Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia Foundation/2016/Community consultation/Communities/Set 1

SVentura (WMF)

Response by SVentura (WMF) 19:15, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

SVentura (WMF) Lower complexity threshold for first time contributors

Lower the threshold for actual contributions. In other words, make contributing to the projects easier (access to 'edit' or 'improve' buttons everytime user interacts with content, both on our sites, mobile apps, and on third party environment), value small contributions and make contributing less time/effort intensive (through micro-edits, edit suggestions mechanisms - yes people might think this is spoon-feeding, but that's how you raise a *baby* into a *steak eating* adult. Make contributing to the projects *fun* and rewarding (use principles of gamification to bring people in, reward contribution, participation and initiative - particularly for newbies). Part of our success in engaging future communities might rely on how we define ourselves, what does a 21st century knowledge project looks like? Is a digital encyclopedia composed of pages, articles, images, video, interactive boards, audio, graphics.... all of the above?

@Atulkherde (WMF): Inviting more and more people may dilute the quality. It risks compromising the authenticity of the content. Popularization can only be a secondary goal, and definitely of lower value than authenticity.

@SVentura (WMF): what "baby" contributions come to mind for you? Thanks, LilaTretikov (talk) 21:18, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@LilaTretikov (WMF): WikiGrok (now defunct) was an earlier attempt to test micro edits. Besides the creation of long-form original content for the projects, there is a myriad of curation (janitorial) tasks that can potentially be easier for new less experienced editors. the Wikidata game already uses some if that successfully, helping validate that Obama is a human, Lisbon is a city, and tomatoes are fruits. Maybe we could offer a "sentence to translate", a date to confirm (fact checking for recent events)...find an image of "x" for article "y" on Commons .... I am sure experienced wikipedians could create a list of tasks that - if properly presented - could be a good onramp for newbies.

@SVentura (WMF): Great point! I wanted to mention that we did an experiment a few years ago ^{[citation needed]} in which the Edit tab was painted green. This caused a huge spike in the number of people who edited, but at the time we only had the wikitext interface, plus the social barriers... So there was a conscious decision to not drive more people to edit until we fixed the downstream issues. This mostly supports your suggestion, perhaps also shows that we should be prioritizing proven ways to improve new editor retention (looking at you, Teahouse!). Adamw (talk) 22:08, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@AdamW (WMF): Agree Adam, our sobriety is our biggest brand differentiator, the reader comes to our projects and there is no noise, that's soothing and respectful - but we have to balance that with the need to offer a rich content experience (Yay Discovery) and the need to signal readers that they can edit the projects too. We've been cautious about how we've used our real state - rightfully. New visual cues to trigger engagement might be something worth exploring.

SVentura (WMF) top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

#2 and #4 seems like a good start to help leverage the value and resources that already exist. With an emphasis on #4. Given our global perspective, the Foundation holds a unique position to help identify synergies between community efforts, to create connections between projects across languages and communities.

Slowking4

Response by Slowking4 15:31, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Slowking4's response to the critical question

if you make me pick one it is: become more welcoming. the culture is the constraint on future growth. we have a culture of rigor through rejection; we need a culture of rigor through mentoring. community health could lead this culture change, but it will be a long painful process; the community will not do it on its own. we have a flawed premise that content writers are infinitely available; when expert writers are finite, and preoccupied with their paying work. when they see their work reverted and not a spirit of collaboration, then they go away for good.

Slowking4's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

all of the above. community health will be a system. need a profound culture change: need to stop harassing newbies, especially when they break rules; need to support productive volunteers with grant support; need to play nice with affiliates, help affiliates become better; need to grow activity on global south; need better automation to free up volunteers to authentically mentor newbies; need policies for problem avoidance rather than prescriptive direction.

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I agree with you heartily, but, alas, User:Slowking4, we can't do them all, not at one time. :/ We have to prioritize our approaches so we know what to do first and now (well, where now = June +). Given that, if you could only do a couple at a time, which would you do first? :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:55, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

i kinda agree, we need to set priorities, however, it is not clear to me that there are constraints of resources, but imagination & people. i keep thinking of a strategy of small ball, where you spread the grant love widely, and reinforce success with follow-up. there are a lot of volunteers doing good work, but on a shoe-string. a little expense money would do wonders. also the picking of "one thing" tends to whip saw strategy, when a nuanced family of approaches, or front burner, back burner, might provide a more flexible approach. Slowking4 (talk) 16:12, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Fair enough, Slowking4. :) At least in terms of grantmaking, I suppose it's possible to strategize more widely - when it comes to directing staff activities, I think focal approaches are helpful. But I think you're right that flexibility is important. Support and Safety (formerly Community Advocacy) has prioritized among its strategies this year harassment and strengthening trust & safety practices, but that doesn't mean we haven't gone beyond that, where need emerges. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:17, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

thanks, as far as directing staff & small ball: how about having staff collaborate with Magnus Manske? you or i could name a top ten; listening to them and collaborating on some of their wish list would do more than money. these are productive people who have a big impact. community health may require community organizers. (but then i'm a user who remembers community fellows fondly) Slowking4 (talk) 16:28, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

About how to stop harassing newbies, we must redefine the role of admins. Of course vandalism and propaganda must be fought. But honest contributors must not be chased away with warning templates. When we find an editor that makes poor contributions, we must welcome them and teach them how to improve. It takes longer than reverting straight away, but is necessary to improve the health of the community. --NaBUru38 (talk) 14:58, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

the problem is not just definition. it is entirely culture, not technical nor policy. we have huggle, which attempts to warn automated tool users not to bite newbies, and they treat it as a speed bump. we have all the reasonable policy with nice sounding collaboration, and people persist in the wall of templates. we have "won't consider case at ANI unless template warnings have been previously used." Slowking4 (talk) 02:27, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Yger

Response by Yger 19:09, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Yger's response to the critical question

Approach five

@Yger: Could you explain why? And do you have a second and third choice? Thanks! —LuisV (WMF) (talk) 01:44, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

BethNaught

Response by BethNaught 20:56, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

BethNaught's response to the critical question

Leading question. {{sad face}} However, the critical area to focus on is harassment. We need to stop trolls driving productive contributors away.

@BethNaught: fair point, but still an important question I'd think. What are some ways we can help stop trolling? LilaTretikov (talk) 21:23, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

BethNaught's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Support ideas 1, 3 and 4.

• 1: harassment is a serious issue on English Wikipedia. I don't think the WMF should expand its programme of so-called "SanFranBans" but there needs to be thought about how to optimise co-operation with community structures, such as Arbitration Committees, to tackle harassment.
• 3 and 4: Aiming for maximal transparency and co-operation is essential, because an adequate level of it might be reached.

@BethNaught: How would you define "optimal transparency". We really struggle with that, not because we don't want to be transparent, but because it has a very high human communication costs. Are there some "hard" lines about transparency, when, for how long, and what is/ is not as important to communicate. How much funding should we spend on transparency? How much is too little, how much is too much? LilaTretikov (talk) 21:23, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@LilaTretikov (WMF): I get that there is a balance. But you should know you've screwed up when people, including the Funds Dissemination Committee complain about you not releasing the grant agreement for an oversize grant. If you want a bright-line rule from me, it's that the WMF should publish all the relevant material about money it receives in all ways, grants and donations alike, and that if a grant's terms have to be kept secret it is not a grant worth having, because it will inevitably damage the reputation of the WMF. BethNaught (talk) 19:45, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Idea 2 is so buzzwordy I don't understand what it proposes. Volunteers already do 5 well on English Wikipedia but WMF help may be good for smaller wikis. However I do not endorse any software which changes the fundamental wikitext model of wikis, because look at the mess Flow is in at the moment. With regard to 6, policy and process is important. If anything, there needs to be effort to more effectively explain to new users how to edit Wikipedia and so on.

