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

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SVentura (WMF)[edit]

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

SVentura (WMF) Lower complexity threshold for first time contributors[edit]

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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
@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)[edit]

#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[edit]

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

Slowking4's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]

Yger[edit]

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

Yger's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]

BethNaught[edit]

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

BethNaught's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]
@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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]

Snipre[edit]

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

Réponse de Snipre à la question critique[edit]

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)[edit]

5

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Jmabel[edit]

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

Jmabel's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
If you want to arrange some time we could have a discussion, I'd be interested. - Jmabel (talk) 02:29, 21 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
What's your basic time zone, Jmabel? Do you IRC? :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 21 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]

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

...write here…

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MisterSanderson[edit]

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

MisterSanderson's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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[edit]

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

MER-C's response to the critical question[edit]

  • 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[1] 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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
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)[reply]

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

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[edit]

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

Yair rand's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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Justlettersandnumbers[edit]

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

Justlettersandnumbers's response to the critical question[edit]

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

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[edit]

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

Caoimhin's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

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

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)[reply]
@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)[reply]

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WereSpielChequers[edit]

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

Replace a Recruitment led Strategy with one that balances Retention and Recruitment[edit]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]


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Sänger[edit]

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

Antwort von Sänger auf die Hauptfrage (eigener Ansatz)[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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

Ellywa's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

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

  • 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[edit]

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

Réponse de Pamputt à la question critique[edit]

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

Approche 4.

NaBUru38[edit]

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

NaBUru38's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Yann[edit]

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

Yann's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]

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

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[edit]

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

Müdigkeit's response to the critical question[edit]

...See below.

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

...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[edit]

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

Bluerasberry's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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)[reply]


SSneg[edit]

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

SSneg's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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)[reply]


FloNight[edit]

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

FloNight's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

  • 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)[reply]

Milimetric (WMF)[edit]

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

Milimetric (WMF)'s response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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


Mattflaschen-WMF[edit]

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

Mattflaschen-WMF's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

  • 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[edit]

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

Qgil-WMF's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]

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

  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)[reply]

Halfak (WMF)[edit]

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

Halfak (WMF)'s response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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)[reply]

Trevor Parscal (WMF)[edit]

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

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

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)[edit]

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)[edit]

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

EGalvez (WMF)'s response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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)[edit]

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

TFinc (WMF)'s response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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


Ejegg[edit]

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

Ejegg's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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)[reply]

Sicherlich[edit]

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

Antwort von Sicherlich auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

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)[reply]

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

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

ArielGlenn[edit]

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

ArielGlenn's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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[edit]

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

Jane023's response to the critical question[edit]

4 and 5

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

...write here…


Aubrey[edit]

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

Aubrey's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

  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)[reply]
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)[reply]

Jo-Jo Eumerus[edit]

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

Jo-Jo Eumerus's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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[edit]

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

74.65.39.235's response to the critical question[edit]

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

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

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

Amgine[edit]

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

Amgine's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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


MGChecker[edit]

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

Antwort von MGChecker auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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

Antwort von Sebastian Wallroth auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]

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

Fil211[edit]

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

Fil211 — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

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)[reply]

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)[edit]

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)[reply]

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[edit]

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

Marcok's response to the critical question[edit]

  • 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)[edit]

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


Chris troutman[edit]

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

Chris troutman's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]

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

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[edit]

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[edit]

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

Ziko's response to the critical question[edit]

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)[edit]

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[edit]

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

Antwort von Sujalajus auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Approach two

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

Approach one

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Chaddy[edit]

Response by Chaddy 03:50, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Chaddy auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

You should realize that we - the community - are the indispensable core of the project and hence treat us at eye level.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Chaddy[edit]

3

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Geolina163[edit]

Response by Geolina163 11:28, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Geolina163 auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

2+3+6

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Geolina163[edit]

...hier schreiben...

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

COMMUNIST YAŞAR[edit]

Democratic Communalism

İsmimi Kullanıcı adımı Yaşar olarak Gösterin

Gereon K.[edit]

Response by Gereon K. 11:41, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gereon K.'s response to the critical question[edit]

There seems to be a major problem with transparency between WMF, its boards and the community. Before, actions like Superprotect did not help to build trust either. Openness and transparency improve collaboration with local communities. If there is no openness, accessability and transparency we won't have to think about all other efforts to strenghten communities. This has to come first.

Gereon K.'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Most important: Approach three.


Mandruss[edit]

Response by Mandruss 12:27, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mandruss's response to the critical question[edit]

Step in and end mob rule. Require the enforcement of adult behavior or retirement, evenly applied, without exemption for combative high contributors. Accept the resulting loss of a certain number of editors, knowing that they will be eventually replaced twofold by better editors after the environment becomes less toxic.

Mandruss's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1, 6, 5, in that order.


Hans50[edit]

Response by Hans50 12:32, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Hans50 auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

...Ansatz 1...

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Hans50[edit]

...Ansatz 2 und 3...

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

First Light[edit]

Response by First Light 12:38, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

First Light's response to the critical question[edit]

This is the biggest problem on the English Wikipedia: lack of diversity in terms of gender and age, and too many long time editors who are allowed to behave rudely towards others. These two are related, since I believe the bad behavior here is skewed more towards young males. While this is only speculation, I think it's worth researching this question and finding out if it is true.

First Light's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches 1 and 4


Marcus Cyron[edit]

Response by Marcus Cyron 12:54, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Marcus Cyron auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

  • Die Foundation hat überhaupt keine Ahnung und kein know-how in dieser frage. Überlasst das den regionalen und thematischen Gruppen, die ihrerseits vernünftig ausgestattet werden müssen.
  • The foundation has absolutely no clue and no know-how in this regard. Leave it to the local or thematical groups, that should be sufficiently equipped.

Top 4 von Marcus Cyron[edit]

  • Gebt den regionalen Organisationen Raum zum wachsen, statt sie wie in den letzten Jahren aktiv zu behindern. Nur vor Ort weiß man wirklich, was zu tun ist. Und lasst endlich die Frauen in Ruhe. Seit die WMF den Gender gap für sich entdeckt hat, werden es nicht mehr sondern weniger weibliche Autoren. Die kommen wenn dann von allein und dann, wenn man ihnen nicht so nachstellt. Zumal für den Inhalt ohnehin irrelevant ist, wer Inhalte beiträgt, da diese Beiträge aufgrund seriöser Quellen zu erfolgen haben. Beim Gender gap ist nicht das Geschlecht der nicht Beitragenden das Problem, sondern die Zahl von gut 50% potentieller Autoren.
  • Give the local organisations room for growth, instead of stymiing them like in the last years. What's really necessary is only known locally. And leave the women alone. Since the WMF discovered the gender gap, there are not more but less female authors. They come, if they come, by themself, if you don't hound them. Especially as it's irrelevant for the content, who's delivering it, as these articles have to be based on reputable sources. The problem with the gender gap is not the gender of those who don't participate, but the number of about 50% potential authors.
Hi Marcus, on the subject of local organizations, our strategy has been over the last two years to make creation of organizations easier. In the last year we have doubled because of the rapid growth of user groups. I would have agree that the Gender Gap has not budged, but I would also say that we have not made as much effort as we could in that area. Representation of editors as you say is important, and we should not dismiss it, but rather identify root causes and solutions. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Lila, the CE teams have broken a sweat on the gender gap and I think they've done brilliant work in the last two years. This isn't just a WMF problem. This is a global problem. It will take sustained effort, but so many of the community facing teams have done great (and difficult!) work. AStillwell (WMF) (talk) 06:10, 28 January 2016 (UTC) (sorry wasn't signed in the first time)[reply]

Thank you for calling out the effort the Community Engagement team at WMF has put into moving the needle on the Gender Gap, AStillwell (WMF). I'd like to recognize the dedication and hard work that both new and veteran volunteers have put into narrowing the gender gap, by participating in the Inspire Campaign, collaborating on and upholding the Friendly Space Policies used on Meta and at movement events, and keeping discussions on this important challenge alive on mailing lists and talk pages. As LilaTretikov (WMF) points out, we do not have data yet to show how these efforts have affected the gender diversity among contributors. That said, as a grants officer I am seeing positive changes that would suggest we are moving in the right direction. I have seen this in the number of women who apply for grants, in comments on grant requests from committees and community members suggesting ways that programs could be more inclusive and in community members adopting friendly space policies in board meetings and beyond. The Gender Gap is a big challenge worthy of a sustained effort, and I look forward to the ways we will continue to work toward improving it. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ανώνυμος Βικιπαιδιστής[edit]

Response by Ανώνυμος Βικιπαιδιστής 13:01, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ανώνυμος Βικιπαιδιστής's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach two, Approach three

Ανώνυμος Βικιπαιδιστής's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

You need to provide education for the new members about the rules of the community so they can be able to contribute in the best way and for a long time. I think a Wikimedia school, such as the one in Athens, would be a great asset to the Wikimedia community.

Kertraon[edit]

Response by Kertraon 13:55, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Kertraon à la question critique[edit]

  • Multiplier les démonstrations et ateliers de contribution dans les lycées, les universités, les entreprises et associations, sur les marchés, les salons, les foires.
  • Encourager les opérations de Wikilove. Encourager les remerciements, gratifiants pour les contributeurs : rendre le choix "remercier" plus visible, par exemple de couleur verte au lieu de bleu environnant. Faire des campagnes périodiques pour encourager le wikilove, la cordialité, et à utiliser les remerciements. Cordialement, Kertraon (talk) 13:55, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Machine translation; please help improve.
Multiply contribution demonstrations and workshops in high schools, universities, companies and associations, markets, exhibitions, fairs. Encourage operations Wikilove. Encourage thanks, rewarding for contributors: make a choice "thank" more visible, eg green instead of blue surrounding. Make periodic campaigns to encourage wikilove, cordiality, and to use thanks. Regards,

Top 2-3 de Kertraon (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

  • Approche 7: Vos idées. --> Encourager le wikilove, la cordialité, l'aménité, les remerciements.
  • Approche 2: Créer et soutenir des programmes pour accroître la participation bénévole par la reconnaissance, un tutorat facilité et une re-mobilisation personnalisée.
    • --> Multiplier les démonstrations et ateliers de contribution dans les lycées, les universités, les entreprises et associations, sur les marchés, les salons, les foires, les musées, les bibliothèques.
    • Idée : dans les principales bibliothèques, financer un ou quelques postes réservés pour contribuer à Wikipédia.

Cordialement, Kertraon (talk) 13:55, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Machine translation; please help improve.
* Approach 7: Your ideas. -> Encourage wikilove, cordiality, the amenity, acknowledgments.
* Approach 2: Create and support programs to increase voluntary participation by recognition, easier tutoring and personalized re-mobilization
**-> Increase the contribution of demonstrations and workshops in high schools, universities, companies and associations, markets, exhibitions, fairs, museums, libraries.
Idea: in major libraries, or fund a few positions reserved to contribute to Wikipedia.
Regards,

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Anarchyboy[edit]

Response by Anarchyboy 14:07, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Anarchyboy's response to the critical question[edit]

Making mediawiki more global is good! Not particularly concerned with 'growth,' more about reaching the community in question, which may often span language and geographic divisions.

Anarchyboy's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I would guess approach four, sort of, and five. Not initiatives, per se, more key subjects, some of which may be timely. Having information available initially is a good jumping-off point to make good, useful pages. I'm imagining something like an auto-translation to take updated content on an e.g. Spanish language instance of a page and making it available as source material on the e.g. English version for cleanup, improved translation, and posting, so new information can percolate around more easily and quickly.


Amage9[edit]

Response by Amage9 14:08, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Amage9 à la question critique[edit]

...répondez ici...

Top 2-3 de Amage9 (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

...répondez ici... Lors des discussions sur un article ou débats sur l'admissibilité, pouvoir solliciter automatiquement l'avis d'un wikipedien compétent dans le domaine pour éviter les "fossoyeurs" et les intervenants hors sujet. La nouveauté étant la sollicitation automatique, actuellement on ne connait pas (je suis peut-être mal informé) les compétents du domaine.

Machine translation; please help improve.
During discussions on an article or discussions about eligibility, find away to automatically seek the advice of a competent Wikipedian in the area to avoid the "gravediggers" and irrelevant stakeholders. As novelty is the automatic load, currently we do not know (I may be misinformed) who have competences on that particular domain.
Hi @Amage9: this is an interesting idea. Would this work like chat? LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:21, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Devopam[edit]

Response by Devopam 14:19, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Devopam's response to the critical question[edit]

Devopam's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach five. It is difficult to encourage new editors to come on-board due to the learning curve involved. The more automation can be imbibed, the easier it will be for new users to adopt and adapt.


JoeHebda[edit]

Response by JoeHebda 14:30, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

JoeHebda's response to the critical question[edit]

At Main page add a Welcome Editors block which can include content pointing to Welcoming Committee, Teahouse, Help Desk, Ref. Desk. Also mention Guild of copy editors and tip-of-the-day Tips library.

JoeHebda's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach six: Simplify policies and processes for building communities and wikis. When monitoring Teahouse, Help Desk, Ref. Desk, overall, there is a great need to direct new editors away from attempting new articles which are deleted (AfD). I'm certain this frustrates new editors and consumes time and resources for those monitoring for new content. IMO it would be a great value to place more emphasis on Community portal, especially the Opentask section (including SuggestBot) for improving existing articles.


My opinioni[edit]

"Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and"

Our beloved WP is not a place for feminism. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 1Goldberg (talk) 14:37, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ynanchu alp bilge[edit]

Response by Ynanchu alp bilge 14:48, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ynanchu alp bilge — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Ynanchu alp bilge — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Наиболее предпочтительным решением было бы подход второй и третий.

Machine translation; please help improve.
The most preferred solution would be to approach the second and third.

