China and Africa

A clarification and a question: The WMF isn't proposing to direct resources away from China and Africa. It is saying (and remember, this is all a draft) that it will not prioritize these countries over the next five years. There's a big difference. That also doesn't mean that others in the Wikimedia movement could not focus their energies there. The best example of this is the work that the Wikimedia Chapters have done partnering with cultural institutions, which is something that the Foundation is also not prioritizing.

So here's my question: Given the Foundation's limited resources, do any of you think China or Africa should take priority over other regions? If so, why?

I'm actually very interested in this as well. Eekim and I have lived and breathed this data for a couple of months, and sometimes being too close to the data gets you lost in the weeds. Given that there are limited resources, is there a reason to prioritize this in another way? What would that way be?

For the record, there's a TON of information in Wikimedia-pedia at China and Africa. I had a very emotional reaction to choosing not to prioritize these areas, because I'm a true believer in the cause and the mission - but the truth is, for me, the Foundation would be spending donor money. When it's given to WMF, it's in the trust that we will make logical decisions that advance the mission in a way that provides the highest return on investment while staying true to our goals and mission. Investing in China and Africa are, for me, not safe gambles right now, and I don't feel like (if I were making the decisions, which I'm not) I could feel good about gambling with other peoples' money in those areas. We don't have the cultural competency or the institutional/governmental support to back it up. I want to extend there as badly as anyone - but with limited resources, it's not something I'm comfortable recommending.

But with that said, I'd love to hear other opinions - but they should keep in mind that the Foundation doesn't have unlimited resources. In my opnion, if there's a strong desire to go in to China or Africa, we probably should figure out how to do it using another entity (chapters, some other part of the movement).

I think that those areas should be high priority. When I donate money in the fundraiser, I do so very much with those areas in mind. Actually I could have bought a yearly account on an online commercial encyclopedia for the same money each year. But when I decide to use Wikipedia and donate money to Wikimedia instead, I do so because I know that my money can enable someone that doesn't afford to pay for a commercial encyclopedia to use Wikipedia free of charge. I think this should be considered too. Maybe a lot of donors actually reasons the same way and actually wants their money to be invested in less developed regions. Their might be a good idea to make a survey on the motivation behind the donations.

At the same time I understand that investing in those areas not allways will have a very high effect. Some investments that would have high impact in for example Europe might not make a difference at all in Africa or China because the underlying infrastructure and culture that leads to succes in Europe not is present there. I do however think that every low cost-high impact solutions should have an essential priority in the strategy. I think such strategies are what we have aimed for in the Local Language projects Task Force.

One issue here is that we should be simultaneously developing a five-year plan for the movement and mission, as well as one specifically for the Foundation, to put the latter in context.

Another is that I haven't seen an explicit assessment of the cost & impact stats of various solutions or ideas. From my perspective, if we can define a major priority, whatever the cost, we can find people, networks, organizations, governments, and global superstars to make it happen. And 'low cost/high impact' proposals are always interesting, even when not targeting a core priority.

If expansion in China, India, and Africa are important (simply on the basis of reaching all of manking, as well as current access to knowledge in those areas) but we don't know how to do it effectively, a meta-priority to find better ways to do that [rather than "investing" in a specific type of solution that may or may not work] would be appropriate.

What guided me in the research I did for the Local Language Project Task Force was precisly cost and impact. However, I found that it was very hard to find numbers that meassured the actual impact a strategy would have. For example the cost for localizing the MediaWiki software was estimated to be $0 (well maybe not zero realy), $90 000 or $900 000 depending on what method that was used to get that work done. But then, how do we know what impact that realy has on the local projects? I asked Siebrand at translatewiki.net for data on the correlation between past localization and project growth, but such statistics didn't exist. Hopefuly it will be available in the near future though, as Siebrand told me that he had spoken with Erik Zachte about this in the past, and that work on trying to make this happen was sheduled to take place in January.

Another recommendation where it is obvious that the strategy will cost a lot of money is the fourth recommendation about having more local servers to rise access speeds. Here it is possible to make the estimates about how much faster the loading times will be. You can have a gut feeling that if average article access time is lowered from 30+ seconds to 10 seconds or below you probably will have larger use of the projects, and thereby also contribution to the projects. But how can you be sure that this realy is so? Maybe other factors play a role as well that won't make the projects grow even if people have instant access to the material.

So even if the price and some parameter that is likely to be correlated with project growth is quite easy to estimate. It is still very difficult to estimate the actual impact that the different strategies will have, because you don't know how strong the correlation between the actual impact and the "likely correlated parameter" is. I would therefore make clear that I am very unable to make any judgement about how large the different recommendations in the Local Language Project Recommendations actually will have, and my hope is that many with a greater understanding of the complexity of the problem can make such.

You're right; it's hard to be exact. However, we can make good guesses. Take your example of localisation. We know that localizing our software affects projects across the board, whereas putting a person on the ground in a specific country most likely only affects that country. Now, maybe putting that person on the ground has a greater effect in that country than localizing the software. So the analysis does start getting more complex.