@BethNaught: Heh, fair re 2. Let me think about how we can rephrase that without screwing up translations too bad. I think the idea was about supporting community leadership: in the harassment context, this might be something like allies training for arbs or admins; in the affiliates/chapters context, it might be training for boards or EDs to help them become more effective at their jobs. Does that help?

re #1: open to extra detail on how we can better cooperate with groups like ArbCom, and/or how you think they can be encouraged to take more action about harassment (as I'm sure you know, this is not easy - many of them wrestle with this problem without much impact, which is part of why we have SanFranBans in the first place). —LuisV (WMF) (talk) 01:45, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not an arbitrator, so I don't have any specifics, nor do I know what is already done. I was thinking along the lines that, if an ArbCom is handling a serious case, there should be a designated officer at the WMF for them to seek assistance from. I wouldn't know how this would work in practice. Some kind of training programme sounds like it could be helpful - I became an admin on English Wikipedia a month ago and was surprised at some of the nastiness I've had to hide. If there had been a "how to handle libel, trolling and harassment" page in w:en:Wikipedia:Administrators' guide I would have felt more confident in handling such matters effectively from the get-go. BethNaught (talk) 19:45, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Snipre

Response by Snipre 21:08, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Réponse de Snipre à la question critique

Il faut renforcer les projets. Le système actuel est trop centré sur le travail individuel, ce qui engendre des problèmes lorsque 2 visions différentes se rencontrent sur un même sujet.

We must strengthen projects. The current system is too focused on individual work, which causes problems when two different visions meet on the same subject.

Top 2-3 de Snipre (ou partagez vos idées)

5

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Jmabel

Response by Jmabel 00:41, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Jmabel's response to the critical question

It seems to me that something missing here is to improve the transparency of the Foundation for those already involved in projects and to better align the Foundation to support existing projects. Certainly I am not alone among the most active Commons users in feeling that the WMF is highly opaque and not particularly interested in what we are doing or what we might want. - Jmabel (talk) 00:41, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Jmabel. :) Approach 3 is meant to help with transparency across the board: "Increase communication and transparency with and between our communities and across Wikimedia affiliates." WMF transparency is a critical part of that. I hear you on the need to better align with existing projects; I don't think that's really covered, per se, in the potential approaches. Although this conversation is meant to be about strategy (what we want to achieve) rather than tactics (what we're going to do to achieve it), I'd be really interested in hearing further thoughts on ways we could better support existing projects. There are, of course, some obvious ways - like Community Tech and WikiLegal. But if you'd be interested in talking more about what kinds of support you might envision, I'd like to think about that even beyond the purpose of this consultation. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:58, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

If you want to arrange some time we could have a discussion, I'd be interested. - Jmabel (talk) 02:29, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

What's your basic time zone, Jmabel? Do you IRC? :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

West Coast U.S. (Pacific Time Zone). Haven't used IRC in years, though I assume I could set it back up. Would Skype be an acceptable alternative? I use that pretty regularly. - Jmabel (talk) 06:02, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Jmabel's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

...write here…

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MisterSanderson

Response by MisterSanderson 03:32, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

MisterSanderson's response to the critical question

As the number of articles grow more than the number of editors, it's needed to improve automatization so editors can focus in writing, editing and discussing (human job) and leave patrolling, reversing vandalism, blocking vandals, etc to the machine.

MisterSanderson's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach five: Improve automation tools to reduce manual work for managing content and projects.

Approach one: Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment for contributors and editors.

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MER-C

Response by MER-C 06:27, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

MER-C's response to the critical question

• Stop destroying your communities by...
  • Ignoring them.
  • Engaging in sham consultations.
  • Outright rejecting our feedback with no reason whatsoever.
  • Imposing unwanted, poorly thought out, disrespectful and/or unhelpful top-down changes (software such as Flow, AFT, Gather, Moodbar and superprotect, dumbing down Wikipedia content into snippets, the India Education Program are only just the start of a long list).
  • Abusing them as beta testers.
  • Clueless or contemptuous staff members who do not have any idea of the purpose of individual Wikimedia projects.

An example of all six of these problems is the deployment of the Gather extension on en.wp We want to communicate the sum of all human knowledge with you, not despite you.

• Make editors more productive by providing the tools that they actually ask for.
• Make editors more productive by helping us remove trolls, spammers, (paid) advocates, and banned users from Wikimedia websites as expeditiously as possible, and helping us to keep them away.

Thanks, User:MER-C. FWIW, I thought you made some good suggestions about the last point at the harassment consultation. We're preparing for the next step of that, and exploring tools to help with these workflows looks like a strong need. I kind of feel like at least your first three subpoints could be summarized as "Treat communities like real collaborators". (although I appreciate the specifics on ways to do that :) Just making sure I'm picking up the basic approach and reflecting it accurately.)

Cluelessness is bad, but contemptuousness should never happen - ideally from staff or volunteers. It sounds to me like that's a call for better staff training and perhaps for avenues for outreach when problems exist? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:12, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF): "Treat communities like real collaborators" isn't enough. The WMF should also be accountable to the community as much as possible. Substantial matters such as hiring new board members, C-level executives and all allocation decisions involving $X or more need to be put out for community feedback (the Community Tech consultation was a great example of the latter) and we need to be able to see clear signs that our feedback is being taken into account. The community should be able to initiate a binding RFC of no-confidence against board members and senior management when necessary.

Cluelessness becomes contempt when the first three points I raise above come into play, especially when the feedback is "this is not a good idea" (think w:WP:DISRUPTSIGNS). Gather was especially contemptuous because the WMF designed the extension to dump an additional workload on the community without first asking us, ignored us instead of killing the "feature" when we said no and hired a community liaison who had insufficient knowledge of foundational policy.

Staff training isn't sufficient -- the WMF shouldn't be hiring anyone who doesn't understand the implications of "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia curated by volunteers" in the first place. Awareness of this should be refreshed frequently. Ideally, they should have editing experience.

That said, things have improved at the staff level but not the board level -- as evidenced by the Doc James fiasco. I'm sure things will improve once communicating with (certain parts of) the WMF is no longer an exercise comparable to bashing our heads against a brick wall. MER-C (talk) 08:14, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, MER-C. It sounds like a healthy dose of "empower communities in top WMF decisions" as well. Smart hiring choices - also a good idea. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:06, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

MER-C's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

1 is an obvious support. We are not good enough at removing banned users and trolls from Wikimedia projects and reducing the damage they cause. This will require a multifaceted approach, including hiring a harassment adviser communities can access, more C&Ds, stronger technical measures (e.g. the stuff I proposed in the Community Wishlist Survey, 500/30 for toxic topics).

Regarding 3 and 4: it is obvious that the WMF is not transparent enough. You need to fix this first, and fast.

If 5 exclusively means more resources for the Community Tech team, then I'm all for it. Otherwise, regard this with extreme caution due to long-standing WMF incompetence and cluelessness regarding what the community wants (e.g. Flow).

Other stuff: One of the biggest challenges facing our projects is the abuse of our resources for advocacy and promotional reasons. Subproblems include civil POV pushing and paid advocacy. Some of the tools that are good against harassment can also be applied to this problem. This may also help to reduce harassment by freeing up community resources to focus on positive tasks.

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Yair rand

Response by Yair rand 06:51, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Yair rand's response to the critical question

What can the WMF do to help in this area? Not much. Wikimedians work pretty hard at it already, with no small number of designated WikiProjects dedicated to the issue. Some of the WMF's tech projects will probably have a minor impact (slight negative impact from Flow or its successor, slight positive from VE and similar work), but nowhere near large enough to even influence the direction of development. I suppose some of the ideas around real-time collaboration floating around, coupled with some serious development on changelists like Related Changes, might provide some real aid to the people who work on this. However, whether the health/growth/diversity of the communities gets better is almost entirely out of the hands of the Wikimedia Foundation. Other things are not, so please work on those instead. --Yair rand (talk) 06:51, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Yair rand's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

I'm going to assume that Approach six was simply added by mistake, or misphrased to the point of losing the intended meaning, but just in case it's not: Don't. Do. That. Seriously, the WMF trying to directly intervene in project policy crosses the line.

Approach one isn't within the WMF's (or anyone's) capabilities. I don't understand the jargon in approaches two and four, but two sounds like it's mostly outside the WMF's domain. Approach three is extremely important (particularly transparency of the WMF), but mostly for reasons other than those listed in the question. Allowing increased communication between communities will probably actually be somewhat beneficial to community health. Reducing hostility matters, and inability to communicate breeds hostility, especially if the parties need to work together while being unable to communicate easily. Similarly, the more WMF transparency and communication, the fewer people who assume that there's a hostile force hanging around the movement. Approach five, sure, do that, but it also probably won't help health/growth/diversity to any significant degree. Approach six, don't even think about it.