Miniapolis[edit]

Response by Miniapolis 15:03, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Miniapolis's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Miniapolis's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches one, three and six.


Chielbuseyne[edit]

Response by Chielbuseyne 15:04, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Chielbuseyne's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

2

Chielbuseyne's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

6 5

Ga naar het volgende onderwerpsgebied (Kennis)

Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick[edit]

Response by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick 15:08, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick à la question critique[edit]

Mettre dehors des contributeurs qui parlent beaucoup et font beaucoup de bruit mais qui s'avèrent totalement improductifs du côté des articles. Une erreur colossale a été de laisser se développer sur Wikipédia une classe politique (et ça se retrouve dans plusieurs versions linguistiques) qu'on entend beaucoup trop au détriment des contributeurs qui travaillent réellement sur les articles. Celui qui est malheureusement mis en avant est celui qui se montre le plus au détriment de celui qui bosse le plus. Par ailleurs, un des maux dont souffre la communauté est l'immobilisme.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Put outside contributors who talk a lot and made a lot of noise but who prove totally unproductive side items. A colossal mistake was letting grow on Wikipedia a political class (and it is found in several language versions) we hear too much at the expense of contributors who actually work on the articles. Whoever is unfortunately put forward is one that shows the most detrimental to one who works the most. Furthermore, one of the ills of the community's inaction.
Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick What do you think the WMF can do to help this issue?

Machine translation; please help improve.

Que pensez-vous du WMF peut faire pour aider cette question ?LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:00, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Top 2-3 de Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

  • Approches 4 & 5 : toutes les langues doivent être développées autour de données collectées/rassemblées dans Wikidata. Mettre ses données dans Wikidata doit être aussi valorisé que de mettre ses photos sur Commons. En centralisant toutes les données, on va avoir une meilleure vérification et une meilleure mise à jour tandis que les contributeurs-rédacteurs auront le champ libre pour rédiger les articles, ce qui apporte une plus-value nécessaire pour faire augmenter le nombre de lecteurs. Ça passe donc encore par des modèles communs, comme je l'expliquais dans ma précédente intervention.
  • Approche 6 : toujours faire le plus simple possible. Wikipédia a un peu trop tendance à se bureaucratiser.
  • Approche 7 : Wikipédia vient de fêter ses 15 ans, c'est l'occasion de tout repenser. Je ne pense pas qu'on puisse attirer des contributeurs par un quelconque moyen, ce sont les gens eux-mêmes qui décident de venir. À partir de là, il ne faut pas faire fuir les bonnes volontés puisque nous parlons de la future génération de contributeurs. Pour l'écart hommes-femmes, je ne me pose pas trop de question, je regarde le travail de la personne et non son sexe.
Machine translation; please help improve.
  • Approaches 4 & 5: all languages ​​should be developed around data collected / gathered in Wikidata. Put its data in Wikidata should be as valued as putting photos on Commons. By centralizing all the data, we will have a better and better verification updated while contributing editors will have space to write articles, which brings added value needed to increase the number of readers. So it goes further by common patterns, as I explained in my previous intervention.
  • Approach 6: always as simple as possible. Wikipedia has a little too tend to become bureaucratic.
  • Approach 7: Wikipedia has just turned 15 years is the opportunity to rethink everything. I do not think we can attract contributors by any means, it is the people themselves who decide to come. From there, it should not scare away good will since we are talking about the next generation of contributors. For the gender gap, I do not ask myself too many questions, I look at the work of the person and not their gender.

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

TeriEmbrey[edit]

Response by TeriEmbrey 15:28, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

TeriEmbrey's response to the critical question[edit]

It would be really nice to see some dedicated Wikimedia Foundation staff travel across North America and South America to assist local non-profit organizations (including libraries) in hosting edit-a-thons and introducing communities to Wikipedia.

TeriEmbrey's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

"Approach five: Improve automation tools to reduce manual work for managing content and projects" would really help small Wikiprojects, especially GLAMs, in contributing more to Wikipedia.


ONUnicorn[edit]

Response by ONUnicorn 15:45, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ONUnicorn's response to the critical question[edit]

Encouraging new editors the way the foundation encourages financial donors would be a big help, especially on the smaller projects. I don't know about other projects, but on en.wikipedia, the civility policy needs more teeth. Also, governmental censorship is a big problem on some language projects. The foundation needs to enable free speech on projects where governments are trying to throttle it.

Hello, User:ONUnicorn. :) Thanks for your feedback. Specifically, do you mean doing banner outreach for new contributors? Or did you have something else in mind? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:30, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. See my response to the critical question on Reach. ONUnicorn (talk) 18:42, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ONUnicorn's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches one and six.


Gato Preto[edit]

Response by Gato Preto 15:52, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de Gato Preto a la pregunta crítica[edit]

La respuesta a la pregunta crítica se resolveria con una mayor implementación en los capítulos nacionales, es decir, tener mayor organización en cada país y conseguir entrar en el universo educativo y de mayor o menor forma implementarlo gradualmente y crear un proyecto de integración de los proyectos Wikimedia en los centros educativos.

Machine translation; please help improve.
The wing answer critical questions would be resolved with further implementation at the national chapters, that is, have more organization in each country and get into the educational universe and of varying shape gradually implement and create an integration project of the Wikimedia projects in schools.

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Gato Preto (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

  • Segundo enfoque;
  • Cuarto enfoque;
  • Primer enfoque.
Machine translation; please help improve.
  • Second approach;
  • Fourth approach;
  • First approach

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

FNDE[edit]

Response by FNDE 15:57, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von FNDE auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

2, 5, 6

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von FNDE[edit]

Die Hürden senken um neue Autoren zu gewinnen: bisher ist der Einstieg nicht ohne Weiteres möglich. Wikipedia muss massenkompatibel werden und nicht nur von technisch versierten Menschen nutzbar sein. Außerdem halte ich Projekte wie die "Teestube" für Anfänger sehr hilfreich.

Lower the hurdles to gain new authors: up to now the access is not self explanatory. Wikipedia must become mass compatible, and not only be usable by technically versed people. I think that projects like the "Teestube"" are very good for beginners.
FNDE Thank you. Could you please link to the project?
Vielen Dank. Könnten Sie bitte Link zu dem Projekt? LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:05, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@LilaTretikov (WMF): Wikipedia:Teestube (closed at the moment due to restructuring/redevelopment works) --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 14:52, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Alarichall[edit]

Response by Alarichall 16:34, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Alarichall's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Alarichall's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1 (top), 6 (second most important)


PalaciosBertolot[edit]

Response by PalaciosBertolot 16:56, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de PalaciosBertolot a la pregunta crítica[edit]

Que el acceso a la comunicación con wikipedistas experimentados sea mas amigable y que no de la impresión de ser de constante censura, sin detrimento de la labor de vigilancia permanente que realizan.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Access to communication with experienced Wikipedians be more friendly and not give the impression of constant censorship, without detriment to the work of permanent surveillance they carried out.

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de PalaciosBertolot (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

Mejores opciones: La 05 y la 06.

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

Mostapha ali[edit]

3.2.4.5


Dmitry Dzhagarov[edit]

Response by Dmitry Dzhagarov 18:15, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dmitry Dzhagarov — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Dmitry Dzhagarov — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

...пишите здесь…Подход пятый

Machine translation; please help improve.
Approach 5

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

MurielMary[edit]

Response by MurielMary 19:05, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

MurielMary's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

MurielMary's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 1, definitely. There needs to be more encouragement for editors of under-represented groups, such as women and non-white ethnic groups. This could be done through face-to-face events led by institutions or community groups to encourage people to learn how to edit and then to write/edit on areas of interest to them. Also, once people are editing there needs to be greater understanding and support for the need to diversify the writing on WP. Frequently articles on women, for example, are tagged for deletion as "non-notable" and a strong discussion takes place to have the article kept because the nominator wasn't thinking about how "notable" for women might be different for "notable" for men (e.g. notable for being a pioneer woman in a new country, building a community focus in a pioneer environment - I've seen an editor comment "but she was just there along with her husband").


SageRad[edit]

Response by SageRad 19:36, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SageRad's response to the critical question[edit]

Create a better editing environment, with no bullying or harassment. Enforce civility and foster integrity.

SageRad's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach one is important, but it's not only gender but general harassment and bullying that needs to end, and mechanisms of enforcement need to ensure integrity instead of the opposite as they often do right now.


Imeriki al-Shimoni[edit]

Response by Imeriki al-Shimoni 19:55, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Imeriki al-Shimoni's response to the critical question[edit]

I believe we can improve things a little by making guideline pages (such as WP:MOS) easier to find and browse for new editors. I would guess most new users are unaware they even exist until someone points it out to them in a Talk page, if they ever visit a Talk page. New users are also likely to not be sure how to even begin editing, thus may be "scared away" just by frustration (someone who has never seen before in their life, in any form, the inside of a car may want to drive one, but put them inside, and them not knowing where to begin, how to even start or operate it, would cause many to shy away and never try again). Some approach that would make it easier for less web-tech-savvy users (many older academics, for example) to learn how to contribute would be helpful.

Imeriki al-Shimoni's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

No other opinion at this moment.


Don-kun[edit]

Response by Don-kun 20:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Don-kun auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Die Struktur und das Handeln der Organisationen sollten gegenüber den Communities offen und transparent sein und Feedback bei den Freiwilligen gesucht und ernstgenommen werden, ohne aufdringlich zu sein. Die Communities sollten technisch und organisatorisch unterstützt werden, dies innerhalb und gegenüber neuen Mitarbeitern ebenso umsetzen zu können. Außerdem sind Angebote an die Communities wichtig, die ihnen beim Beitragen zu den Projekten oder bei Kommunikationen mit Außenstehenden helfen (geschieht auch schon viel).

Machine translation; please help improve.
The structure and the actions of the organizations should respect to the communities to be open and transparent, and feedback be sought and taken seriously in the volunteers, without being intrusive. The communities should be supported technically and organizationally, to implement this within and to new employees as well. In addition, offers to the communities are important to help them contribute to the projects or in communications with outsiders (happens a lot).
Moin Don-kun, ich waere dankbar, wenn du bei den von dir angedachten Angeboten konkrete Beispiele - sowohl fuer bereits stattfindende als auch erstrebenswerte - nennen koenntest. Das wuerde die Evaluierung des Punktes deutlich erleichtern :) Gruss und Dank, --Jan (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Schwierig, da das ein großes Feld ist und ich auch nicht jede Art des Beitragens und jedes Projekt kenne, daher auch nicht jede mögliche oder gewünschte Unterstützung kennen kann ;) Sehr gut, motivierend und förderlich für die Mitarbeit finde ich das Literaturstipendium oder die Unterstützungen für Fotoprojekte oder Wettbewerben. Schon kleine Dankeschöns kommen gut an. Vielleicht nichts direkt für die Foundation, aber etwas wozu Wissenstransfer zwischen den Chaptern stattfinden sollte, und das kann die Foundation unterstützen. Unterstützung dabei, an Institutionen zu gehen oder Workshops für Interessierte zu geben könnte es vielleicht noch mehr geben. Aber dafür braucht es auch immer die Gelegenheiten. Vielleicht ist da schon sehr der Wille da, aber noch kein Weg gefunden (bei Chaptern und Foundation). Bei Transparenz und Offenheit ist es sehr schwer, einen konkreten Vorschlag zu machen. Einiges scheint auf einem guten Weg zu sein. Der Konflikt um die Board-Besetzung ist ein Negativ-Beispiel. Ein Governance-Review auch in Hinsicht auf die Transparenz und Nachvollziehbarkeit der Entscheidungen könnte helfen? Bezüglich Offenheit der Communities können technische Entwicklungen oder organisatorische Unterstützung beim Finden neuer Konfliktlösungsmechanismen (oder ganz konkret von Konfliktlösung und Problembehandlung bei pers. Treffen wie in Deutschland schon teils praktiziert) helfen. Hier sind beim zweiten auch eher die Chapter gefragt. Wichtig ist bei beidem, dass die Initiative von der Community kommen sollte oder eine Initiative der Foundation in früher Phase in die Community getragen werden. Fast fertige Produkte der Community anbieten hat schon oft in Konflikte und zu Frustration geführt. Andersherum kann auch nicht jeder Freiwillige ständig mit den neuesten Ideen der Foundation belästigt werden, wenn er sich doch mit dem Wissens-Projekt (welchem auch immer) widmen will. Das Feuer muss aus der Community kommen oder sich in ihr entzünden - sonst wirds nicht. --Don-kun (talk) 17:37, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Vielen Dank, Don-kun. Die Beispiele und Bewertungen machen die Einordnung deutlich effektiver :) Gruss und Dank, --Jan (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Don-kun[edit]

2, 3 und 5

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Pengo[edit]

Response by Pengo 20:11, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pengo's response to the critical question[edit]

