take some time and effort to gain traction. That would only become more true as I try and get my head around applying it to multiple projects. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I find any of them impractical or unrealistic.
All of which kind of leaves me back where I started, with the list I've submitted to this discussion and not quite knowing if there's anything else I can contribute currently. I guess I'll kick back and wait for more input from other folk :o)
I guess we could start by identifying recommendations that tries to achive simmilar goals.
I think for example that all of the following has in common that they wants to bring Wikimedia to the masses (labels taken from the summary on the recommendation page)
- Movement roles - Investing in chapter development
- Movement roles - Establishing a Chapters Network
- Movement roles - Promoting real life events
- Movement roles - Enable nonmembership structures such as university departments to serve in the chapter role
- Movement roles - Enable volunteers to form Regional Working Groups as a sub-Chapter status
- Offline - Schools
- Local Languages - Outreach
- China - Promote the Wikimedia movement and involve the public at large
And the following aims in one way or the other at improving the contributor experience, and to make more potential contributors able to contribute.
- Community health - Volunteer recognition
- Community health - Improve consensus-building processes
- Community health - Demarcate and strengthen volunteer roles
- Community health - Tools for community health
- Community health - Social networking features
- Quality - Global WikiProjects
- Quality - Senior Editors
- Local Languages - Stimulate creation of local content
- Local Languages - Localization and internationalization of the MediaWiki software
- China - Lift the obstacles for participation
Note that each of these recommendations might try to achive other, different goals as well. But I have tried to find the similarities.
A valid exercise, Dafer.
Philippe has asked us for "synthesis". I've looked up the definitions and one is "the combination of ideas into a complex whole".
So perhaps we're supposed to stop thinking of them as individual recommendations but more than grouping together similarly themed recommendations we're supposed to merge them in such a way that we still have a lot of detail.
I'm a little wary of attempting to draft something along those lines. I'm struggling to articulate why. Part of it is that I feel there should be an interim step; I would like to see the WMF discuss them as individual recommendations and then return to us with ones they favour and encourage us to work on them, perhaps then to produce one large strategy document suitable for fitting on one page.
Without that interim step I fear we'll essentially end up either just doing a cut 'n' paste job where we stitch them all together (hopefully with some degree of finesse but) leaving us not much further forward. Alternatively we'll find ourselves being somewhat ruthless in editing out parts of the recommendations so that we have something more streamlined. I guess that could work, however I feel I'm reaching the point at which I say "I lack the authority to do that". Any kind of editing exercise is going to involve an implicit assertion that "I know better than the Task Force that drafted this recommendation".
All having worked correctly the TFs will have researched their data and worked collaboratively to present something fairly focused. If we're going to chop stuff out I guess it behooves us to know the data each TF used. OK, that should be in the recommendation already but... sigh.
Perhaps I just lack confidence. I'm reluctant to be the one that wields the scissors. I feel the need to defer to a higher power. Yet I'll be the first one to complain if the WMF seems to take a deeply authoritarian approach :o)
So, all that said, I think I'll step back and wait to see if anyone is willing to take all this in hand in some forceful way and I'll just try and support that as best I can.
I feel unsure about what we are supposed to do as well. I also feel that I am very unable to judge the relative importance of the different strategies. All I can do is to analyse the strategies and find agreements/disagreements.
Probably everone else feels the same, because there hasn't been any real new progress on this discussion page yet, only summaries of what has been done before and not any synthesis. So what probably is needed now is clearer guidlines about what we are supposed to do.
Yes. The other thing that concerns me is that it appears that TF members may not know of the discussions here. I wonder if many of them have assumed that their work is done. If that's the case I would feel bad removing any TF-created content without the people that drafted that content here to argue for its retainment or at least to guide the decision-making.
I think we are expected to provide concise recommendations which serve as a kind of summary to the long elaborated recommendations of the Task forces. We can also indicate what we expect from WMF concerning various recommendation groups.
I am also a bit at a loss as to how we can say "this should go into the final strategy document" and "this shouldn't" (insofar as I have actually understood what's asked of us. I like the "themed" approach provided by Dafer, as it brings some perspective into recommendations that would be "cross taskforces", and I find the notation system a god way to try and weigh the different recommendations. But a a notation system, in my opinion, will only work if we have lots of people weighing in, as for example, my notation would be completely different from that of Bodnotbod :). I'm thinking maybe we want to work in a mindmap kind of way, trying to start with a taskforce and trying to map all the recommendations of all the taskforces in relation to that taskforce. This should help us show the different links between different recommendations. To some extent, I suppose that a recommendation that finds itself "linked" to many other might organically take more weight than one which is extremely specific and doe snot relate to anything else.
What we can do of course is to go and ask for specific feedback (rating the TF proposals) in our communities, but this would require some time, preparation, and also we need to present concisely what is expected to be rated - the sum of all TF recommendations is too big for mone persone to read, and the summary of topics is too short to make any judgement. Also, we have translation issues (if we want to avoid systemic bias etc).
I've been watching this discussion. Was not sure what to contribute... until I realized most of us are not sure what to contribute.
I think there's a danger in trying to make the recommendations any more concise. Already, the summaries leave out important details. The other day, someone said "wait, the recommendation to 'improve consensus building' doesn't offer any tangible ways to do that!" Of course, if you go into the recommendation, you see a lot of detailed suggestions. Moreover, you see facts to back it up, so we're not just asking the board to blindly follow them. Summarizing it has made the recommendation less clear, and increased the possibility of failure.
You can abstract all these recommendations, but eventually you end up back at general ideas like "improve usability" and "focus on quality".
I think we could use a bit more feedback from the board. If they're reading all the recommendations, then there's no value in summarizing or shortening them. If the real issue is that they don't like some of the recommendations, then we need to know which ones, so we can either improve them, take them apart and recycle them, or abandon them altogether.
The initiative is now on the Foundation side.
I don't see ourselves trying to draw a diagram on how each recommendations interact with each others in sort of ecosystem.