Tl;dr: Use Approach 3, please. Approach five would also be a plus. --Yair rand (talk) 06:51, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

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Justlettersandnumbers

Response by Justlettersandnumbers 11:52, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Three, five.

Seven: The crucial thing is to improve the transparency of the Foundation itself, and to find ways of repairing some of the damage to relations between it and the editing community. Increasing the number of elected representatives on the Board of Trustees might help with this, and re-instating James Heilman would probably be a good first step. The perceived dichotomy between the project and the Foundation is a serious threat to its future. Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Caoimhin

Response by Caoimhin 12:18, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Caoimhin's response to the critical question

...write here…

Caoimhin's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach five is always useful and I think I would put it at the top of the list.

Wikitables are very useful, but seem a bit primitive to me in terms of the Javascript they produce for sorting. e.g. In a table of countries including population and continent and many other columns, if you click a column (e.g. population) to sort by that column, and just after that click another column (e,g. continent) to sort by that, then the first column should be used as a secondary sort key - so that within continent countries would still be sorted by population. And so on for tertiary sort keys, etc. And authors should be able to give tables default sort keys (and sort direction, ascending or descending), rather than having to keep the rows in order within the source code.

Hello, wikitables already use the previous sorting as secondary. I agree with default sorting, which would remove the need to reorder and number rows every time a value changes. --NaBUru38 (talk) 15:02, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

@Caoimhin and NaBUru38: The basic use-case is already possible - it does not occur by default, however you can just shift-click on a secondary (and more) columns; see Help:Sorting#Secondary sortkey for details and a good multicolumn table to test with - but that feature is very hard to discover, which should be improved; this issue is tracked at phab:T43926 ("jquery.tablesorter multiple columns sort feature is not discoverable").

Specifying a default search direction is tracked at phab:T17403 ("tablesorter should provide a way to have a particular column be sorted in reverse order by default").

I've filed phab:T124265 to cover the feature request of a default sort direction. Hope that helps. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:50, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

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WereSpielChequers

Response by WereSpielChequers 14:43, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Replace a Recruitment led Strategy with one that balances Retention and Recruitment

One way of looking at the health of a volunteer community is to think in terms of Recruitment of new members, Retention of existing members and Reactivation of former members.

As a fifteen year old organisation Wikimedia has naturally had a focus on Recruitment, you can't retain or reactivate volunteers until they've been recruited. But the balance of effort and the opportunities are now very different to what they were 15 years ago. We are now a movement with over a hundred thousand current volunteers and over a million former volunteers.

Recruitment of new editors is getting more difficult. We still get lots of new editors trying out Wikimedia sites, but we are very unsuccessful at converting triallists, those who make a handful of edits, into regular active members of the community. Increasing quality has weakened two of our best recruitment methods, as readers are less likely to see vandalism and typos than they once were. It has also been hypothesised that in the age of the mobile and of mirrors that replicate Wikimedia sites without clutter such as edit buttons recruitment of new editors will continue to get more difficult.

As a response to the rise of mobile and of mirrors that show Wikimedia content without the edit buttons that we use to recruit new editors, an increased emphasis on retention and reactivation is a strategy that could enable the Movement to continue having a vibrant active editing community through at least one cycle of consumer equipment. A medium term strategy, one that looks beyond the next ten years, will also need to include an element of recruitment.

Different communities and countries are at very different points on the process of moving from paper to the Internet. There are still some languages where only a small proportion of the population has leisure time use of computers, decent Internet access and sufficient experience of the internet to edit Wikipedia (editing Wikipedia is not a task for people new to the internet). For most languages we should now move from a Recruitment based strategy to one that balances this with Retention and Reactivation. A balanced approach with activities that look at all three areas doesn't mean that we stop trying to recruit volunteers, our medium and longterm future depends on recruitment. In the medium term, most of the community members who celebrate our fiftieth anniversary will hopefully be new, many not yet born; In the longterm, our centenary celebrations are unlikely to include many current volunteers. Recruitment and indeed reactivation are also opportunities to rebalance our existing community by targetting at our gaps, for example the gender gap.

This strategic change also has the possibility to rebuild links between the WMF and the Wikimedia movement. A strategy that explicitly aims to keep the existing volunteers motivated to still volunteer is likely to include attempts to defuse some of the tension between the WMF and the volunteer community; Whilst a policy overly focussed on recruitment always had the risk of looking like an organisation trying to replace a cadre of disaffected volunteers with a different more amenable community. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:43, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi @WereSpielChequers: -- I am particularly interested in "reactivation" strategy you are speaking about. What are some of the tactics do you the the WMF can deploy to help reactivate editors? Especially since we often do not have an email address to reach out to them. What can we do to support them? Thank you. LilaTretikov (talk) 21:28, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi @LilaTretikov:, the only tests of reactivation that I've done on Wikimedia have been by email, and they weren't big enough for scientific samples. But they were very promising. I tested inviting people to UK events that were near where they had taken photographs. I didn't say I was emailing them because they hadn't contributed in over a year, I did say I'd noticed they had uploaded photographs near where the event was. Responses ranged from, yes it was a nice holiday but I actually live two hours drive from there, to what a shame I have a family event that day; not everyone responded, but no one was negative. I also reached out to a former Wikimedian I know via facebook. A tool that enabled you to email users who have uploaded images in a particular category or geocode range would make the first approach viable, currently it is very very labour intensive. Social Marketers could advise as to how we reach out to former editors via Facebook, but it would be safe to assume that a lot of the regulars are in touch with former editors. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that many former editors are still readers and even occasionally watch certain pages or policies. So fixing some ancient phabricator/bugzilla reports, and then going back to the editors who raised them might actually get their attention. Another thing that I raised in 2009 during the last Strategy process was to survey former editors. That actually happened, but only once. One of the most common responses was "I haven't left yet". I would think a further survey would help establish reasons for coming back. A tailored survey might actually help encourage people back. Also we could try an an annual email listing some of the things that have happened, "we now have a tool that shows you articles in your area that don't have images" and maybe some of their ongoing impact "articles you created were viewed by another x thousand people last year" or images you uploaded were added to these articles .... .... It should be possible to automate that and drop in such paragraphs where the readership exceeded certain thresholds. All basic marketing stuff. Happy to discuss further if someone wants to Skype me. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:59, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

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Sänger

Response by Sänger 15:54, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Antwort von Sänger auf die Hauptfrage (eigener Ansatz)

Die WMF sollte sich absolut klar darüber werden, dass sie eine Serviceorganisation für die Communities ist, und sich diesen unterzuordnen hat. Die Wikimediabewegung ist eine Bottom-Up-Organisation, Top-Down darf nur im äußersten Notfall gehandelt werden.
Die verheerenden Fehler, die beim Superprotect-Disaster zu Tage getreten sind, als arrogante, eitle WMFer mit reinen Machtmitteln gegen die Community ein völlig fehlerhaftes Programm durchgesetzt haben, ohne Rücksicht auf Verluste, darf es nie wieder geben. Solch grob gemeinschaftschädliches Verhalten muss streng sanktioniert werden.
Ebenso darf nie wieder ein von der Community gewähltes Mitglied das Boards ohne jede nachvollziehbare Begründung abgesetzt werden. Es gibt keine besser legitimierten Mitglieder des Boards als die drei gewählten, alle anderen haben mehr oder weniger Legitimationsprobleme. Ausgerechnet ein solches Mitglied rauszuwerfen ist ein böser Affront gegen die Community.

The WMF should awaken to being just a service agency for the communities, and that it should subjugate to them. The Wikimedia movement is a bottom-up organisation, top-down should be restricted to severe emergencies.

The fatal errors that became evident in the superprotect disaster, as arrogant, vain WMFers pushed through an extremely erroneous application, regardless of the consequences, must never happen again. Such rogue community-destructive behaviour must be sanctioned hard.