  • Unite communities. Reduce the number of places to talk. Say I'm looking for some quick feedback on the new article I made which lists critically endangered mammals, where do I go? Where's the community? WikiProject Biology, WikiProject Tree of Life, WikiProject Animals, one of the numerous village pump pages, the taxobox template talk page? #wikipedia-en on IRC? a mailing list? In Ideas Labs' New ideas? Where's the community? I haven't found a Wikipedia community in any of these places. There's just ghost towns where no one posts, or they're places for very specific requests. What if I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself and talk about my interest in threatened mammals? Am I meant to start a new WikiProject just to do that? Are you just going to create tools to make more of these ghost town "communities"? Why? Wiktionary (en) has just five "discussion rooms" and no WikiProjects or mailing lists and they have a much stronger community for it. For one you don't spend as much time trying to find the wrong place to post your comment, and your comments are much less likely to go ignored or unnoticed. Important in a community.
  • Stop treating all comments equally. Say 100 people read through every comment here. Will that make it any easier for the next 100 people to find the insightful, interesting or useful comments? Not at all. There's a "Thank" action you could dig through the history to use, but even "publicly" thanking users for their comments through the wiki software doesn't help anyone else find those comments. I created the "Resolved" template in 2006 to help users identify at a glace which threads didn't need to be read over again, but a community needs to be built from many small actions, not monolithic statements of fact. There also needs to be a template for "10 people think this comment or thread is worthy of attention". That will never happen here because wiki software is absolutely the wrong solution for discussion threads and community participation. We've tried to make it work for 10 years and it has failed.
  • Stop using a wiki for comment threads. Some things that are awful about comment pages: users must manage comment threads, do their own indenting and de-indenting-where-there's-too-much-indenting, keep track of which bits they have any haven't read is awful, and decide whether to reply directly to someone or post their comment at the end of a thread because no one will find their addition if it's in the middle. It's 2016. Time to retire this awful, awful hack and start using a non-wiki solution for discussion. Any conversation that goes for more than a page is absolutely awful to attempt to reply to or keep track of or even to read. Without fixing how communication works on Wikimedia you cannot fix anything that relies on communication.
  • Where's the community for people who read Wikipedia, but don't (yet) edit? There's a huge Wikipedia community on reddit: /r/wikipedia (144,354 subscribers). Just people sharing interesting pages. But there isn't anything like that on Wikipedia itself. Here you have to be editing or at least asking questions to be part of the community. If you want to bring people into the community, give a way for people join it while they're still just readers. Right now there's no practical reason even to sign up for an account unless you're actually editing. Dedicate more space on front pages to what readers say they're interested in instead of what editors think they should be interested in and get readers participating with small actions such as publicly "liking" or "sharing" a page. ("Add page to a watchlist so I can log in later and find out if any punctuation got changed" is not a useful function for most readers and does not help foster community in any way)

Pengo's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • 5: Improve automation tools, or rather make them unnecessary: Scrap the wiki concept on talk pages and use software that doesn't need automated bots to clean up and archive the mess of wikitext that is talk pages. Maybe you could even notify users of a new comment in a thread they participated in? How incredible would that be in 2016?
  • 7: Reduce community entry points. Don't make users spend time searching for an active, relevant community before they can say anything. If you used real forum software you could even move posts between forums without causing mess and confusion.
  • 7: Wiki talk pages are a failed experiment. All the bots and templates and hacks and "thank" plugins in the world aren't going to make them better means of communication. Let them go already.
  • 7: Stop asking users for these endless comments and go do measurements yourselves. Have some leadership. These community outreach attempts are blackholes for ideas. 75 comments and hardly anyone has discussed anything anyone else has said. This isn't a "discussion" page, it's a dumping ground.
  • 7: Create communities for readers, not just editors. Create a space where readers can simply say, "hey, I found this interesting."


Wikimpan[edit]

Response by Wikimpan 20:23, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimpan's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikimedia projects have a great documentation, but it is not easy to find. First of all: it requires searching, and people generally don’t like doing this. The path between “I want to do X” and the page that describes X should be shortened somehow, and the page itself should first describe things in possibly simple and quick way, and only then — later — get into the details. Currently this path is way too long for most users.

The issue also applies to the policies. They’re starting to be too extensive and to hard to grasp by the new users.

Wikimpan's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Own idea: promote, among academic staff, editing Wikipedia by students to get better grades. This could also increase quality of the articles, if students’ work will be checked.

Approach 6, for the reasons mentioned earlier.

Approach 1 is important for some cases. While my cooperation with english Wikimedia project is flawless, I’ve nearly gave up editing the polish edition, as it has become — in my view — a tiny circle of editors that tend to control every aspect of how things should look like, and use their powers (on PL Wiki edits have to be checked by the privileged users before publication) to enforce it. This is completly against the original “be bold” and evolutionary approach.


Zedshort[edit]

Response by Zedshort 20:33, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Zedshort's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Zedshort's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

The community of WP editors has been winnowed down to two populations that in their extreme can be described as either Morlock or Eloi. The Morlock I characterize as thick-skinned, aggressive, territorial, conceited, vain, arrogant, highly tenacious, rule-quoters, with whom one cannot work. The Eloi are the polar opposite and are easily discouraged by the Morlock. As we all know, Morlock eat Eloi. Over the years, the very long process of winnowing the population of editors has resulted in a very large fraction of the remaining editors falling into the category of Morlock, while the very people you believe are missing from these projects, are the ones that have been chased away. To put it bluntly, the Morlock tend to be young, technologically arrogant males. It isn't that you don't need such people, it is just that such people should not rule the roost. At present, the population is not diverse enough to be healthy.

We need to draw in more mature, responsible and cooperative people. Simply by having a great many eyes on the project and the process we can keep WP alive, healthy and growing. I have made the suggestion of an “Ask a question, get and answer” feature that would draw in a large body of educators that would improve the WP population demographics. By dint of the fact that those new people would be watching what goes on here, they would act to moderate the behavior of the more aggressive. Zedshort (talk) 20:33, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Zedshort. I like your descriptive language. Really striking. :) In terms of your "Ask a question, get an answer" feature - can you link me to where that's described or perhaps describe it a little bit more? How does it differ from the RefDesk, for instance? :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:44, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You will find my proposal stashed on my talk page on WP:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Zedshort. I submitted it once on the Village Pump Proposals, only to have it panned by a very few, very negative and rather scatter-brained people. Thanks. Zedshort (talk) 20:43, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I find the idea intriguing and a way for people to exchange knowledge in other ways than strictly articles. Engaging, "sharing in" knowledge can take many forms. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:26, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I am of the opinion that this is all about education. At present, WP (which I think of as at the core of this endeavor) is almost sufficient for those capable of self-education. However, the fraction of people capable of self-education is small. The next step would be education facilitated via other people attempting to answer questions. If you have a clear view of your purpose and the boldness to take the next step then the future is wide open. Zedshort (talk) 19:36, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Worlddreamer[edit]

Response by Worlddreamer 20:47, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Worlddreamer's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here… Approach 2, 6, and 5. This question sounds like you're unsure what your community is. Or maybe the question is unclear to me because I'm not a part of the community your discussing. Obviously, your community must have many brilliant people but if you want to sustain yourself past this generation you'll have to reach more everyday people and their children as well.

Worlddreamer's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…


Sanglahi86[edit]

Response by Sanglahi86 20:51, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sanglahi86's response to the critical question[edit]

Even the support and/or report abuse pages appear to have a very staid atmosphere. There should be a focus on making these pages a little bit more welcoming/hospitable to users.

Sanglahi86's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Approach two: Create and support programs to increase volunteer participation such as recognition, facilitated mentorship, and personalized re-engagement.
  • Approach one: Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment for contributors and editors.
  • Approach six: Simplify policies and processes for building communities and wikis.


ArthurPSmith[edit]

Response by ArthurPSmith 21:17, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ArthurPSmith's response to the critical question[edit]

Greater transparency and better communication; recognize community's that do things well; have a process for reforming communities that don't.

ArthurPSmith's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 2 and 3.


Seagull123[edit]

Response by Seagull123 21:24, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Seagull123's response to the critical question[edit]

One way the Foundation could do this is by maybe assigning one WMF editor/employee (I don't know the ins and outs of the WMF's structure) to each project/project language (e.g. English Wikipedia, French Wikinews, Swedish Wikivoyage, etc.) to be a sort of partner/mentor/ambassador sort of thing to help the projects a bit more. What I mean is, that these "ambassadors" would build relationships with experienced editors and would be able to be approachable by new editors, they would also be able to weigh in on important community discussions to help explain/discuss what the WMF's position is on things and what the WMF could do about these discussions. This would make sure that smaller projects don't feel left out or forgotten about by the Foundation, or that they only concentrate on English Wikipedia, possibly stopping loss of editors and encouraging new editors to contribute more regularly (as they will feel that they're being welcomed by the Foundation itself if a WMF editor/employee is there to help them).

One of our big challenges is size. With nearly 900 Wikis we have to pick and choose where we can deploy resources, so natural gravity takes us to large Wikis. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:29, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Seagull123's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches 1, 5 and 6. (I would suggest approach 2, but I'm not sure what recognition, facilitated mentorship, and personalized re-engagement are - maybe that itself comes under approach 6 of simplifying "policies and processes"). I do think that approach 6 is important as complicated policies, shortcut codes (WP:OR or WP:GNG on English Wikipedia) and complicated processes could easily make new editors confused and possibly make them feel like they're forced to leave. So if there was a deletion discussion on a page on Wikipedia that a new editor had an opinion on, but after reading all the policies, they may feel like they may not know enough to contribute to the discussion or feel like they may get something wrong if they contribute, so they may just ignore the discussion and hope it goes their way or leave that project altogether as they may think that all of Wikipedia is that complicated.


Johnragla[edit]

Response by Johnragla 22:54, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Johnragla's response to the critical question[edit]

1 & 2

Johnragla's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…


Ryan Hodnett[edit]

Response by Ryan Hodnett 00:03, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ryan Hodnett's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Approach six
  • Approach one
  • Approach three


G41rn8[edit]

Response by G41rn8 00:47, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

G41rn8's response to the critical question[edit]

G41rn8's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

5


JoshuaKGarner[edit]

Response by JoshuaKGarner 02:50, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

JoshuaKGarner's response to the critical question[edit]

Make people want to edit pages. Idealistic things like a 50/50 gender ratio are useless if nobody is actually making edits. Perhaps reach out more to multi-lingual speakers and ask for assistance in cross-translation of pages.

JoshuaKGarner's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach seven: make better editing tools. People have been asking for this for years. I support approach two in theory, but it is incredibly vague.


Knxwrtr[edit]

Response by Knxwrtr 03:52, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Knxwrtr's response to the critical question[edit]

I'm constantly surprised by the lack of communication. Someone will ask a question on a Talk page and it is never answered. There has to be a way to direct people to have their questions answered.

Hello, User: Knxwrtr. :) Are you talking about questions for the Wikimedia Foundation or in general - for instance, questions on the talk page of an article? :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Knxwrtr's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Two, three, five and six.


Missimack[edit]

Response by Missimack 04:05, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Missimack's response to the critical question[edit]

The single most important thing the Wikimedia Foundation can do to improve our communities is to actually listen to the contributors. Not pretend to listen and then do what they want, with no transparency and no accountability. Not become a corporation that doesn't understand the role of each Wikimedia project, or of its contributors. The Wikimedia Foundation should be helping and encouraging contributors, and the best way to do that is by listening to them. The last thing it should do is continue to sell its board of management off to corporations, trustee by trustee.

Missimack's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach one: this one is obvious really.

Approach two: mentoring and teaching best practices should be favoured over heavy-handed punishment.

Approach six: current policies and processes can be very daunting to newcomers. Simplify them and make them more accessible.


Zoeannl[edit]

Response by Zoeannl 05:54, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Zoeannl's response to the critical question[edit]

One: Though this is worded backwards. It should say Create a safe, welcoming environment to reduce harassment and gender imbalance. Overhaul Help-Help is not friendly. Look at Distributed Proofreaders on how to upskill and support the non-technical novice.

Zoeannl's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

+ Two + Three + Six:

Use Wikisource as a starting platform for Wiki skills, an introduction to wiki editing for the non-technical. Learning to edit is a high learning curve for many in itself, Wikisource provides the content so people can learn to edit before taking on the challenge of providing content. This supports engagement of non-digital natives: women, older folk, "poorer" people etc. are over-represented in this group. Engagement is self-driven, topic based, information seeking, enables familiarisation with wiki-ways while reading or creating texts.
This requires an over-haul of Help systems. As above—look at DP.
Brainstorm ideas on creative wikifying; Encourage/push links between communities; More guidelines on and support for annotation, translation and creation of texts from WS texts. Enrich the WS experience.

+ Four

Align Wikisource with Project Gutenberg/Distributed Proofreaders so proofreaders can transfer easily between them. Wikisource needs more proofreaders who would learn Wiki-skills that could feed into other communities. Distributed Proofreaders need more "Post-processors"-proofreaders can become more technically savvy through working at Wikisource, providing the confidence to try PPing at DP. DP has better processes for learning the basics of proofreading; WS is better for learning things like image processing, project management, bots and stuff (I'm still learning)
Align WS systems and processes, jargon, and Help with DP.
Direct copying from Project Gutenberg is embarrassing, and generally unproductive. Push to convert these texts to scan-based.


Ядерный Трамвай[edit]

Response by Ядерный Трамвай 06:55, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ядерный Трамвай — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

Ратую за параллельную работу по повышению привлекательности статуса человека, пишущего в проектах ВМ. Сейчас это довольно легко сделать неискушённому человеку (хотя нет предела совершенству). Но мотивация…

В общем, популяризация проектов в обществе, создание образа википедиста. Можно создать какое-нибудь СМИ, говорящее, чего достигла Википедия и другие проекты, истории успеха и так далее. Наверняка это и так уже есть, но вот… я и многие другие не знают.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Plead for parallel operation to increase the attractiveness of the status of the person writing projects VM. Now it is pretty easy to make an inexperienced person (although there is no limit to perfection). But the motivation ... In general, promotion of projects in the community, creating an image of Wikipedians. You can create some media saying what reached Wikipedia and other projects, success stories and so on. Surely it is already there, but ... I and many others do not know.
  • Еще бы охоту писать не отбивали удалисты статей, которые сами их не пишут и много вреднее вандалов--1Goldberg (talk) 12:29, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Machine translation; please help improve.
  • Still hunting repulsed udalisty not write articles that they themselves do not write a lot more harmful vandals

Ядерный Трамвай — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Опять выберу пятый вариант. Сейчас я вижу полезную информацию, но очень трудно её добавить в статью. Если будет возможность упростить этот процесс технически, будет хорошо. И первый вариант (опять же), частично. Нужно упростить порядок взаимодействия участников в сообществе. Например, мою правку откатили. Раньше я об этом мог узнать, только зайдя в соответствующие журналы. Сейчас, кажется, у меня будет уведомление сверху. Хорошее начало.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Again, I choose the fifth option. Now I see useful information, but it is very difficult to add to the article. If it is possible to simplify the process technically, it will be fine. Both the first embodiment (again) partially. It is necessary to simplify the procedure of interaction between the participants in the community. For example, my editing kickbacks. Before I could find out about it, only going to the appropriate journals. Now, it seems, I will notice above. A good start.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Ajpolino[edit]

Response by Ajpolino 07:28, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ajpolino's response to the critical question[edit]

Sometimes there seems to be a great divide between the experienced editors and the newbies. I think a focus on attracting more newbies, and then convincing more to stay would help to attract a wider diversity of editors and opinions.