I want to reiterate something. This letter is largely focused on Foundation investments. It makes sense, given the Foundation's limited resources, to focus on things that will have broad impacts. However, because we are a distributed movement, it makes sense for people on the ground to engage in local strategies. One of our big next steps is to flesh out the movement roles questions. Specifically, who in this movement should be doing what?

Regarding cost/impact analysis: The regional analysis largely focused on impact and less on cost (other than China). There's another layer of analysis that still needs to be done. Help us flesh this out. A good starting point is Wikimedia market analysis.

Yes, I agree with both you and the letter that on-the-ground precense in Africa ain't something to strive for at the moment. One of the first lessons Gerard tought me when I arrived here was that general strategies that will have an impact on a large amount of projects are something to strive for. And I believe that such strategies not are pushed aside in this letter with point 4,5 and 6 under "Synthesis of the issues to tackle with the strategy" and point 3 under "Recommended priorities for the Foundation" supporting this. At least I believe these statements are sufficient for South America, Africa, Middle East and South Asia. How well they address the issues of reaching China and India I don't know though.

What analysis is supposed to be collected? Under market analysis I find a lot of tables that allready are filled in. But is there some specific collection or analysis of data that needs to be done?

When we put a person on the ground in a particular country, he or she CAN localise for the language he knows. When this person is not part of that countries language(s) and culture(s) he is likely not to be as effective as could be.

When we put someone on the ground in a multi-lingual country, then it should be one of his/her objectives to remove all the roadblocks that exist.. Finding people to localise our software is one of the more obvious ones.

The notion that these approaches are in competition is not that wise; as we understand the processes that promote editors to edit and readers to read, it is only natural to have a person on the ground make those the priorities. Thanks,

Fair point, Gerard. Many software companies put people on the ground to understand these obstacles, as you point out. This is something that should be included as part of the boots-on-the-ground experiment.

Perhaps the solution is to have a separate fund devoted to those who wish to have their donations put into regions like China and Africa in order to spread the base out of the Western world? If it is about relocating resources, I would think the donors should be the ones to determine such. After all, one of the classic concepts about Wikipedia was about giving poor children in Africa who have only computer access and not large libraries the ability to tap into a huge educational resource. It would be rather impossible if we turned our backs on them, no? Ottava Rima 01:26, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Nobody has suggested turning our backs on them. They would retain access to Wikipedia, our other projects, and the multiple languages thereof. It's just that the FOUNDATION - the legal entity - would not invest in new projects there, which it's not doing today. The status quo is maintained...

Philippe - Proposals for closing projects at meta. Sango, Twi, Kirundi, etc. There are many, many African language wikis for languages that have millions of people. They are being closed because of lack of participation. I do not have figures on any correlation between amount of spending by the WMF to advertise about these wikis and in the African regions where the languages are predominate, but I am going off the assumption that there is little money invested. If the Foundation is unwilling to put as much money as it currently invests in Africa for these languages (assuming there is any at all), then the rate of drying up of African language wikis would only increase. That concerns me. Ottava Rima 01:55, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

As to "investing in [projects]", it's not a zero-sum game. I see three interlocked groups: priorities, opportunities, and resources (are there more in that vein?). Other global efforts with their own priorities, in a position to point to or create opportunities, have resources that they don't always know how to direct; when we can identify ways to combine the three, everyone benefits. It would be helpful to see a breakdown of specific proposals along those lines:

 mission priorities   
      --->  proposals to accomplish each priority
                  ---->  costs of each proposal  
                  ---->  dependencies, shared components
 
 opportunities  
      --->  proposals to take advantage of each opportunity
                  ---->  gains from each proposal (including new resources)
                  ---->  mission priorities furthered by each
 
 resources available 
      --->  ways to get more of each resource
                  ---->  partners
                  ---->  calls for help
      --->  proposals depending on each resource

Separating priorities, opportunities, and resources would help avoid some of the current confusion, where "not a priority for investment" is being interpreted as "not supported from in terms of interpretation of the mission".

Perhaps we can phrase "not a priority" better: divide opportunities into "funding and messaging priority", "important goal needing further analysis; way forward is not clear", "goal best achieved by regional groups, chapters, and languages", and "not a core priority". The first three should all be pursued enthusiastically wherever there are low-cost high-impact solutions. [the bottleneck is identifying those solutions]

Very few areas that had a serious Task Force assigned to them fall into the last category -- they were selected precisely because they are a priority for some parts of our current efforts, or because they are representative of a large potential effort or audience not currently served but addressed by our mission.

Echoing Philippe's comments above: The beauty of free culture is that people can invest in the countries of their choice without going through the Foundation. The Google Translation Toolkit project is a good example of this. They initially chose to focus on Indian languages, Arabic, and Swahili, and they're now focusing on Korean. Kenya/Tanzania and South Korea were not countries that emerged as "top priority" countries in the analysis on this wiki, but Google is doing great work in those regions for their own reasons. And everyone benefits from that.