Likewise there must never again a community elected member of the board be removed without any comprehensible reason. Thre are no better legitmised members of the board besides the three elected, all other have more or less legitimacy deficits. To ditch such a member is a huge affront against the communities.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Sänger

Ansatz drei (folgt beinahe schon aus meinem Vorschlag oben)

Approach three (nearly results from my approach)

Ansatz eins (hierbei vor allem Unterstützung der div. Communities bei diesem Vorhaben)

Approach one (here especially the assistance of the diverse communities with this venture

Ellywa

Response by Ellywa 17:13, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Ellywa's response to the critical question

...write here…

Ellywa's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

• Approach one is my top priority.
• In addition, make in each language a very simple introduction how to edit. In NL-Wikipedia there are too many help pages. Help our community to make it simpler.

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Pamputt

Response by Pamputt 20:45, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Top 2-3 de Pamputt (ou partagez vos idées)

Approche 4.

NaBUru38

Response by NaBUru38 21:40, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

NaBUru38's response to the critical question

I think that we must do what Jimmy Wales suggested at Wikimania. Rather than highlight what actions are forbidden, we must highlight the best practices. We must agree on what we should do in community, and encourage people to be like that.

@NaBUru38: We have been experimenting with Community Capacity Development (which helps communities identify best practices from other languages/projects) as one way of doing this. I would love to hear more suggestions and details if you have any. LuisV (WMF) (talk) 02:07, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

NaBUru38's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 1 is a actually a goal, not an approach. To prevent harassment, we must encourage people to be polite, sincere and fair with others.

Approach 2 is a must. It's hard to commit to a volunteer project when all you do is read and type on a computer. Meeting people makes the project more real, as you get to know people closely. Relations are different when you meet people personally. People don't start shouting at first sight, they try to understand each other.

Approach 3 isn't correctly defined. Issues between the Foundation and the rest of the community go deeper than miscommunication. The Foundation has often made decisions on its own, as if they were the leaders. The Foundation must support the community, not impose decisions on them.

Thanks for you comments, @NaBUru38:. I agree that the problem is deeper than miscommunication. Do you have any ideas for how the Foundation could better receive guidance from the community? --Lgruwell-WMF (talk) 01:42, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Yann

Response by Yann 22:16, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Yann's response to the critical question

My main project is Commons, which is severely understaffed with admins, license reviewers, copyright violations checkers, etc. We currently have about 250 admins, half of which are inactive. I think we need at least 300 active admins, which means that if we keep the current ratio of active/inactive admins, we need to increase the number of admins to 600.

Uploading tools are also often broken, especially the Upload Wizard. They are also complex (and inefficient, at least for videos).

@Yann: Any ideas how to get more admins on commons that WMF could help with? I know that I have seen some admins leave commons because of the hostile tone there, and it is difficult for WMF to help directly with that, so any suggestions you have are welcome. LuisV (WMF) (talk) 02:13, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

LuisV (WMF): Potential users (active, long term, and trusted) find copyright complex. Would it possible to organize trainings? Swedish users refuse to be admins because of potential legal risks. What does the WMF could do? Regards, Yann (talk) 20:46, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Yann's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 1, 2, and 3 should be the priority. More trust between WMF and the community will encourage volunteer participation. We need large training programs on 1. copyright, 2. "customer" management, and 3. project scope.

1. We receive too many copyright violations (we are deleting 2,000 files every day).
2. Many people do not understand that volunteers expect to be respected and recognized for their work. We have too many fights/arguments for petty reasons.
3. We receive many out of scope files (selfies, advertisements, etc.).

All this lead to a huge backlog of files not reviewed, copyright violations not deleted, files without proper categories and multilingual descriptions, etc.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Müdigkeit

Response by Müdigkeit 12:44, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Müdigkeit's response to the critical question

...See below.

Müdigkeit's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

...Top one is...Approach seven. That is approach one without the gender gap. Harassment is a very serious issue, and some site banned users still circumvent their ban. The WMF should step in when those site banned users ignore their bans and continue to harass. And by that I mean sending a C&D letter to those. After all, the Terms of Use don't allow them to edit in areas they are banned in. The gender gap is rooted in external reasons as well, and the internal reasons should be mostly related to harassment. The second and third ones(tied) are Approach three There are four possibilites. You don't communicate well and keep things secret in general that don't need to be secret. This contributes towards distrust. You are as open and transparent as possible, and everyone sees that you do a really poor job. This generates high amounts of distrust. You are as open and transparent as possible, and there are some contentious issues. Those who don't like them at least see that there is support for those measures as well. You are as open and transparent as possible, and that what you do isn't criticized negatively much, because you do a really good job. We are at possibility 1(Secrecy), and enough people think that is possibly because you want to avoid 2(really poor job) ...and Approach two which should help in getting and retaining good editors. And Wikipedia can neither survive without readers nor without writers and caretakers.

Bluerasberry

Response by Bluerasberry 13:11, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Bluerasberry's response to the critical question

The best way for the Wikimedia Foundation to improve Wikimedia communities would be to directly and without shame or hesitation discuss movement finances with community stakeholders and develop clear mutual expectations of what money is available and how it will be divided.

Bluerasberry's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

There is an "approach 0" also, which is to identify what resources are available and define what will and will not be shared. Most or all disputes between the Wikimedia Foundation and community stakeholders have a root cause of the community mistrusting how the Wikimedia Foundation spends money. The word "corruption" is not currently used but if that word ever comes into use, it probably will never go away. I would like to prevent it from ever being used. Right now, fortunately, the community merely feels that projects getting investment lack community support, and other projects which deserve community support are being neglected. Considering "approach one", reducing gender gap, this hardly seems like worth mentioning. As serious as the problem is, the funding going to address this problem is so low that merely promising a small amount of stable funding to address the issue without making it a named priority would be a natural place to start. It is a big problem, but not so big that it probably could not be addressed with a little community discussion and a little funding. The strategic priority should be to address problems with no obvious or easy solution.

I favor 3 and 4, which concern the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and affiliates. There is currently regular questioning of Wikimedia Foundation actions and motives by a large percentage of the community. When new community members are recruited, there are community processes in place which educate and train them to criticize the Wikimedia Foundation and seek to position communities in an adversarial role with the Wikimedia Foundation. I am really not sure what to think of this, but so far as I know, this kind of training is shared and translated seemingly among Wikipedians globally, and it worries me that there is not mutual understanding. There are many Wikimedia community leaders with strong opinions about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation staff, but who also do not communicate regularly with staff, and yet feel that their lives and influenced by staff. Steps should be taken to establish and maintain perpetual positive relations between the Wikimedia Foundation and its regional promoters. A few years of spreading misinformation might influence entire regions for a generation.

One thing that I would particularly like is for the Wikimedia Foundation to provide marketing materials to local groups, so that everyone can have base expectations about the Wikimedia movement brand. I feel that there is not enough positive messaging in circulation, and too many of the shared community stories include an aspect of overcoming a problem that has some connection with the Wikimedia Foundation. Like for example, a common story which seems positive is "I organized a Wikipedia event with no funding and it was a great success", but the negative spin that always comes up on that is "Why was there no funding? If not for this, then where does the money go?" and the community alone cannot readily answer these kinds of responses.

It is in the best interest of the Wikimedia movement for the Wikimedia Foundation to have the support of the Wikimedia community affiliates. Now is the time to invest in prevention. I never want a future potential strategic approach to say "restore relations between the WMF and affiliates".

This is kind of alarming information User:Bluerasberry and really great framing ("I never want a future potential strategic approach to say "restore relations between the WMF and affiliates"). Thanks for that input. Some of us in Community Engagement have experienced this when we reach out to affiliates and chapters to do capacity building work together and we get a bit of hostility, and we are very surprised. There are ideas in the works of setting standards about how we do our work. For example, rather than just asking for input about a project, we actually work on projects together with community members, including affiliates. I can really see how distrust can fester and pass on to others. This is a really great insight; thank you for this. --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 21:28, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

SSneg

Response by SSneg 15:58, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

SSneg's response to the critical question

The key ingredient to building a community is a positive feedback loop. Discover the website, contribute a little, get reward, contribute more, get more reward, share your excitement with friends to bring more people in. However, it does not work like that with Wikipedia today.