Ajpolino's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 3! It's often challenging to keep track of things across various Wikimedia projects. They're unnecessarily separated! Approach 2. Increased volunteer participation and recruitment should be a major push of any organization like ours that relies almost entirely on volunteer contributions.


QuixoticLife[edit]

Response by QuixoticLife 08:24, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

QuixoticLife's response to the critical question[edit]

Be willing to go to the mat for people who are being harassed/abused in the community. Make it clear the project cares about inclusivity of all people even at the expense of the comfort of some. Also see my response below.

QuixoticLife's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

One. #1 all the way. Far down the list maybe #2 and #4, but #1 has to be the absolute top priority if Wikimedia isn't going to be consumed by Gamer Gate–style harassment on a regular basis -- driving home the point that Wikimedia projects aren't safe spaces and that the organization/board/admins have no desire to make it so. Don't let that continue to be the narrative. Lots of open-source software projects are making concrete steps like integrating Codes of Conduct, providing new mechanisms for reporting abuse, hiring diversity trainers, and collecting and disclosing diversity data. Wikimedia should be a part of that new, necessary, humane push for inclusion.


Jobrjobr[edit]

Response by Jobrjobr 08:56, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jobrjobr's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach one and Approach six.

Jobrjobr's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…


Tbranch1527[edit]

Response by Tbranch1527 11:28, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tbranch1527's response to the critical question[edit]

Make Wikipedia content very easy and "User-Friendly" to be shared on social media networks for targeting community growth and participation.

Tbranch1527's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I think Approaches one(1), two(2) and five(5) would most benefit the growth and diversity of Wikipedia within many individual communities and social groups.


Wlg3616[edit]

Response by Wlg3616 11:31, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wlg3616's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…Approach four and six

Wlg3616's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…


DJSupreme23[edit]

Response by DJSupreme23 11:35, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

DJSupreme23's response to the critical question[edit]

It is not that the comunities are unwelcoming; it is they are demanding on time and engagement from people that are mostly already very busy in the everyday, and people either don't engage, or they fall out in short order.

As for the supposed the gender gap, this is agenda-pushing notion which assumes and results in default perceptions of marginalization (where there is none) and will thus twist WP policy.

DJSupreme23's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

+2 , +5


Juandev[edit]

Response by Juandev 11:58, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Juandev's response to the critical question[edit]

...Open projects to other motivation types of people, such as sociable and discovery groups. Sociable people would enjoy possibilities to socialize. This could be done by creating new wikiproject connected to others, where a user can live his wikisocial online life (i.e. to have his presentation there, run blog, chat with othere, have discussions etc.). Discovery people are motivated by the possibility to study something, so the program edit and study or edit and earn course may work.

Juandev's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...2


Sophie Graubert[edit]

Response by Sophie Graubert 12:37, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Sophie Graubert à la question critique[edit]

...répondez ici... 2 3 1

Top 2-3 de Sophie Graubert (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

...répondez ici...

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Happy Attack Dog[edit]

Response by Happy Attack Dog 14:17, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Attack Dog's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Happy Attack Dog's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...Make pages for policies that explain them in simple terms, in order to not overwhelm new users. Happy Attack Dog (talk) 14:17, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Sargolin[edit]

Response by Sargolin 15:05, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Sargolin à la question critique[edit]

...répondez ici...2-3-4

Top 2-3 de Sargolin (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

...répondez ici...

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Luke081515[edit]

Response by Luke081515 15:14, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Luke081515 auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Am wichtigsten ist es, das die Beziehung WMF zu community stimmt, von der Betreiberseite. Danach sollte dann schritte wie Ansatz eins verfolgt werden.

It's most important, that the WMF's understanding of and relationship with the community is sound. After that steps like approach 1 should be followed.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Luke081515[edit]

  1. Ansatz drei (3)
  2. Ansatz eins (1)

Andgy[edit]

Response by Andgy 16:57, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Andgy — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Andgy — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

...пишите здесь… подходы первый,второй и шестой

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Jc3s5h[edit]

Response by Jc3s5h 16:58, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jc3s5h's response to the critical question[edit]

...The best editors are rigorous about the quality of articles. We should be welcoming to those who want to improve content, but should not lose sight of the fact that some have a different agenda.

Jc3s5h's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...Two and three.


Llywrch[edit]

Response by Llywrch 17:00, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Llywrch's response to the critical question[edit]

Honestly, until the Foundation can put its own house into order & restored trust with the communities of volunteers I believe it's best contribution to Wikimedia communities is one of benign neglect. Campaigns to reduce harassment or increase participation by women, minorities, the Global South, etc. etc., have only succeeded in alienating established volunteers & demonstrating the Foundation's incompetence.

Further, the Foundation has time & again demonstrated an inability to constructively interact with the Wikipedia communities. Its mishandling of the Visual Editor fiasco, conflict with the German Wikipedia over Superprotect, controversial hirings & firing of Foundation Trustees then failing to swiftly & intelligently explain the reasons for those personnel changes -- these actions & others have served only to sour the relationship between the volunteers & the paid staff. Obviously changes must be made, but before these changes happen meaningful communication between the two groups must be established. Or the entire movement will dissolve.

P.S. Stop thinking like a high-tech startup would be a good first step.


Louis-garden[edit]

Response by Louis-garden 17:37, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Louis-garden à la question critique[edit]

2

Top 2-3 de Louis-garden (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

...répondez ici...

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Joe Sewell[edit]

Response by Joe Sewell 17:38, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Joe Sewell's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikipedia has moved from acknowledging contributions to condemning legitimate edits and articles that are similar to existing ones. If there is any sense of "consensus" around, it does not show up in public areas. Editors are not treated equally. For example, one article was written that was similar to another one. The latter one had no banners or issues noted. The new one, though, attracted the attention of a "project," which didn't just edit it mercilessly (as one should expect), but criticized the very creation of the article in its Talk page and through warning banners. When the similar article was pointed out, the project representative merely said that he hadn't gotten around to it yet (even though it had been created several years prior). This tells editors of all kinds that we are no longer welcome here.

A similar discouraging act occurred when I tried to modify the format of an article to look better in the Wikipedia iOS app. The edit was rejected, claiming that it did not fix anything. I didn't even bother to argue, but decided to ignore any and all proofreading from now on.

Joe Sewell's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1 (though I don't see a "gender gap"), 3, 6.


Gorvzavodru[edit]

Response by Gorvzavodru 19:39, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gorvzavodru — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Подход первый снижать количество личных нападок, чтобы сделать рабочую среду для вкладчиков и редакторов более безопасной, доброжелательной и благоприятной.

[First approach]
Machine translation; please help improve.
First approach to reduce the number of personal attacks to make the working environment for contributors and editors more secure, friendly and supportive.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Ing. Garin[edit]

Response by Ing. Garin 20:13, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ing. Garin's response to the critical question[edit]

2

Ing. Garin's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

5-3


Stilfehler[edit]

Response by Stilfehler 20:59, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Stilfehler auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

I think the gender gap is a humongous issue that is really overdue being tackled. I have been contributing for more than 10 years and haven't seen the slightest improvement there. Females who try to introduce female interest topics are frequently subjected to attempts of article deletion, by a male crowd who doubts the relevance of such topics. Entire subject areas (such as pedagogics, textiles, fashion, design) are tremendously underrepresented, often obviously due to a lack of qualified female contributers.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Stilfehler[edit]

One.

I have 2 ideas that I think may help to close the gender gap:

  • I feel there are no considerations going on whatsoever about the visual appearance of WP, for example the main pages. The design is nerdy and appeals primarily to males, notably to IT interested males. Please involve some experts in the design who know a thing or two about impressions that a web site makes on the general public, like by design choices.
  • Females love, as we all know, to work in networks rather than solitary. I would love to see tools in WP that make it possible (or much easier) for users of all sexes to congregate in virtual teams or groups (with interest in particular subjects) which would serve as a social base from which especially female contributers could work in a warmer, less anonymous, more social environment and with more confidence.

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

LovelyLillith[edit]

Response by LovelyLillith 00:16, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

LovelyLillith's response to the critical question[edit]

I think we need to get beyond online and implement more "ambassadors" into the real world. Have more meetups, work directly with schools/youth groups to introduce them to Wiki and help them develop a love for the various groups and projects. Perhaps reaching out to Girl Scouts, photography groups, women's groups, artist collectives, programmers, or other special interest groups would be good? You only keep passionate about what you know firsthand, and most people only know Wiki as a place to go for an answer to a question, not as an opportunity to contribute. If they perceive Wiki as being a safe place to be yourself, as anonymously as desired while online, it can grow as people express their interests here. More Wiknics, Editathons and meetups where people can bring a friend to a museum or other place and contribute would be great bridges to be truly social.

I've not experienced sexual or other harassment directed at me personally, but I have seen male editors scoff at the idea of underrepresentation of women's topics and historical figures. 16% representation in articles about woman is a very sad state of affairs, particularly when a portion of editors just don't get that it is a problem. LovelyLillith (talk) 00:16, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

LovelyLillith's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach one, three and five


RonnieV[edit]

Response by RonnieV 00:22, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

RonnieV's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

Essentieel is dat de huidige gebruikers gaan inzien dat Wikipedia niet 'hun' project is, maar dat Wikipedia een project is van alle generaties en van alle mensen. Hetgeen iedereen heeft bijgedragen is geweldig, maar soms moet je constateren dat je eigen houdbaarheid verstreken is. Vaak blijkt dat uit een grote aanwezigheid buiten de hoofdnaamruimte en een zeer conservatieve houding ten opzichte van wat er momenteel in de Wikipedia aanwezig is. Laat dingen los en geef een nieuwe generatie de kans om verder te werken aan het project. Wil je niet loslaten, zorg dan in ieder geval dat je nieuwkomers op een enthousiastmerende wijze ontvangt en ze zo veel mogelijk begeleidt om beter bij te dragen aan Wikipedia, zonder een veto uit te spreken over nieuwe ontwikkelingen, nieuwe inzichten, nieuwe inhoud.

Machine translation; please help improve.
It is essential that current users to understand that Wikipedia is not "their" project, but that Wikipedia is a project of all generations and of all people. What anyone has contributed is great, but sometimes you observe that your own shelf life expired. Often, a large presence outside the main namespace and a very conservative attitude to what is currently in the Wikipedia site. Let go of things and give a new generation the chance to continue working on the project. Will not you let go, make sure in any case that you receive newcomers an enthusing way and guide them as much as possible in order to better contribute to Wikipedia, without a veto from speaking about new developments, new insights, new content.

RonnieV's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

Belangrijk is dat iedereen zich veilig voelt om aan Wikipedia bij te dragen en dat iedereen die het enigszins in zich heeft aangemoedigd wordt om dat te doen. Benadering een is dan ook belangrijk in mijn ogen. Technische hulpmiddelen (Benadering vijf) kunnen een aanwinst zijn, als ze enerzijds laagdrempelig zijn, anderzijds de gemeenschap hiervoor open staat. Momenteel is het (deels) vullen van pagina's uit Wikidata nog een groot taboe op een deel van de wiki's. Het is dan ook belangrijk om met de gemeenschappen in gesprek te gaan en te kijken hoe we dit kunnen wegnemen, voordat er meer energie gestoken wordt in andere hulpmiddelen.

Machine translation; please help improve.
It is important that everyone feels safe to contribute to Wikipedia and that anyone who is somewhat encouraged in them to do that. Approach a is important in my eyes. Technical aids ( Approach five ) can be an asset, as they both are easily accessible, on the other hand, the community is open to it. Currently, the (partially) filling pages from Wikidata still a big taboo on part of the wikis. It is important to engage with communities and see how we can take this away before more energy is put into other tools.

Ga naar het volgende onderwerpsgebied (Kennis)

VexorAbVikipædia[edit]

Response by VexorAbVikipædia 00:58, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

VexorAbVikipædia's response to the critical question[edit]

You have a tough problem here. With over 5 million articles in English Wikipedia, there aren't too many subjects remaining where an ordinary person can make a substantial contribution. Many of the present articles are poorly sourced. And I doubt that most people would want to do the boring drudgery of sourcing articles. (Sort of like volunteering to do a term paper.)

What you need is: (1) to inform people of what's needed. If someone visits an article on "Tulips", you might add a link in the border stating something like: "Do you know something about horticulture? Maybe you'd like to help with articles on these subjects. [Click here]" ; (2) to produce a simple, short video on how to edit an article. How to add an in-line citation. What qualifies as a good source. Show an actor creating an article from scratch, or uploading an image or video to Wiki Commons, etc. And spread the video around — say, to YouTube and elsewhere. You guys at Wikipedia make poor use of the Internet's resources.

The idea of any "community" is futile. Most of your edits are done by individuals working alone, not as part of any real community. If such communities even exist, you do a lousy job of advertising them.

VexorAbVikipædia's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two Approach five Approach three


Ambrosia10[edit]

Response by Ambrosia10 04:32, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ambrosia10's response to the critical question[edit]

  • Approach one
  • Approach two

I whole heartedly support the use of editathons to create and assist an increase in volunteer participation. I am biased as that is why and how I first started editing but I do think more proactive support of editathons by the Wikimedia Foundation would help create a support network for those editors starting out and can also supply a network to assist should editors come up against harassment and other such negative engagement.