On the surface, Wikipedia advertises itself as an open book where anyone can contribute. In reality, you will spend a lot of time creating an article on something you really care for only to see it go into waste bin accompanied by snarky comments of experienced users. What are the chances you try again? What are the chances you spread a good word about Wikipedia? Invite your friends? Probably close to zero.

There are some avenues to fixing that. For first-time contributors:

1. Lower threshold to contributing. Even a minor edit to an article is a big step, psychologically, for many. It means that only self-confident people with high tech skills and maybe a little propensity for conflict get to edit. Suggestion: introduce low-level contribution steps such as “rate this article”, “suggest an illustration”, “suggest an improvement”, “suggest a source”. Wikidata game is a good albeit very crude example of such minor contribution.
2. Introduce safeguards. Instead of saying “you may want to read a dozen of lengthy rules and essays on what you cannot do in Wikipedia while you struggle with the editor”, make sure new contributors know the basic rules of editing before they commit time and emotional effort to that. For example, suggest completing a quiz on basic rules of Wikipedia after registration (to get editing privilege or get some points under the belt, see below). Like in Commons Uploader, where you have to “sign” under the license.
3. Improve community’s tools that help review and weed out improper content, including politely phrased templates etc. When reviewers get tired of seeing the same mistakes over and over, they start giving short links to articles like WP:NOT instead of carefully explaining and educating. Even when well-intended, such brevity can easily be mistaken for rudeness by the new authors, which impacts their first time experience.
4. Develop new guides and trainings for creating one’s first article that are short, easy to digest, interactive, includes knowledge checks and rewards the author in the end somehow (even if it’s a make-believe certificate that they get in email). Explain step by step what they can do and should do instead of pointing them to kilobytes of rules on what they shouldn’t do.
5. Allow new contributors to provide references and sources in a simpler form, without requirement to struggle with REF tags etc. Maybe even let them write a “pre-article” that only lists topic, information and sources and ask the community for feedback on whether this is enough material to do a proper article. It’s like writing a paper in university, and it can potentially save a lot of useless work and frustration for many people who try to write on their favourite band etc.

For the contributors who made a few edits:

1. Encourage experienced users to say thank you by introducing more and simpler ways to provide positive feedback. I love getting “Thank you for your edit” messages and I love to send them but it is quite hard to find them if you’re a new user. What about simpler ways to “upvote” a reasonable, weighed opinion in a talk thread? Or say a button to say ‘thanks for an image’ to an uploader on Commons?
2. Show people’s contribution upfront. Use everything we know about gamification today, see how Stack Overflow communities are doing that. This is a tricky point, because stats can be easily abused, so maybe you should concentrate on people-generated stats such as “thankyous sent”, “thankyous received” etc first. Make sure that user’s contribution is easily seen and is easy to be validated by peers. Build better systems instead of silly medals that anyone can give to anyone at any point in time, which makes them worthless.
3. Welcome them to the improve Wikipedia. Ask their opinion in polls, send them surveys, keep them involved. It will help you monitor the success rate of any measures you employ while reminding the authors about Wikipedia.
4. Encourage them to share their experience with others, explain how they can invite their class mates, colleagues or fellow hobbyists to contribute. Provide collateral materials, training and encouragement.

Another problem is that Wikipedians are perceived as those nerdy bookworms that crawl in the dustier corners of the internet. In other words, there is an image problem. Some of the ways to fix that are:

1. Contributors should get more public recognition, WMF should cooperate with municipalities, governments, organisations, universities, and even (blasphemy!) corporations and encourage them to appreciate and highlight people’s contribution. How about running a marathon on improving articles on NASDAQ companies and fly in the top contributor to ring the NASDAQ bell? How about sending a short thank you letter from the mayor of some French province to people who contributed to articles? WMF should be lobbying and brokering these collaborative deals directly and globally via chapters.
2. Famous and/or distinguished contributors should be highlighted. Contributors will feel better and public image will improve if public knew that professors, physicians, businesspeople or other local prominent people use Wikipedia, or write in Wikipedia.
3. Make people’s profile pages look better, encourage them to upload real photos and give real names. Replace the silly userboxes and medals and self-built pages with nicer, friendlier profiles that I can proudly share with friends and colleagues, like a Linkedin page, not something I only intend for “closed cirtcuit” use, like a club my friends would disapprove of.
4. Today, MOOCs are considered equivalent to “real education” by employers. Wikipedia contribution should count, too. WMF could build a process where making a certain topical contribution (authored 50 articles, reviewed 500 articles, etc) counts as a milestone and is awarded by WMF with a certificate saying “Name Namesson is awarded for notable contribution to Wikipedia on the subject of…).
5. Introduce local and global annual awards for the Chapter of the year, Wikipedian of the year, Best growth, Best local project and many other nominations. Train and encourage local chapters to work with news media to leverage getting an award and make sure Wikipedia is regularly on the news and nations feel proud that they doing well in this community.

SSneg's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 1 and 2, 5, definitely. Approach 4 - yes. I was disappointed that Russian-language Wikipedia was invited to Consultations on January 18 via forums, leaving us no time to e.g. translate the texts. Approach 3 - I think cross-community collaboration is great but requires a lot of translation and coordination resources, and there are fruits that hang lower in terms of ways of improving Community. Approach 6 - cannot comment.

Hi, User:SSneg. You have a lot of very well developed, great thoughts here. I thank you for sharing them. :) I'm sorry about the short notice on the consultation. Next time, we hope to start sooner so we have more time for translations. We put up the consultation for translation on January 11 and reached out as assertively as we knew how to the translator community, so we were very fortunate to have some translations in place, but it was not enough time. We need to do better. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:19, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

FloNight

Response by FloNight 19:25, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

FloNight's response to the critical question

To recognize that in general, individuals and people from ally organizations need an invitation to volunteer for the wikimedia movement, training on ways to make high quality contributions, and support/project management services. The original base of people who were attracted to contributing to Wikipedia without training and support are not adequate in number or diversity to sustain a healthy wikimedia community or high quality content.

FloNight's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

• Approach One: The WMF need to tackle how to make Wikimedia projects more inclusive which includes better dispute resolution strategies, ally training programs to better support minority groups on each WMF project, and off wiki support process to address serious harassment issues. The WMF can not do this alone. The wikimedia community does not now and never will have the capacity to do this well without support of WMF.
• Approach five: Project management dashboard and tools for use with long term and short term initiatives with GLAM, STEM, healthcare organizations who are collaborating with WMF affiliates and individual wikimedians.
• Approach three: In some places in the wikimedia movement communication and transparency is damaged, in other places it is stronger. We need to not throw the baby out with the bath water. New strategies for improved transparency and communication need to reflect the point of view of the broad wikimedia movement.

Hi @FloNight:, welcome to the consultation. Would you share any specific ideas around approach three, please ? I am curious to see where you see those areas and how you see the WMF improving in those that are lacking. LilaTretikov (talk) 21:32, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Milimetric (WMF)

Response by Milimetric (WMF) 21:30, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Milimetric (WMF)'s response to the critical question

Our community is suffering from a terrible user experience problem. Policies and workflows are very hard to understand for newcomers. This simultaneously makes the barrier of entry really high and intensifies the "protectionist" instinct for the project veterans. Basically, walking into a complicated situation where you don't know the rules and learning the rules is *really* hard is a recipe for disaster. So in my opinion the first thing to do is to fix that experience.

Milimetric (WMF)'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

I support approach 5. The others are important but our workflows and content management tools are awful, that's the easy win.

Mattflaschen-WMF

Response by Mattflaschen-WMF 21:35, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Mattflaschen-WMF's response to the critical question

To be successful in increasing participation, we need to make headway on both social and technical problems. On the social side:

• Increase mutual respect - The community needs to play a key role in this, but the Foundation can help by continuing to support efforts like anti-harassment work, Friendly Space Expectations, and the Code of Conduct for technical spaces.

• Scale mentoring - Mentoring efforts like Adoption and the Teahouse can help, but need to be scaled so there are many more participants, both on the experienced user (mentor) and inexperienced user (mentee) side. Technical support can be used to help scale this.

On the technical side:

• Continue to reduce barriers. A lot of progress on this has been made already (e.g. VisualEditor), but much more has to be done. Areas include mobile (needing a desktop computer for a particular task is itself a technical barrier that we should avoid when possible), discussion (Flow; simpler talk pages are required to promote engagement and collaboration, particularly among new users), curation/patrolling (this needs to be easy on all projects, not just large ones like English Wikipedia).

Mattflaschen-WMF's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

• Approach six (Simplify policies and processes) - Per above, we need to keep making things easier both technically and socially
• Approach two (Create and support programs to increase volunteer participation) - This needs to scale.
• Approach one (Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap)

Qgil-WMF

Response by Qgil-WMF 21:43, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Qgil-WMF's response to the critical question

Increasing diversity is the key, because more diversity in our communities implies more potential for growth in diverse areas, and more evident need to understand each other across languages, gender, age, economic and social background, etc.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 21:43, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Qgil-WMF's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

1. Create and support programs to increase volunteer participation such as recognition, facilitated mentorship, and personalized re-engagement.
2. Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment for contributors and editors.
3. Own suggestion: increase diversity among WMF employees and locations, explicitly seeking to mirror (or at least represent) the geographies and human backgrounds we want serve with free knowledge.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 21:43, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Halfak (WMF)

Response by Halfak (WMF) 22:00, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Halfak (WMF)'s response to the critical question

I think our biggest struggles are around misunderstanding what motivations there are to dismiss newcomers or react negatively to them. Wikipedians are constantly barraged with newcomers -- many of whom are POV-pushers, vandals, or other types of trolls. If we can help Wikipedians direct their effort towards newcomers who will appreciate it and be recognized for it, I think many more Wikipedians will find the energy to have more positive interactions. In order to manage this, we need two things -- a space where mentorship and patience are the norm & a high-capacity (probably automated) means to routing good-faith newcomers to those spaces. In order to do this effectively, we need (1) a research program that explores both the lived-experience and scale of phenomena around newcomers and editor interactions (we have a solid start) (2) an engineering team that can build technical infrastructure to support process and (3) broad collaboration with the volunteers who will form the human-infrastructure of such systems.

Halfak (WMF)'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

So, I have some general feedback about the "approaches". It seems to me that #1 and #6 are goals, not approaches. While I think that these goals are worthy and important, I think that deciding on an approach is critical before I can put my support behind either directly. In my experience and in my studies, naive approaches to hard problems like these will not be effective. Further, I'm not sure that I understand what types of initiatives might fit under the "programs" of #2.

Approach #1 & #5

Highlight and reward desirable behaviors WRT interacting with newcomers. Newcomers are another backlog that we haven't taken seriously when considering what work we support with process, tools, and metrics. When a newcomer is successfully retained through the efforts of Wikipedians, it should be easy for others to recognize their mentors for their contribution. As soon as editors can compare their mentorship score in the same way as their edit counts, many will find a way to optimize their mentoring capacity. We can use tools and process to direct newcomers most in need of help to mentoring spaces like the Teahouse. A lot of newcomers are not editing in good faith and many good-faith newcomers do not need help. We can automate the process of discovering likely good-faith newcomers who are most in need of help. We already have experience doing this and we've shown that it improves retention in controlled experiments. We can also further lessen the load on mentors and the newcomers who enter these spaces by improving their tooling, enabling Flow, etc. While this approach may sound general, I suspect that it will either illuminate or directly ameliorate the root causes of harassment and aggressive behaviors towards others (women, non-westerners, newcomers in general) in our mature communities. This is not really the approach that is described in either #1 or #5, but its and approach with a track record that matches the spirit of both.

Note that I made some edits to the content above. I'll post the diff link once I have it. It will go here: Special:Diff/15283847 --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 16:32, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Trevor Parscal (WMF)

Response by Trevor Parscal (WMF) 22:03, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Trevor Parscal (WMF)'s response to the critical question

It needs to be much easier to discover and execute tasks that intersect a user's interest and skill level. This could be done in many ways, including making engagement points more visible, supporting and incentivizing users to increase their skills, providing friendly guidance when they've done something poorly and rewarding them when they've done something well.

Trevor Parscal (WMF)'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 5 is the most critical in my view, because hostility toward newcomers is emboldened by having to laboriously clean up their messes. I believe that to whatever extent approach 6 is possible, it could make it less likely that newcomers will make those messes. Finally, approach 2 would help convert those newcomers into happy and productive active editors.

EGalvez (WMF)

Response by EGalvez (WMF) 22:09, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

EGalvez (WMF)'s response to the critical question

I think that the best ways is ultimately through volunteer recognition and leadership development (sort-of approach 2). These are the people that we all look to for inspiration; people who we view as incredible volunteers internally and who might even be recognized externally one day. We often hear a lot about Jimmy Wales in the news; which is surprising given that his involvement is minimal and there are some incredible folks in this movement. Would be really great to see more recognition for the leaders of this movement, within and outside the movement.

EGalvez (WMF)'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 3 and 4: I think that over time we have grown in different directions (as affiliates & projects), which is what is accentuating the need for working on our individual and organizational culture. Its also impossible to keep up with everything that is going on, so it becomes easier to ignore and focus only what is closest to your organization or your own work. Intramovement communications (and internal communications within organizations) is so key to this to make it easier to learn about what is happening elsewhere. I can probably spend all day just reading updates on mailing lists for example. I think we ("we" as in all affiliates, including WMF) all bring important lessons, skills, opportunities to the table, and we can't help each other out if we are not communicating. The next step beyond communicating is doing projects together. We can only really build solve these issues by working together on projects and setting a standard for how we work on projects together, instead of siloing ourselves into different spaces, regions, and languages.

In terms of transparency and accountability, I think we need to get better at communicating how we are doing in our work as the foundation. We need to find ways to get input from communities, affiliates and projects about how we are doing in our work, and what we need to improve. And we need to find ways to get input from all voices, not just the loudest ones. This is not done enough from my perspective and its not done in a coordinated way. We could become a better organization, faster.

TFinc (WMF)

Response by TFinc (WMF) 22:10, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

TFinc (WMF)'s response to the critical question

A healthy community to me is one that can:

• show impact
• mentor
• be sustainable

At this point in time I don't think there is any question about our communities showing impact. That's worked really well. But, mentorship has been extremely haphazard and we've consistently heard from our new users that they are confused, unsure, and are driven away due to on wiki interactions. Some choose to work through this and do amazing contributions but what if we drove fewer of them away. I don't think there is a shortage of people who would want to contribute but instead the tools, tone, and lack of mentorship keep them away. If we could get better at that those we would have a far more sustainable community where fewer people would leave.

TFinc (WMF)'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

1. 1 and #2 are the most pressing as they address the issues commonly sighted for departures

Ejegg

Response by Ejegg 22:17, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Ejegg's response to the critical question

The tension here seems to be between attracting new editors by making editing easier, and keeping the quality on the wikis high by reverting anything that's not up to par. What if we had a place for users to add meaningful content and practice editing (or even admin duties) without the pressure of the main projects?

Ejegg's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

The WMF could host wikis for cities / towns / regions and link to them from the relevant wikipedia pages. If a new user creates an article that doesn't meet the standard of notability, admins can encourage them to move it to the applicable local wiki. If an establishment that was previously only locally relevant rises to national prominence, we'll have an article ready to move up to the big time for further polishing.

Thank you @Ejegg:, how would people create new wikis? Today it is a difficult process. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:15, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Sicherlich

Response by Sicherlich 00:47, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Antwort von Sicherlich auf die Hauptfrage

Visualisation

• Talk with the community
• Treat the Community at least as an equal partner not just like a cheap work force. ... you don't do that? ... Well, let me mention Superprotect. Or Arnnon Geshuri. Or James Heilman
• I'm not asking to do everything what someone of the community asks for. But to treat them as important partner. Their work is the main reason you get your monthly salary.
• ...Sicherlich ^Post 19:16, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Sicherlich

removed. I don't think that WMF cares about us. see above ...Sicherlich ^Post 19:16, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

ArielGlenn

Response by ArielGlenn 02:04, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

ArielGlenn's response to the critical question

Though I am a WMF staffer, I am writing here solely in my role as a once active but now primarily lurking volunteer.