Ambrosia10's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…


Tibo Nova[edit]

Response by Tibo Nova 05:15, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tibo Nova's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikipedia must show that editing and engaging with content is fun (or it can be at least). Younger people see a lot of characters, no interactions, no immediately rewards. They accustomed a world where they just upload a kitten and get dozens of likes and comments instantly. Editing and waiting for acceptance (from unknowns) is another world. It will be a hard match.

Tibo Nova's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

In decreasing order: 2, 1, 5


Yngvadottir[edit]

Response by Yngvadottir 07:58, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yngvadottir's response to the critical question[edit]

Pretty much the opposite of what you have been doing. The WMF's ill-informed and condescending intervention has done significant harm to the maintenance of respectful and attentive cooperation between disparate editors. To a very great extent, the basic problem is the WMF adopting this as its business. The WMF should facilitate what we want to do to share knowledge, and not direct what we are to do and seek to police us according to its own pre-conceived notions.

Yngvadottir's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

The only one I can endorse here is Approach three: we are balkanized, better communication would be good.

Approach five leads to more obfuscation and further divides the community into techies and users. Also the emphasis on automation contributes to weighing down pages with templates that shut out both new editors and readers/users with limited connectivity. It's also served as a means of control by the WMF, as with the replacement of the editor-created and serviceable Toolserver with the more demanding and usually non-functioning Tool-lab. The latest manifestation, the WMF's promotion of machine translations, is a flat-out insult to the entire editing community (besides demonstrating colossal ignorance of languages and condescension toward their speakers).

Approach one, from the WMF, has the opposite effect from that intended. We are a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment if functioning as intended, i.e., not set against each other by a high-handed and controlling group of self-appointed bosses. There is no adequate data on the sex ratio among project participants, largely because it is and should be impossible to identify participants. What we need is mutual respect, and this is harmed, not helped, by labels and by directives from "above". Of course harassment is wrong, as is anti-newbie bias and as are a number of prejudices that corrode community (nationalistic, religious, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, political, ethnic, anti-scholarly, and class-based prejudices, to name some). But the only way to combat such biases in massive international online projects is community enforcement of the norms of civility, with a generous dose of self-examination and debate. Not "Drop everything and make special rules for what the WMF has decided is the priority bias to root out!" For one thing because the WMF is not our boss and is overriding and thus weakening the community's own communication processes. For another because it's deeply condescending for the WMF to decide which prejudices are really important. And thirdly because the WMF thereby undermines the community's own mores by implicitly declaring them bad.

Two, four and six sound like ways for the WMF to throw money around without actually helping anything except its self-image.

Approach seven: The single best thing the WMF could do to help us rebuild and strengthen our project communities would be to stop trying to find out our identities and promoting self-identification. The right of anonymity is a core value in the projects and a vital safeguard for an unknown number of participants - the greatest number of whom may be women or people living under regimes that do not like Wikipedia, I don't know - against both on-line and real-life harassment. At least one person has been imprisoned and possibly killed for his Wikipedia editing, and Gamergate has educated much of America to online harassment of women, and yet the WMF keeps trying to out volunteers, if only so it can mail them T-shirts or because conventions are so much fun. Stop it. It's none of the WMF's business whether I am a man, a woman, or a third-gender Martian, how old I am, where I am from or live now, or whether I hold a job the WMF would respect, am a double agent for a country they would disapprove of, or edit by hacking into a bordello's wifi from my shack in the bushes a block from their HQ. The site disapproves of TOR nodes and the like and of paid editing, but other than that, I and everyone else should be judged on our edits. And anonymity (and the right to a mask/user name of our choice within reasonable limits) compels people to judge on that basis and thereby reduces the possibility of prejudice.

Yes, we have problems: with snark, with the attack approach to argument, with unexamined bias regarding notability, with conflicting notions of what best serves the reader (especially around religion and science), with pervasive hostility to experts, with international and class-based conflicts between notions of profanity and civility. The WMF has been at best preventing us from dealing with these and other problems of the community with understanding and nuance and at worst and increasingly exacerbating them by overriding the community and treating us all with condescension verging on contempt. All very well-meant, no doubt.


Carlotm[edit]

Response by Carlotm 08:14, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Carlotm's response to the critical question[edit]

I see Wikipedian population divided in two opposite main ways of considering their role.

  • Those who consider Wikipedia an online version of a paper encyclopedia or, even more strictly, an academic essay. They want to keep what has been achieved in term of content and consider almost any intervention as a disruption. They don't evaluate different formats and how the material may be presented differently. They are often harassers and use Wiki rules and guidelines just to cover their unwillingness to accept changes. They are usually against newcomers. On the other hand their knowledge is usually high.
  • Those who consider Wikipedia the encyclopedia of what is going on online, from blogs to any other kind of trash floating on the Internet. They despise more knowledgeable editors and pretend to write whatever they like, in particular pseudo-science, religious believes smuggled as common knowledge, any conceivable theory on political and economic matters or occurrences. They too are harassers and unable to contextualize themselves in a bigger human environment where a hierarchy among knowledge holders may be the salvation of the project.

The situation is so delicate that I cannot find any suggestion but to move around these two extreme visions, with all the other in between positions, with delicacy and shrewdness. What is imperative to me is to improve democratic resolutions giving in the same time leeway (limited to contents) to knowledge holders (this Community consultation may be an example of how to try to solve Wikipedia's main struggles), and avoid any kind of marketing strategies.

Carlotm's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Combined approach 1 & 6. Policies, guidelines, How to, should be drastically reduced. Emphasis should be put to the main documents governing the community. Wikipedia:Five pillars and User:Jimbo Wales/Statement of principles should be strictly enforced whereas all other rules should be put in the background (ubi maior minor cessat).
  • Approach 2. In particular to favour coverage of lacking sectors.
  • My further approach. Rewrite policies in a way that: any edit with value will be accepted right away, without going through the Caudine Forks of writing an essay in talk page; any abuse of the reversion process will be strictly sanctioned; the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle ‎will be transformed into BOLD, discuss, re-edit; a new 15 days guideline will be included, where an editor, most likely an owner, not liking the last edit with value or at least equivalent value, instead of starting a war, should wait 15 days and then re-edit it; a new guideline will be included to sanction whoever enters in an edit war with futile motives.


KPFC[edit]

Response by KPFC 12:43, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von KPFC auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

...hier schreiben...

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von KPFC[edit]

2, 3, 6

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Tokyogirl79LVA[edit]

Response by Tokyogirl79LVA 14:40, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tokyogirl79LVA's response to the critical question[edit]

This is definitely a key area that needs to be improved. I have some ideas, some of which won't necessarily be truly feasible in the way I'm doing them.

Ambassador program[edit]

Right now a few of us are working on revamping the Ambassador program. We've stalled a little at the moment since we're trying to find a time to meet up virtually to discuss the scope and other issues, but there's interest in revamping and relaunching this to encompass schools and any academic-related group that would require assistance, like GLAM related matters. If not this, then something along these lines would be fantastic.

The rationale with this is that if organizations and schools have people they can turn to, they'll be more likely to leave with a positive impression of Wikipedia and continue editing on their own time or return for future projects.

Booths at events or colleges[edit]

There are already some booths held at major, major conferences and events - ie, things at the national level. However I think that Wikipedia would benefit greatly by holding booths or something similar at events on the state level or at college events. For example, I'm planning on holding a booth at the Virginia Library Association's annual conference later this year, where I'll discuss education and GLAM related matters. I'll be paying this out of my own pocket, which I don't particularly mind, but I do think that there would be some benefit to encouraging editors to do this with their own local events or facilities as they can. There would need to be an emphasis on the fact that the WMF would be unable to fund booths of this nature (although local chapters may be able to help), but I think that a lot of people would be like myself and would be willing to do this on their own dime or find ways to hold booths that wouldn't cost money.

The rationale here is that a lot of places tend to see Wikipedia as unreliable or however the media tends to depict us. Outreach of this nature could be extremely effective in helping to combat some of the more negative media depictions. A positive face-to-face interaction would also help with this, since many people are unaware of who edits Wikipedia and assume that it is random, faceless people. Response by Tokyogirl79LVA 14:40, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SusikMkr[edit]

Response by SusikMkr 16:18, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SusikMkr's response to the critical question[edit]

We have mechanism of online awards: First article, fifth article, .... and many other things. I am convinced, that we need build chain of events, in order to keep both: experienced editors with newcomers. We need to feel the pulse of Wikipedia. We have built chain of activities for our community. I can represent our model of enlarging and maintaining community. Wikistats doesn't represent the real picture. In addition it is all time too late.

@SusikMkr: Hi, I wanted to let you know that there is currently a new notification type being created for edit-milestones (phab:T124003), in addition to the existing notifications for translation-milestones (phab:T99071). There are also a number of other possible new notifications under discussion.
Could you explain a bit more, on what you mean by "chain of events" and "I can represent our model of enlarging and maintaining community" ? Thanks. :-) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Hi User:Quiddity, I'll try to explain. Main thing is that we need Wikipedia in the air all time. I mean the results of an event and following regular editing of participants between two events, have to influence in involving them at following event.

How to keep people in the project, how to build a stable community? People need attention, care, and relations in their real life. In the beginning, we decided to concentrate our efforts on one school. After several workshops, we organized an event in this school gifting active students Wikipedia mugs. Second step was to multiply the number of involved schools. WikiCamp. After a successful WikiCamp our task was to sustain all participants between two terms of WikiCamp. Our little group couldn’t manage hundreds of students. Therefore, we started to found local WikiClubs in small cities, villages, schools, were we have experienced Wikipedians. Wikiclubs are places where Wikipedians can gather, edit and help newcomers. In all our events we invite experienced editors and newcomers, in order to glue newcomers with help of motivated people. Best.--SusikMkr (talk) 05:49, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SusikMkr's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...one, five…


B k[edit]

Response by B k 16:40, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

B k's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Develop strategies or policies to limit long-term, devoted editors. There is a clear power imbalance between dedicated users who think of themselves as "page owners" and casual users who don't know WP customs and mechanisms. This is a delicate problem because dedicated editors do great work in preventing bona fide abuse and spam. But when a casual user's edits are reverted solely because the page owners felt that they weren't consulted first, that casual user now has a bad impression of WP editing and is likely to leave. Setting some sort of "term limits", hurdles to knee-jerk reversion, and otherwise limiting overzealous page owner behavior would frustrate some long-term editors but could pay off in bringing in many new editors.

This approach differs from Approach Two because the recommendation here is about reining in page owners, not about rewarding users who managed to get past overvigilant gatekeepers. It supports Approach One, because the power to block edits from a differing perspective is a key tool in harassment.


Ozdiaz[edit]

Response by Ozdiaz 17:01, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ozdiaz's response to the critical question[edit]

I believe supporting and potentially aligning with 1 or 2 major educational platforms affords an opportunity to expand the reach of Wikimedia content and impact a very necessary part of our future.

@Ozdiaz: Thanks for your feedback. Do you have any examples of the kind of educational platform you mean? Something like a library, or something else like a massively online course system? LuisV (WMF) (talk) 01:16, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ozdiaz's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

In no particular order, I support: - Approach 2 - Approach 4 - Approach 5


Marcel coenders[edit]

Response by Marcel coenders 17:03, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Marcel coenders's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

I'am also a voluteer at Librivox. In that community rule number 1 is be nice. Unfriendly posts are removed unfriendly users are blocked. At wikipedia I made a small mistake and that (without asking why i did it) was directly called vandalism.!!!

Invite people who are not completely familiair with al the rules and sjabloons to write there contributions on the 'overleg' page. More experienced contributers can edit the contributions.

Marcel coenders's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

2. I was very proud when wikipedia won the Erasmusprice it felt I won ik myself!! But there are more ways to give volunteers credits in the real world. (like a royal medal in the netherlands for exepetional active volunteers een lintje krijgen van de koning).

@Marcel coenders: We were all proud of that - thank you for your involvement! If you have any other suggestions for ways to recognize volunteers, I would love to hear them. Thanks! LuisV (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Shangkuanlc[edit]

Response by Shangkuanlc 17:24, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Shangkuanlc 對關鍵問題的回應[edit]

⋯⋯在這裡寫⋯⋯

Shangkuanlc 的前2或前3優先順序(或分享您自己的想法)[edit]

策略一: 通過降低騷擾現象或性別落差,來維護對貢獻者與編輯者一個安全、友善、以及支持的環境。 策略三: 提升在維基媒體社群或自治體組織之間的溝通與透明度。 策略五: 改善自動化工具來降低手動管理內容與計畫的工作。

Machine translation; please help improve.
Strategy One: by reducing harassment or gender gap, to maintain contributors and editors for a safe, friendly, and supportive environment. Strategy Three: to enhance communication and transparency in the Wikimedia community or local government organizations. Strategy Five: Improving automation tools to reduce manually manage content with project work.

下個主題領域(知識)

Gnrc[edit]

Response by Gnrc 18:48, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Gnrc à la question critique[edit]

5

Top 2-3 de Gnrc (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

...répondez ici...

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Besenok[edit]

Response by Besenok 21:12, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Besenok's top 2-3[edit]

Approach two: Create and support programs to increase volunteer participation such as recognition, facilitated mentor-ship, and personalized re-engagement.
Approach six: Simplify policies and processes for building communities and wikis.
Approach one: Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment for contributors and editors.


Jojo17[edit]

Response by Jojo17 21:41, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Jojo17 à la question critique[edit]

Améliorer les outils d'automatisation pour réduire le travail à la main pour la gestion des contenus et des projets.