ArielGlenn's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 1 is good, but it doesn't cover enough ground. Why do people form cliques and draw lines between insiders and outsiders? Why do people become invested in an editing topic to the point of asserting ownership privileges? Or, more to the point, how can communities that show these behaviours change?

Not covered in the listed approaches:

We have beliefs about what sort of people do what kind of things, from artists to mathematicians. Most of us do things which we imagine belong to appropriate roles for us; if I don't think of myself as an athletic type I'm not going to try out for the track team. So if we asked a passer-by what sort of person they thought would be excited about editing an encyclopedia, I expect that would give us a lot of insight into why they don't edit themselves. But if they viewed editing as the cool and hip and in thing to do (to use a few no longer hip phrases :-P), something done by ordinary people who don't have superspecialized knowledge in some field, a lot more folks might see that role as a possibility for themselves. This approach is similar to the "but all your friends do it" method (see http://www.fastcodesign.com/3037679/evidence/read-about-how-hotels-get-you-to-reuse-towels-everyones-doing-it). So it might be worth a campaign of some sort, visible to readers, breaking our stereotypes about editors, or a game that lets people find friends or famous people who edit, or promotional spots showing regular people who edit instead of the er supereditor geek we have come to know, love and shake our heads about while heaving a deep sigh :-)

Communities mean involvement, not just or necessarily content contribution. How can we get more people involved in: bringing the Wikimedia projects into classrooms, working on strategy, helping to reform detrimental community behaviours, promoting content reuse, other? What are all the other roles a healthy community's members should fulfill?

If readers are a part of the community, how can they play an active role? Did the idea of reader annotations or comments on content ever go anywhere or is that something a third party reuser ought to pick up? How else can readers be involved?

Jane023

Response by Jane023 17:53, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

Jane023's response to the critical question

4 and 5

Jane023's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

...write here…

Aubrey

Response by Aubrey 11:05, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Aubrey's response to the critical question

The Wikimedia community is very complex, at many different levels. I personally think that communication and transparency between the WMF and other affiliates is important, but it's not an issue for millions of users. It is an issue, for example, that they don't understand wikipedia, thay think they can write what they want, they participate in good faith but DON'T KNOW HOW TO TALK TO PEOPLE, that they feel harassed or insuleted by some not-really-empathic admin, etc. There is no silver bullet, for this. I personally think that we, as WMF and affiliates, should try to engage more admins, and promote better projects like the Teahouse. Hopefully find things and tools that work, and improve them.

Please bear in mind that other projects (like Wikidata, or Wikisource) do have calmer communities, because there are few things to fight over :-)

Aubrey's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

1. N°5
2. N°4
3. N°1

Hi @Aubrey: Do you think admin conferences would help? Or do you have other suggestions on how to help people talk to people? LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:17, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi @LilaTretikov:, sorry for the late reply. Yes, I think that conferences, seminars, workshops, week-in-the-wood-for-team-building would help. I often think that the "human" factor is somewhat neglected, in our community, because we work online and we are a global community. I don't think there is a silver bullet here, it's like it is: still, we maybe can try to address the issue talking more. I remember a good project from Wikimedia Israel, I'm not sure they are ready/willing to talk about it yet, but involved a psychologist for admins who wanted to talk to her. I think that is a great idea. Personally, I'd love to take half the admins of italian Wikipedia in one place, and talk about empathy for 2 days :-D Aubrey (talk) 07:22, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus

Response by Jo-Jo Eumerus 14:13, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Jo-Jo Eumerus's response to the critical question

One thing that needs to improve is that the atmosphere of distrust and badness that a number of volunteers perceive in regards to the WMF and especially the technical work (which is frequently, IMO not correctly, conflated with the Foundation). I think some of this is thanked to authority issues (the WMF is perceived as, and is, an authority over the projects) but also because of incidents such as the foundationwiki "coup" in 2013, "Superprotect" in 2014, the removal of James Heilman for the Board (compounded by the shoddy communication - in controversial circumstances it's necessary to have explanations ready up front) more recently as well as the controversy around the new Trustee as well as concerns raised about staff morale. My impression is that the community and the WMF too frequently are separate bubbles with little understanding or feedback of what A does by B. That is, the WMF and the Board need to be subject a bit more to community input (e.g by increasing the number of elected trustees, something proposed elsewhere on this page) regarding strategy, financial and technological decisions. And this input needs to be binding, not merely advisory.

Also, we need better ways of keeping our projects free from undesirable contributions. On an everyday basis, Wikimedia projects are hit by a barrage of spam, advocacy, promotion of agendas, copyright violations and all manner of disruptive editors; I do know about them because I work on enwiki's copyright policing boards. Some of them can can cause enormous damage; the debacle currently underway on the enwiki Arbcom requests page is emblematic of the fallout that trolls which can't be dealt with with normal community systems can cause.

A third note on my part is that sometimes the requisites for "recruiting new participants" and "keeping the already existing ones" can sometimes mean a careful balancing act; as I've seen as a participant to a non-Wikimedia community what is good for one scope may not be good for the other one. The Flow discussions are an example IMO; while talk pages may be a substandard way of having communication (e.g because one has to sign and there is no clear delimitation between the comment of person A and person B) and most non-Wikimedia websites use systems like Flow the wiki infrastructure and community behaviours have developed around the current format and have both inertia and certain benefits.

Jo-Jo Eumerus's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

2 and 3, as well as a 7 which is the second paragraph above. 5 is too "far future" stuff (-->in the sense that technology for some of the most helpful things doesn't exist yet) IMO for it to work in the current strategy timetable. 1 needs more work by the communities rather than by the WMF; pushing it in a top-down fashion won't work and will just cause conflict. Regarding 2, my sense is that to promote the development of communities one needs "positive feedback" to show that one's work and participation is being appreciated (something I noted on the other response page) - especially since we already have lots of "negative feedback" (e.g speedy deletion, blocking) that is needed to keep the content of the sites at good quality but tends also to put off volunteers. I also emphasize Yann's caution about 6 - while a lot of processes and policies tend to become ingrained by inertia even when they have become useless or harmful, the record of fiat/top down changes in policies and processes here on Wikimedia is not particularly good.

74.65.39.235

Response by 74.65.39.235 16:56, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

74.65.39.235's response to the critical question

Focus on quality and scope of content;resist distractions by refocusing.

74.65.39.235's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach 6 is a start. Support those passionate about quality with approach 2.

Amgine

Response by Amgine 17:26, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Amgine's response to the critical question

Listen. The Foundation has a history of not listening, therefore the communities <broad sweeping generalizations>disregards or opposes WMF 'meddling'</broad sweeping generalizations>

Amgine's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

None of these have been successfully implemented previously; all have been tried. 6 is the only one I feel might have some effect.

MGChecker

Response by MGChecker 23:07, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Antwort von MGChecker auf die Hauptfrage

Wegen der großen Kommunikationsprobleme und wachsenden Distanz der Wikimedia Foundation zur Community halte ich aus diesen Ansätzen Ansatz drei für eindeutig am wichtigsen, da er gerade dadurch hilft, dass vermieden wird, dass eifrige Autoren unnötig aus solchen Gründen verloren gehen.

Because of the large communication problems and the growing distance of the Wikimedia Foundation to the community, I think that of these approaches approach three is clearly the most important, precisely because it helps prevents eager authors being unnecessarily lost for such reasons.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von MGChecker

Recht neutral stehe ich den Ansätzen zwei vier und sechs gegenüber. Ansatz fünf halte ich für ungeeigenet, da so viele Autoren wegbrächen, und bei Ansatz eins halte ich den „Gender gap“ für eindeutig überbewertet, da hat man dringlichere Probleme.

I am quite neutral towards approaches two, four and six. I think approach five is inappropriate because so many authors would break off, and in regard of approach one I consider the "Gender gap" as clearly overvalued, since we have more pressing problems.

Sebastian Wallroth

Response by Sebastian Wallroth 14:19, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Antwort von Sebastian Wallroth auf die Hauptfrage

Keine von diesen. Die Wikimedia Foundation muss verstehen, dasss die Interessen der Communities sich nur wenig mit den eigenen Interessen deckt. Die Wikimedia Foundation muss die Communities loslassen, ihr Freiräume lassen. Die WMF muss den Communities signalisieren, dass sie sich selbst organisieren können und sollen und dass die WMF nicht das zentrale Oberkommando ist, sondern eine Organisation, die die Communities in ihrer Arbeit unterstützen kann. Die WMF wird Aufgaben übernehmen, die von den Communities nicht oder nicht ausreichend übernommen werden können. Zum Beispiel die Steuerung der Softwareentwicklung das Fundraising. Sie wird die Communities dabei unterstützen, sich selbst zu organisieren, zum Beispiel auch durch Community Manager.

None of these. The Wikimedia Foundation has to understand, that the concerns of the communities only fits marginal with its own concern. The Wikimedia Foundation should let loose of the communities, allow them room for themself. The WMF has to signal the communities, that they could and should self-organise, and that the WMF in not central command, but an organisation, that helps the communities with their work. The WMF will assume tasks, that the communities can't, or can't sufficient, do themself. For example the supervision of the software development and fundraising. It would support teh communities to organise themselof, for example with community managers.

Sebastian Wallroth Ich liebe den Gedanke Community Managers zu beschäftigen. Was halten sie von einem Community Manager bedeuten. Haben Sie eine Stellenbeschreibung für einen Community Manager? Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 15:04, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Sebastian Wallroth I love the idea to employ Community Managers. What do you mean by a Community Manager? Do you have a job description for a Community Manager? Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 15:04, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Best practice in Germany is defined by the Bundesverband Community Management. BVCM published job definitions for Community Managers here: http://www.bvcm.org/2012/07/bvcm-definiert-social-media-berufsbilder/ Please refer to the PDF at the end of the post: http://www.bvcm.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Anforderungsprofile-an-Social-Media-Berufsbilder.pdf

The main topic I wanted to raise is that the communities have to organize themselves. This won't work without the encouragement by the Foundation. The Foundations need to understand that it is not part of the communities. But that is not a problem as long is the WMF trusts in the self organizing qualities of the communities. The job of Community Managers would be to encourage, support, and cheer the communities. --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 22:38, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Sebastian Wallroth

Fil211

Response by Fil211 17:36, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Fil211 — ответ на насущные вопросы

Первичным приоритетом должна стать возможность максимального донесения знаний до как можно большего числа пользователей. Сообщества должны ставить своей целью максимальный обхват представленных знаний, при условии что данные знания не создают угрозу ограничения круга лиц, которые будут иметь возможность доступа к этим знаниям.--Fil211 (talk) 17:36, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

The primary priority must be given an opportunity to maximize the knowledge reports to the largest possible number of users. Communities should aim to a maximum girth of knowledge representation, provided that such knowledge can not pose a threat to limit the number of persons who will have access to this knowledge.

Fil211 — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)

Наиболее важными являются первый и пятый подходы. Важно чтобы участник чувствовал себя максимально комфортно. Категорически неприемлемо малейшее промедление с пресечением преследования по любым мотивам. Кроме того автоматизация функций позволит сократить время на администрирование ради увеличения времени на написание статей.--Fil211 (talk) 17:36, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

The most important are the first and fifth approaches. It is important that participants feel as comfortable as possible. Categorically unacceptable slightest delay in the suppression of persecution on any grounds. Besides automation functions will reduce the administration time for the increase of time writing articles.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Marcok

Response by Marcok 09:46, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Marcok's response to the critical question

• 7: health, growth and diversity of our communities may be assured and improved only if the Wikimedia Foundation will abandon his strongly centralized, selfish, and typical north-American model of management. Resources must be managed locally, both supporting Wikimedia local chapthers, and creating decentralized agencies for macro-regions (i.e. North Africa, Central Africa, South Africa, Middle East Asia...) to support local volunteer programs.

Marcok's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

• 50% of the WMF resources should be employed in Africa, expecially in improving local communities.

Chris troutman

Response by Chris troutman 12:29, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Chris troutman's response to the critical question

The WMF is the single biggest threat to the Wikipedia community. Close the offices in the Bay Area. All we need is a secretary in Florida to make sure the servers are still running. You would also do well to peruse the Missing Wikipedians list and ask why those editors quit. Any real company would give former employees exit interviews to figure out what's wrong. WMF clearly doesn't care if it doesn't even bother to inquire.

I love the idea of "exit interviews" for editors in good standing who are leaving or have left, although I'm not sure how it could be implemented. Perhaps there could be some sort of standard questionnaire with a response format capable of being entered into a database so that patterns and problems could be identified. That would actually give the project some hard data to use in finding solutions. The challenge, I guess, would be in getting retiring users to participate - a lot of people just seem to abruptly quit. An educational program about the questionnaire for existing users might help there. Gatoclass (talk) 16:32, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I'd disagree with your statement that "all we need is a secretary in Florida to make sure the servers are still running"; if the Foundation were truly responsive to the needs of the various communities, there are lots of ways it could help -- & without ever being involved in the actual content of Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. However, you are spot on about moving the offices away from the Bay Area. The only purpose for having offices there is if WMF wants to be a high-tech start-up, &/or recruit senior people from Silicon Valley -- neither of which fit our mission. And I think a major reduction in staff -- anywhere from cutting a quarter of the staff to reducing the staff to a quarter of its present size -- might be a good thing: I suspect a lot of employee dissatisfaction is due to having too many people with not enough to do, which leads to petty infighting over territory & credit. I was hoping something like this might happen under Lila, but obviously I was wrong. -- Llywrch (talk) 17:38, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Chris troutman's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Approach one is the most important. When prolific contributors are given a free pass after calling a female contributor the c-word, it sends a message that some editors are more equal than others. NPA has to be enforced. Approach two is the next most important although I'm not sure having the WMF take the place of the community in this role is a good idea. WikiProjects have drives and hand out awards and the process works so long as the WikiProject itself has a large enough userbase to be self-sustaining. The efforts on Wikipedia that died ought to be looked at. Approaches five and six are both bad ideas. I love tools like Twinkle but there's something of prejudice against these tools as their edits have utility but not legitimacy and for good reason. Besides, I don't want AI doing all the writing on wiki or there will be no need for editors, at all. Our policies are already as simple as they can be considering the amount of wikilawyering we see. Making them simpler will have only unintended consequences.

Mr. Zabej

Response by Mr. Zabej

• Approach 1,
• 2,
• 4(!)

It is important to facilitate any transfer and exchange of skills and best practices from well-developed chapters to small wiki-communities.

Ziko

Response by Ziko 18:24, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Ziko's response to the critical question

In the center is harassment, and it would be a big improvement to strictly apply the rules we already have. But many Wikipedians don't recognize harassment when they see it, 'your article is crap' is considered to be a topic-related evaluation and not as harassment. With such a community, it is difficult for community-elected admins to make a difference.

But the harassment issue is surounded by some other issues. It would be too simple to tell Wikipedians, for example, to be nicer to newbies, to assume good faith. Many newbies indeed to not have good intentions, they try to abuse Wikipedia as an advertisement platform.

I remember a WMF study from a few years ago. The researchers found out that newbies don't want to be contacted with prefabricated text blocks. So the researchers told the Wikipedians to write nice personal things on the user talk pages of the newbies. But why do Wikipedians prefer to use text block templates? Because in their experience most newbies never answer. Writing real, personal text would be a colossal waste of time. So the workflow and situation of the experienced Wikipedians must be taken into consideration as well.

A starting point could be to strenghen Wikipedians and help them to react more appropriately with problematic behavior. For example, it is good to make clear that advertising content is not accepted on Wikipedia, but it is not necessary and even damaging to the overall atmosphere in Wikipedia to meet a newbie's advertising content with verbally abusive language.

Ziko's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)

Definitely Approach One, reduce harassement. It is absolutely necessary that ill behavior is met with serious consequences. Simple appeals to be more civil are laughed on by the toxic people that ruin the atmosphere. Even dead threats are not seen as a reason to ban a contributor.

Sujalajus

Response by Sujalajus 22:04, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Antwort von Sujalajus auf die Hauptfrage

Approach two

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Sujalajus

Approach one

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)