[Approach 5]

L235[edit]

Response by L235 21:49, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

L235's response to the critical question[edit]

Honestly, this doesn't feel like a Foundation issue to me, at least insofar as direct involvement by WMF much farther than WMF's current role. Providing individual grants to Wikimedians with good ideas is a good idea. Intervening on direct request of a project's ArbCom would save a lot of hassle sometimes (enwiki TDA, for example). Encourage any community-led efforts to increase health, growth, and diversity, but don't be heavy-handed in any way. And finally, bluntly, drop the charters chapters. Kevin (aka L235 · t · c · enwiki) 21:49, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@L235: It would be helpful for me to understand why you're uncomfortable with it. Is it because you don't trust us to be effective, don't think there are problems that we should address, or ... ? There are many possible reasons (all of them with at least some validity!) so helping me understand why you're concerned will help me better shape whatever work we do do. Thanks! LuisV (WMF) (talk) 01:04, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@LuisV (WMF): As a general point, doing more than suggesting new practices will come across as heavy-handed and leads to drama. There's been quite a lot of friction between WMF and the projects at least as long as I've been an editor. (Ping me in a few hours to expand on my point; I'm heading to bed about now but might have more time later to expand.) Kevin (aka L235 · t · c · enwiki) 06:11, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@L235: I think as a general rule I'd say our approach for community issues should generally be "ask community about best approaches (including feedback from us) and then supporting implementation of those approaches". I don't think top-down approaches have long-term sustainability or scalability. That's the tack we're taking in the harassment work, for example. But obviously that hasn't always been the case WMF-wide, so I understand the concern and would look forward to more detail from you. LuisV (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

L235's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

In order, three, one, and the rest. Kevin (aka L235 · t · c · enwiki) 21:49, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]


JMatazzoni (WMF)[edit]

Response by JMatazzoni (WMF) 22:27, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

JMatazzoni (WMF)'s Request for More Detail in Approach Five[edit]

Approach Five is the approach in Communities that deals most with technology. It says: "Improve automation tools to reduce manual work for managing content and projects." As a member of one of the WMF technical teams, I find this directive both too specific and too general.

Too Specific as to Means

Approach Five says we should “improve automation tools.” Is automation the best or only way to build community? What if we were, for example, to focus a project on improving usability, making some key tool much simpler to use and learn but not “automating” it? Might that arguably not be an excellent way to make the community, as the directive puts it, “more welcoming”? Is automation really our objective, or are we aiming a little higher? On which topic, read on.

Not Specific Enough as to Ends

Approach Five is silent about why we should reduce manual work or for whom. How is reducing work connected to community, and how can tech teams most effectively help build community? Is it better to reduce work for the existing base of active editors, making them more productive and engaged? Or is it more beneficial to make life easier for new editors in order to broaden the base of volunteers and, one hopes, increase diversity? These are questions we ask ourselves all the time.

Clearly both groups of users are important, and in the long term the WMF will continue to serve both. But in an environment where resources are constrained, we often have to choose among projects aimed at helping one group or another. Strategic documents are most helpful when they provide guidance that focuses discussions and supports managers in making choices. So, as a product manager who has to help my team make decisions – ideally by showing how those decisions align with strategy -- I'm asking for guidance.

If we should be aiming our technical efforts at empowering experienced users and admins, then let's say so. If we're looking to build tools that encourage new and/or more diverse volunteers, then please, let's be specific. If the answer is that we always need to be doing both, then that's good to know as well. But simply telling a tech team to build tech that will “reduce manual work” doesn't do much to focus the conversation we're having already.


Лорд Бъмбъри[edit]

Response by Лорд Бъмбъри 23:04, 27 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Лорд Бъмбъри's response to the critical question[edit]

Organising events for Wikipedians to meet in person. These do not have to be expensive - a meeting at a local restaurant (not a fancy one, one where students and young people would go with their own money), a wiki-picnic (grab some food and sit in a park), go together to the nearest mountain, etc. When people know each other in real life they discuss in a more civilised way online and give more in order to have a reason to meet the others again soon. Same goes for international meetings. Please, not a Hilton, but rather something like hostels - as soon as the rooms are clean all is fine; I'd rather have one meeting more than spend money on a fancy hotel. Especially regional cooperations like Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe are very beneficial for the communities in them, because of their common understanding of the world.

Лорд Бъмбъри's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  1. Increase communication and transparency with and between our communities and across Wikimedia affiliates.
Transparency is hugely important. Nowadays a lot of communication between Wikipedians is being run in private groups and chats on Facebook, Google Hangouts, etc., because it is much easier as on wiki - mostly because there are no edit conflicts. If some kind of chat/forum function is added to the wiki world, it would be great.
  1. Create and support programs to increase volunteer participation such as recognition, facilitated mentorship, and personalized re-engagement.
Please, in a smart way. Not some learning pattern which is usable for a set of countries and useless for most other countries. If the programs offer some measurement techniques for grants, they have to be written so that no communities are disadvantaged by it.
@Лорд Бъмбъри: Thank you for participating! I personally agree with your suggestion for better forum technology. It is not an easy area, but important. Some people have been discussing one alternative here; if you like that idea, or have other suggestions, I would love to hear them.
For learning patterns, do you have any suggestions of the best (or worst) learning patterns you've seen? That could help us improve. Thanks! LuisV (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gailletboréal[edit]

Response by Gailletboréal 00:06, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Gailletboréal à la question critique[edit]

1, l'environnement actuel est un peu inhibant pour les nouveaux contributeurs

Machine translation; please help improve
1, the current environment is somewhat inhibiting for new contributors

Top 2-3 de Gailletboréal (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

2, je pense que les nouveaux contributeurs souhaitent un accompagnement plus personnalisé que le simple rappel des principes de Wikipedia (admissibilité des pages, style encyclopédique, importance de la forme, pas de travail inédit etc. sont des données d'emblée très présentes 6,

Machine translation; please help improve
2, I think new contributors wish for more personalized guidance than the mere reminder of the principles of Wikipedia (eligibility of pages, encyclopedic style, importance of form, no unpublished work etc. are very outset data
6

Libcub[edit]

Response by Libcub 00:17, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Libcub's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Libcub's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

One, Five, Six


Frank Behnsen[edit]

Response by Frank Behnsen 02:25, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Frank Behnsen auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Frank Behnsen[edit]

Ansatz zwei, ergänzt um Ansatz sieben: den Vorschlag, Kurse in Bildungseinrichtungen – Schulen, Hochschulen, Volkshochschulen, etc. – anzubieten, geleitet von erfahrenen ehrenamtlichen Wikipedia-Mitarbeitern – mit dem Spezialthema Wikipedia-Mitarbeit für Anfänger und Fortgeschrittene, inklusive der Einrichtung von Spezial-Community-Seiten in der Wikipedia mit weiterführenden Informationen und Diskussionsseite, und das speziell für jeden einzelnen solcher Kurse und deren Teilnehmer (als ein Beispiel: „Wikipedia-Kurs VHS Neustadt, WS 2016/17“). Gruß, — Frank Behnsen (talk) 02:25, 28 January 2016 (UTC) (de:Benutzer:Frank Behnsen)[reply]

Approach two, supplemented by approach seven: the proposal to provide courses in educational institutions - schools, colleges, adult education centres, etc. - led by experienced volunteer Wikipedia authors - with the special topic Wikipedia collaboration for beginners and experts, including the establishment of special Community pages in the Wikipedia for further information and a discussion page, this especially and individual for each of such courses and their participants (as an example: "Wikipedia course VHS Neustadt, WS 2016/17").

Pointro[edit]

Response by Pointro 03:17, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pointro's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 5, Approach 3, Approach 4

Gkml[edit]

Response by Gkml 09:33, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Gkml à la question critique[edit]

Approche 7 : vos idées ; il me semble qu'un fonctionnement selon la méthode de de.wikipedia par exemple permettrait beaucoup d'économies en matière de mises à jour : toutes les mises à jour effectuées par des IP doivent être validées par un utilisateur reconnu (qui a plus de cinq cents — par exemple — mises à jour validées à son actif), idem pour les utilisateurs enregistrés qui ont moins de cinq cents mises à jour validées à leur actif. Cordialement.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Approach 7: ideas; it seems to me that the method of operation according de.wikipedia eg allow a lot of savings for updates all the updates made by IP must be validated by a recognized user (who has more than five hundred - for example - validated updates to his credit), same for registered users that have less than five hundred validated updates to their credit. Best regards.

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Schlind[edit]

Response by Schlind 10:07, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Schlind auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

...Wertschätzung dessen, was andere schreiben...

Appreciation of what others write

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Schlind[edit]

...* wichtig: Ansatz 1; * Ansatz 7: Schulprojekte initiieren und wohlwollend begleiten; * Ansatz 8: vor großen Änderungen (v.a. Löschungen, großer Textumbau (hier gestützt durch Algorithmus)) den Hauptautor informieren mit Zeitfenster; * Ansatz 9: "Stammtische" für Wikipedianer v.a. und gerade in kleineren Ortschaften organisieren...

* Important: Approach 1; * Approach 7: initiate school projects and accompany them benevolent; * Approach 8: before big changes (mainly deletions, large text conversion (here supported by algorithm)) inform the principal author with a time window; * Approach 9 organize "round tables" for Wikipedians, especially in smaller towns ...

Patrickwooldridge[edit]

Response by Patrickwooldridge 12:07, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Patrickwooldridge's response to the critical question[edit]

...I think more positive feedback/reinforcement for contributors might be useful. I note that many people today collect "badges" and "tokens" signifying their participation in projects even though these tokens have no practical value. Personally, I have made quite a number of edits which have stuck and authored a few pages and images, but have never received any positive feedback other than being invited to the Guild of Copy Editors.…

Patrickwooldridge's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...My priorities would be Approach two and Approach one…


Filursiax[edit]

Response by Filursiax 12:15, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Filursiax's response to the critical question[edit]

I myself don't participate in any group, so my responses will be somewhat abstract. However, I have performed a number of edits and extensively consulted the Talk pages, and it seems to me that the learning curve is rather steep. First, the editing interface (though more user-friendly now than previously) could still be substantially improved and simplified. (In the Talk section, the Edit interface has not been modernized at all. This should be done immediately.) Use of "computerese" in the interface should be reduced to a minimum (what does the button "Wikipedia markup" mean, for example?). A panel consisting of non-computer-savvy users might be set up to test and critique the new interfaces. Secondly, the very widespread use of abbreviations (POV, IMHO etc. etc.) often makes it hard for a non-initiate to understand what discussions are all about. I know the abbreviations can be looked up, but that implies leaving the Talk or Edit interface one is in. How about putting a handy little link to a simple abbreviation list (in a pop-up window) in an accessible spot in these interfaces?

Filursiax's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2, 5


Helmutvan[edit]

Response by Helmutvan 12:16, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Helmutvan auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

mehr Anlaufstellen schaffen in der realen Welt, also Veranstaltungen, Ausstellungen, Stammtische usw...

create more contact points into the real world, like events, exhibitions, regular meetings etc ...

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Helmutvan[edit]

Ansatz 3,5 und 6

Jtuom[edit]

Response by Jtuom 12:25, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jtuom's response to the critical question[edit]

Wiki contributions should more and more be seen as an essential part of knowledge workers' job. So far it is mostly volunteers who do this on free time I suppose. But larger research institutions, universities etc. should start moderating pages of their own field of expertise so that wiki work becomes a real job and a legitimate task. Also, contributions should be measured and evaluated, and credit should be given. There are some new approaches where scientific journals accept Wikipedia articles as scientific contributions. This is a very promising approach, and Wikimedia should encourage such development. Wikimedia should also encourage the development of "Wikipedia of Science" where original research is produced in a collaborative way in a wiki or similar web-workspace. The new wiki system would then feed results of primary research into Wikipedia in a more direct and effective way than what happens now.

Jtuom's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I vote for approaches 2 and 4 (improvement of Wikipedia in new languages is vital). My own approach number seven is described above.


Seedorfjohnny[edit]

Response by Seedorfjohnny 14:36, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Seedorfjohnny auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Seedorfjohnny[edit]

3, 5, und 6 sind die wichtigsten. Vereinfachung und Durchsichtigkeit, auch wenn die Inhalte Differenzierung erfordern

3, 5 and 6 are the most important. Simplification and transparency, even if the content demands differentiation

Kippelboy[edit]

Response by Kippelboy 14:42, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kippelboy's response to the critical question[edit]

WMF is not the boss, it's the facilitator. It needs to be clarified in all its movements and projects. WMF needs to behave as a matchmaker between movement affiliates. Investigating communities, knowing their weaknesses and their key success aspects and facilitating knowledge flow. Helping to scale interesting projects and procedures and giving help and resources when needed. Also mantainting infraestructure and taking care of legal aspects. I

I always says WMF should be seen as the "projects' concierge"-> "You have "the keys" and your role is to make sure everything is working fine, but everyone knows you're not the boss, but a server. And everyone appreciate it"

Kippelboy's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

3 and 6


H-stt[edit]

Response by H-stt 15:04, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

H-stt's response to the critical question[edit]

en:Subsidiarity. I still believe that the vast majority of new authors are self-selecting based upon their own intrinsic motivation. For them and the existing communities, just let them do their thing. If you want to support the editors, don't do it from San Francisco. You are too far removed from their (our) experience. Work by the chapters. Make sure they have the ability to engage with their editing community. Try to promote local communities of people who can meet face to face. Organized by locals, not someone who flies in from San Fran. Take a look at the still new initiatives of WMDE and WMAT to create Wiki[mp]edia spaces in several cities, for local workshops, meetups, community editing or hanging out.

H-stt's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

3 2 7 (Communicate, Communicate, Communicate your goals, methods and metrics.)

Prathaplal[edit]

Response by Prathaplal 16:30, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Prathaplal's response to the critical question[edit]

Suggest an approach

Prathaplal's suggestion[edit]

  • Make Wiki community easier
  • Make Wiki communities update by connecting it with social networking community


Mvk608[edit]

Response by Mvk608 16:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mvk608 — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Mvk608 — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Подход третий: улучшить связи и прозрачность взаимодействия с нашими сообществами, а также и между ними и партнёрскими организациями-участниками движения Викимедиа (региональными, тематическими и т.д.) Подход пятый: улучшить автоматические инструменты для снижения объёмов ручной работы при управлении содержанием и проектами. Подход шестой: упростить правила и процессы для построения сообществ и вики-сайтов (в т.ч. новых языковых разделов существующих проектов).

Machine translation; please help improve.
The third approach: to improve communication and the transparency of interaction with our community, as well as between them and the partner organizations participating Wikimedia movement (regional, thematic, etc.) a fifth approach: improve the automatic tools to reduce the volume of manual work in the management of content and projects . Approach Six: to simplify the rules and processes for building communities and wikis (including new language sections of existing projects).

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

V0d01ey[edit]

Response by V0d01ey 17:21, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

V0d01ey — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

Люди работают с самоотдачей там, где результат их труда ценится. Нужно сделать так, чтобы любые конфликты своевременно разрешались. Для этого нужно довести до приемлемого уровня первичную проверку правок (патрулирование), чтобы вовремя замечать войны правок и успеть урегулировать их до эскалации конфликта.

Machine translation; please help improve.
People are working with dedication, where the result of their work is appreciated. It is necessary to ensure that any conflicts were resolved in a timely manner. To do this you need to bring to an acceptable level the initial verification of edits (patrols), in time to ignore the war and edits them to have time to settle the conflict escalation.

V0d01ey — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Первый, второй и пятый подходы.

Machine translation; please help improve.
The first, second and fifth approaches.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Argantoni[edit]

Response by Argantoni 17:37, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de Argantoni a la pregunta crítica[edit]

...escriba aquí... 2

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Argantoni (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

...escriba aquí...

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

Ânes-pur-sàng[edit]

Response by Ânes-pur-sàng 17:44, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ânes-pur-sàng's response to the critical question[edit]

Engage with schools and universities

Ânes-pur-sàng's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

ONE - TWO

Suggestion - Let each contributor have their name similar to a sponsor - on say 20-30 articles - whereby they take prime responsibility for those articles It can be annoying when you create an article and someone comes along and changes the whole basis of it, or even renames it to something you consider is incorrect. So certain actions need the sponsors approval.



Guillaume (WMF) / guillom[edit]

Response by Guillaume (WMF) / guillom 18:03, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Guillaume (WMF)'s response to the critical question[edit]

Introduction[edit]

(Disclosure: Some of what I'm advocating for here relates to my work. I work on those issues because I believe they're important, not the other way around.)

"What do you think is the best way for the Wikimedia Foundation to help improve the health, growth and diversity of our communities to help them be more welcoming and open so that the movement is sustainable?"

Well, that's quite a mouthful :) And there are a few assumptions in that question that it's useful to spell out explicitly. I understand the question as:

"We want the movement to be sustainable; therefore Wikimedia communities must be more welcoming and open; therefore the WMF must help improve the health, growth and diversity of those communities. How do we best do that?"

One obvious prerequisite is that we must be able to observe and measure the health, growth and diversity of Wikimedia communities. At the moment, growth is the only dimension we're measuring. We have some historical data (see Gender gap and Diversity as starting points), but it's old and spotty. If we're hoping to have any kind of impact at all in those areas, the first step is to set up a process to measure them, and stick to it over time.

Recruitment and Retention[edit]

The lack of diversity is by definition a compound issue: for example, the lack of geographical diversity might be primarily caused by the poor quality of internet access in emerging communities, while the lack of gender diversity might be primarily caused by combative environments on wikis. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem.

However, one thing we can work on that would benefit everyone is to make sure that we're not hemorrhaging users once they're here. Because of our prominence, Recruitment (getting people to want to contribute) is something we can (at least for now) worry about later. Retention (getting people to become and remain contributors) is a more pressing issue, in my opinion.

Addressing Retention[edit]

Addressing Retention means investigating why people leave, and fixing the leaks. The good news is that we already have a pretty good idea of why people leave (see SSneg's and Halfak (WMF)'s excellent points above). The bad news is that fixing the leaks involves social and cultural change, which takes time.

I believe the best way to address our Retention issue is to make it both desirable and easier to foster a nurturing environment. Right now we have a problem of communities not being "welcoming and open" enough, as mentioned in the question. This partly stems from a widespread culture of suspicion towards newcomers, which itself finds one of its causes in the fact that experienced editors became overwhelmed by the influx of newcomers as the site became more popular.

Addressing Retention with social and cultural change[edit]

By 'desirable', I mean leading social and cultural change to shift perceptions and behavior. Newcomers who stay very much emulate the behavior they observe in the existing communities. Right now this emulation tends to fuel a vicious cycle leading to toxic environments; what we want is to turn this cycle into a virtuous one, so that it's socially desirable to be welcoming.

Addressing Retention with tools and infrastructure[edit]

By 'easier', I mean providing tools and infrastructure to support and facilitate this social and cultural change. There have been a few rare examples, and we need more.

The Teahouse experiment is one of the rare initiatives that have been proven to have a positive impact on newcomer retention. We need to invest more resources to support that kind of initiatives, both socially and technically.

We also need to make it easier for contributors to self-organize in smaller communities, like WikiProjects. Welcoming, on-boarding and socializing newcomers is easier when they have common interests with existing contributors. We may not be able to go back to the pre-2006 atmosphere, but we can get back some of the collegiality that we've lost along the way. Improving WikiProject infrastructure will also help with task recommendations (see Trevor Parscal (WMF)'s point above).

Summary[edit]

Fighting harassment is a good start, but harassment is just the extreme part of the iceberg. The problem of toxicity runs much deeper, and addressing harassment won't be enough unless we provide communities with the tools (both social and technical) to address toxic behavior themselves.

In other words, I believe the role of the WMF is not only to lead by example, but also (and more importantly) to gradually facilitate and implement social and cultural change, and to empower communities to address those issues by themselves in the long term with the appropriate tools.

By making it both socially desirable, and technically easier, to be welcoming, our communities can get back some of their lost collegiality, which in turns will improve community health and diversity.

Guillaume (WMF)'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Following from my analysis above, I think I'm in favor of:

  • Approach 1, with the caveat that it's not just about harassment, but more generally about the deeper issue of the vicious cycle and how to change it to one where newcomers emulate positive behavior.
  • Approach 5, to the extent that it refers to social and technical tools to support Approach 1.
  • Approach 2, as it relates to socialization, mentoring and helping users find their place in the communities.

Brownturkey[edit]

Response by Brownturkey 19:15, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Brownturkey's response to the critical question[edit]

student assignments to edit wikipedia pages

Brownturkey's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

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


Rcgardne[edit]

Response by Rcgardne 19:28, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rcgardne's response to the critical question[edit]

I've never had a negative interaction with another wiki community member. My only problem has been lack of interaction. The result is confusion about the sometimes vague nature of projects, or reluctance to contribute. Wikimedia is about sharing, but feels lonely sometimes, and "Be bold" lacks meaning in a vacuum. Other knowledge-base sites feel more connected (Kahn Academy sends subscribers emails with fun articles & feels much more personal but is more difficult imo to contribute. Stack exchange, etc.)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, User:Rcgardne. I most often hear from the other side of this spectrum, and this is a welcome reminder that a "welcoming" environment isn't just one where negative communication is minimal, but one where positive communication thrives. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rcgardne's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two

Kaldari[edit]

Response by Kaldari 21:28, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kaldari's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikipedia is a bad user experience for pretty much everyone except readers. We need to improve the technology that editors and tool builders use (including documentation) and we need to address the problems of toxicity and harassment.

Kaldari's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Approach one - Wikipedia has become a toxic environment for women that want to participate at a high level. Efforts to increase the representation and participation of women, while given nominal support by the majority of Wikipedians (and the WMF), are typically undermined by a small number of trolls and misogynists who have become very effective at exploiting the rules of Wikipedia (and off-wiki harassment) to drive prominent female editors off the projects. Any editors or admins who challenge this pattern of harassment immediately become targets of harassment themselves. A related issue is that the civility policy has become completely unenforced and unenforcable, as the people who try to enforce it also become targets for harassment, even if they are ArbCom members (the people elected to handle such issues).
  • Approach five - A huge percentage of the work on Wikipedia these days is curating and monitoring content. The workflows for doing these tasks are complicated, inefficient, and arcane. We need to build better tools for these workflows and improve the tools that exist, including automating processes that can be automated. In many cases, there are already community-built tools for handling common workflows, but these tools are undocumented, unmaintained, limited to specific wikis, or have poor user interfaces. We could help improve and expand them. Some examples of semi-automated tools that are specific to English Wikipedia that could be expanded to other wikis include Plagiabot, Citation bot, and PageCuration.

Flukas[edit]

Response by Flukas 21:41, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Flukas's response to the critical question[edit]

Encourage new contributors over legacy "rights" of older users.

Flukas's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach five

Approach three

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Lingawakad[edit]

Response by Lingawakad 23:50, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Lingawakad's response to the critical question[edit]

education programs highlighting the educational - Wikipedia is a legitimate starting point for research, and teachers should acknowledge and share this - and personal benefits - visible/shareable kudos for quality contributions, similar to GitHub for open source developers. edit: i did not realize that harassment is so prevalent in the Wiki world. obviously, that needs to be given priority.

Lingawakad's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2, 3, 4

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Solrezza[edit]

Response by Solrezza 00:21, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de Solrezza a la pregunta crítica[edit]

3

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Solrezza (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

...escriba aquí...

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

Jzsj[edit]

Response by Jzsj 02:09, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jzsj's response to the critical question[edit]

How to increase "engaged communities (that) can create content."

Jzsj's share your own idea[edit]

I've finished graduate studies in 3 areas and have a research MS in mathematics, and have also spent tons of time working with computer programs, but I don't find most of the instruction pages for editing very user-friendly: I think there's a need for simplification of many of them, say "Editing for Dummies". I usually get my creating/editing help simply by going to articles that use the various templates, but such help might be better offered in, perhaps, a special category of help pages.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Connor Behan[edit]

Response by Connor Behan 02:42, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Connor Behan's response to the critical question[edit]

Have certain weeks when all talk pages are just disabled to force editors to go into "beast mode". If people stopped posting random talk page opinions (like this one), the encyclopedia would be so much further along.

Connor Behan's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1, 5 and 6. Good things happen when a site is low in policy and high in automation. And I don't know the best way to make people less sexist but I hope you figure it out. Even when talk pages discussions are infrequent because everyone has realized they are a waste of time, women in this community still need to know that they will be collegial.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Soy Juampayo[edit]

Response by Soy Juampayo 03:52, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Soy Juampayo (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

Solamente la opción dos me parece interesante.

Only option two seems interesting to me.

Happysquirrel[edit]

Response by Happysquirrel 05:05, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Happysquirrel's response to the critical question[edit]

First and foremost, increase support for editors. Right now I would say poor welcoming of newbies and burn-out of long term contributors are the two main causes of loss of editors and they are connected. An embattled, exhausted, over-worked long term contributor is less likely to be tolerant to and welcoming of newbies. Conversely, well-meaning newbies who are not properly welcomed and oriented are more likely to cause huge amounts of disruption by not knowing what is going on. Editors at all stages need to be valued more. They also need to feel part of the community. Right now one often feels one is alone and abandoned.

I also think it is crucial we reach out more to Universities. WikiEd is great, but we need more edit-a-thons and other things like that. A university is always full of people passionate about knowledge and with lots of access to references. It could be a great source of contributors. Student clubs could also be nuclei for meet-ups and other social interaction and community building in their surrounding area.

Happysquirrel's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I would say approach 1 and 2 are crucial. I would strongly support a modified 5 whereby the WMF adopts and provides support for some of the community tools that already exist and have become essential (X! tools, Cluebot NG). This means you are guaranteed to focus on stuff the community already uses and wants and it doubles as super great recognition of the original contributor who developed it. Also, keeping highly useful existing tools running smoothly would greatly reduce frustration.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)


Imfrankliu[edit]

Response by Imfrankliu 05:23, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Imfrankliu's response to the critical question[edit]

I do not believe approach one is going to improve WMF significantly. The identity, including race and gender, is not public unless the user puts it on their user page.

I think approach three will improve WMF. I have been an WMF user for roughly one month, and in total only one WMF staff contacted me. (Via Wikipedia teahouse).

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Kiyoshiendo[edit]

Response by Kiyoshiendo 06:50, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kiyoshiendo's response to the critical question[edit]

Make it easy for people to contribute. Don't waste the user's time with dozens of pages of guidelines and help documents. Simplify that shit so people are actually willing to read the rules and improve Wikipedia. In essence, cut out what isn't strictly necessary.

Kiyoshiendo's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

A few ideas: 1. Trim the help guides down to the bare minimum. Deal with issues as they come up. 2. Improve the visual editor so anybody with a computer can understand and use it within five minutes. 3. Introduce a new tutorial for users to be able to contribute after a few minutes of instruction.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Flyingfischer[edit]

Response by Flyingfischer 07:55, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Flyingfischer's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach six, Approach one, Approach five

Flyingfischer's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Cangaran[edit]

Response by Cangaran 11:18, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cangaran's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach six is the most important. Editors and contributors from more diverse environment should be encouraged especially different school of thoughts.Main problem in India is lack of wide spread culture of critical thinking. The academia and academics of India is below par. So skilled editors are in scarce. For this case facilitated mentorship will be useful

Cangaran's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two, Approach Five, Approach six

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Kuskondu[edit]

Response by Kuskondu 13:11, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kuskondu — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Kuskondu — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

... 1, 5

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Seescedric[edit]

Response by Seescedric 13:23, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Seescedric auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Nummer 6 und dann auch freundlicher werden wie eng Wikipedia und auch bitte zu modern mit dieser Digitalen Bearbeitung von Artikeln.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Number 6 and then are also friendly as closely Wikipedia and also please to state with this digital editing of articles.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Seescedric[edit]

...hier schreiben...

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

SMcCandlish[edit]

Response by SMcCandlish 13:27, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SMcCandlish's response to the critical question[edit]

The gender gap is a major issue, harassment is not (it's a major issue for anyone it happens to, but it doesn't happen frequently). The main community issues are that the openness of the system leads to two synergistically negative problems: these systems are dominated by people who are here to squabble, not work; and the community is too accepting of squabbling, especially special-interest (and lone nut-job) disruption and pushing of points of view, in particular. We've coming into a new phase in the organizational lifecycle. The "gee-whiz, anyone can edit!" factor of the project's (really, the projects') adolescence has faded. It's time to get serious. In the words of one of the co-founders, it's time to "show the door" to disruptive personalities, with considerably more decisiveness than in the past. This will become important, because as en.wikipedia is now the #5 to #7 (depending on whose stats you like) most used website in the world, and in the top 3 search results for nearly everything, the memetic power and influence it quietly wields is an irresistibly powerful magnet for attempts to skew its content. We already know for a fact that the government of Pakistan, for example, has a small army of pro editors warping WP's coverage of everything relating to do with that company; numerous commercial, religious, political, and other interests have both paid and fanatic PoV pushers (often colluding offline in a highly organized way); and as the real-work editors dwindle and fewer become admins, it really is coming to pass that (in the words of the same co-founder) "the inmates are in control of the asylum". More and more of these external interests who do not share WMF / WP's goal, but just want to use them as a tool, are actually getting admins in place, taking over wikiprojects, etc. Well, to hell with that.

SMcCandlish's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  1. Elements of approach one.
  2. Three.
  3. Two.

Constructive new suggestion: WMF mandates adminship system reform at en.wikipedia (from which the changes would propagate to other projects by memetic osmosis), with a number of pre-determined requisites. Pretty much exactly as happened with the Arbitration Committee being planned an implemented within a specific timeframe. The goals in short would be to make ti so that virtually any competent and non-disruptive editor with 18 months or so under their belt will (not just can) become an admin, and an end to present really horrible and easily gameable popularity contest. The administrative backlog is astounds, often months behind in many areas of the project.

 — SMcCandlish ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ʌ≼  13:27, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

109.187.7.252[edit]

Response by 109.187.7.252 14:12, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

109.187.7.252 — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

109.187.7.252 — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

...пишите здесь… Третий и пятый

The third and fifth

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Muhittin çiftçi[edit]

Response by Muhittin çiftçi 14:45, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Muhittin çiftçi kullanıcısının kritik soruya yanıtı[edit]

...buraya yazınız ... 3,4 v e5 nolu madde uygulanabilir

Machine translation; please help improve.
3, 4, and 5 may be applied

Muhittin çiftçi kullanıcısının seçtiği 2-3 (veya kendi fikinizi yazın)[edit]

... buraya yazınız ...

Sonraki konu alanına (Bilgi) gidiniz

Antur[edit]

Response by Antur 15:39, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de Antur a la pregunta crítica[edit]

...escriba aquí...

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Antur (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

Enfoque dos

Approach 2

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

Poupou l'quourouce[edit]

Response by Poupou l'quourouce 18:04, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Poupou l'quourouce auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Ich würde hier sehr gerne sagen, dass Nr.2 am wichtigsten ist. Allerdings sind Transparenz und Kommunikation derart schlecht, dass ich diesen Punkt vorziehe.

I would very much like to say here that No.2 is most important. However, transparency and communication are so bad, that I prefer this point.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Poupou l'quourouce[edit]

3 - 2 - 4


Julius1990[edit]

Response by Julius1990 19:08, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Julius1990 auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

First of all it needs the realization by the WMF that there is nothing more important than the volunteers in the projects. Let's be honest with each other right now for the WMF the central point is the money and then to put through own ideas (often badly programmed, in every case badly communicated) against the wishes of the volunteers. This went so far for a memeber of the Board of Trustees to tell us long editing volunteers to go. That is the situation up to now. It needs a change of 180° by the WMF on this matter. The money comes by the donors, but on which pages is your begging put? Without the content created by us there would be no Wikipedia, no other Wikimedia project you could monetarize in this way. That makes us volunteers the sovereign of the movement and all of you in Frisco, staff, Board, all of you have to serve our needs and your own ideas for the movement can just go as far as they don't disrupt the movement that is a grass-root thing and nothing that should be challanged top-down. In this context you shoudl get rid of big Jimbo in the Board who acts liek a bully on the schoolground, but is noone any decent volunteer would choose as representative. Beside all that the WMF is no Sillicon Valley Tec Company, the only way you can stand infront of the communities is in total transparence. The last weeks were especially disappointing in this respect.

Stop disruptive projects like Flow, reboot your thinking (writing an encyclopedia will never become a mainstream hobby neither will it be filling Wikidata with items, those are special interests works made by idealists in whose faces you as Foundation have spit many times in the past years). Don't ever push a not ready programm on the projects, make it always opt-in, promise to keep the old structure alive (what you can afford with the millions and millions of money our work pushes in your pockets). Keeping this in mind the conflicts between WMF and volunteers will reduce what also should be the best for the work athmosphere of the paid staff.

I write this in the knowledge that you think you actually gover our movement and you won't give a shit about anything that challanges your preassumptions.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Julius1990[edit]

3 and 4, for details see above

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Mautpreller[edit]

Response by Mautpreller 20:17, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mautpreller's response to the critical question[edit]

I don't like the question because of its wording ("health" should not be applied to communities, and a buzzword like "welcoming" would not have been my choice. Nevertheless, the question is valid. I think the possibilities of participation, co-determination anmd co-decision in communities should be strengthened. At the moment, the influence of communities upon WMF decisions is zero. This will not work. No "sustainable movement" can be built if the movement members cannot influence WMF decisions, most particularly in an open project.

Mautpreller's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach three is reasonable since it might enhance the scope of the communities and their members. I am not sympathetic to approaches one and two. I don't like this language of "welcomimg and supportive etc." which doesn't seem to say anything substantial. Approach five is harmful, because of preventing people to participate instead of inciting them to participate.

My approach is number seven: Give the communities real solid rights in the government of the Wikimedia Foundation. You can be sure this is a step to sustainability.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

116.109.58.192[edit]

Response by 116.109.58.192 20:36, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

116.109.58.192's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

116.109.58.192's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Giudark[edit]

Response by Giudark 23:08, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Giudark's response to the critical question[edit]

(Detto per "Reach" ma riguarda anche questo) Bisogna dare un senso di progressione agli utenti che vogliono partecipare, ricompensarli con punteggi e livelli che sbloccano nuove funzionalità

Machine translation; please help improve
(Ditto for "Reach" but far too) should give a sense of progression to users who want to participate, reward them with scores and levels that unlock new features

Giudark's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

forse 5 ... 7: un sistema di punteggi che invogli ad effettuare sempre nuove modifiche

Machine translation; please help improve
maybe 5 ... 7: a scoring system that makes you want to always make new changes

Vejlefjord[edit]

Response by Vejlefjord 23:28, 29 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Vejlefjord's response to the critical question[edit]

  • Whittle down the 5M+ articles to whatever number adequate articles by removing uncited material
  • Require that people join Wikipedia to edit

Vejlefjord's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches One and Five

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Outlier59[edit]

Response by Outlier59 00:25, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Outlier59's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

5, 6

Instead of having separate author pages on Wikisource from people pages on Wikipedia, have one list of author's works the same on both pages.

@Outlier59: And also for Commons, meta, etc.? LuisV (WMF) (talk) 00:43, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

RikardT[edit]

Response by RikardT 10:09, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

RikardT's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Perhaps I am of an older generation, but I have generally found Wikimedia/Wikipedia to be (1) accessible, (2) helpful and friendly and (3) providing well-researched information. I rely on it for an overview of a topic, though I may delve deeper into that topic if I need greater information. I certainly had not picked up on the issue(s) addressed in Approach One, which talks of harassment and gender gap.

RikardT's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

Approaches 4, 2 and 6 in that order, though 5 (improved automation tools) may have merit.


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Mathmensch[edit]

Response by Mathmensch 11:35, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mathmensch's response to the critical question[edit]

7 - Number seven

Mathmensch's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

From my experience in the German Wikipedia, it seems of utmost importance that administrators are obliged to follow the legal code of Wikimedia word by word, and are forbidden to invent their own rules just in order to silence a user unpleasant to the establishment. For example, I was permanently banished from the German Wikipedia for admitting not to know if any admins from the German WP were involved in paid editing; the desired response was apparently for me to say that I was 100% certain that they were not involved in such activities. For the details, see [1] (German)

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Lumos3[edit]

Response by Lumos3 15:22, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Lumos3's response to the critical question[edit]

Evangelical editors club - Recruit existing editors to a club which tries to recruit additional first time editors from within their social circles. WF could provide examples of elevator pitch scripts and lists of arguments. Set each member of the club a target of one new active editor a year. Give barnstars and praise for exceptional recruitment.

Ioan-Mihai Gale I[edit]

Response by Ioan-Mihai Gale I 16:30, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ioan-Mihai Gale I's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach five is optimum in this situation for myself. As I would like to take part in adding quality content across all platforms, I personally find it difficult to time manage proper wiki markup and categorisation. Also the lack of control over proper titling of articles is off putting.

Hello, User:Ioan-Mihai Gale I. :) I understand that you think approach 5 is the best answer to our question. Since you don't mention it in your suggested approaches, I wanted to just clarify - does approach 5 enter into your priorities along with 6 and 4? If so, where? (First, second, third?) Thanks! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:19, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ioan-Mihai Gale I's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach six and four.

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Gungniir Loruse[edit]

Response by Gungniir Loruse 17:31, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gungniir Loruse — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

...Я думаю, что 5

I think 5

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Julien Houle[edit]

Response by Julien Houle 18:29, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Julien Houle's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here… 5

Julien Houle's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here… 4,6

Hello, Julien Houle. :) I understand that you think approach 5 is the best answer to our question. Since you don't mention it in your suggested approaches, I wanted to just clarify - does approach 5 enter into your priorities along with 6 and 4? If so, where? (First, second, third?) Thanks! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:21, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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MrScoville[edit]

Response by MrScoville 18:45, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von MrScoville auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von MrScoville[edit]

1, 2, 6

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Atsme[edit]

Response by Atsme 18:57, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Atsme's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach one - absolutely, positively a MUST. There is a serious ongoing issue regarding conflicts between volunteers and COI editors. Not all COI editors are problematic and there also unpaid advocacies we must add to this mix. I have found that for the most part, COI editors are happy to do the right thing and will strive for accuracy in articles from a NPOV. Many problems arises because of anonymity and one would have to be awfully naive to think it doesn't. There is a limit to AGF when PAG violations and edits protected by tag teams control an article or suites of articles. Those editors who insist on pushing a particular POV and who are more concerned about creating the right image for their client, employer or advocacy group often create all kinds of havoc in the community. It's one of the reasons ArbCom and AN/I is inundated with issues. The bigger cost to WP is the loss of trust among its readers, and a loss of many GF editors who see themselves as true volunteers fighting battles they can never win because they can't afford the time that goes into it. It is a growing concern to editor retention, and the ambiguity in ToU and PAGs is not helping. Approach three - another absolute. Transparency is essential. Approach five - a given. Approach six - oversimplification is dangerous. The community currently suffers the repercussions of ambiguity and vagueness.

Atsme's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach seven: remove ambiguity from current policies and eliminate policies that contradict other policies, such as WP:IAR. Work harder at enforcing PAGs. It is far too easy for a small team of editors to change current PAGs to better suit their POV. And while RfCs are not supposed to be a vote count, they often are whether intentional or not.

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Monsoonique[edit]

Response by Monsoonique 21:21, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Monsoonique's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach one

Monsoonique's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I agree with all Approaches. However, I know several literate people who have tried authoring on Wikipedia only to be bombarded with missing Citation alerts. Their page has to endure a derogatory banner, sometimes for years as they give up initially before finding help with tracking news references. If a new author writes good descriptive prose that is informative perhaps the citation protocols can be relaxed. Or some "back-end" alerts issued that don't make them look incompetent.

There ought to be a way to filter a good piece of writing which lacks detailed citations but qualifies for presentation to the readership without being flagged with embarrassing banners.

Perhaps a more gentle "Editing in Progress" banner could appear along with the exhortation to experienced editors to help with missing references. In this regard maybe there could be a "Town Square" where newbie editors go to find researchers willing to look up and install citations for them.

Wikipedia is a valuable contribution to the world. I have a permanent $3.00 a month contribution set up in my bank account that will be there for as long as I live. It's not much but if everyone did that we would have much more money for promoting Wikipedia to the Facebook generation.

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Strainu[edit]

Response by Strainu 21:38, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Strainu's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach 6

Strainu's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 6, 2, 5

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Wugapodes[edit]

Response by Wugapodes 22:42, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wugapodes's response to the critical question[edit]

I believe all of them are important ways to improve community, however I feel what harms health and growth is issues of harrasment and systemic gaps in coverage. While the English Wikipedia says don't bite the newbies, the ways in which we go about routine tasks, to the uninitiated, can seem very off-putting. Further, and the "thank" function was a good step in this, recognition of good contributions on the microscale is necessary to give new editors models and things to strive for as well as preventing burn-out from more experienced editors.

Wugapodes's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches one and two are my top choices in that order.

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Commao[edit]

Response by Commao 22:44, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Commao kullanıcısının kritik soruya yanıtı[edit]

yaklaşım be

Approach five

Monna Ry[edit]

Response by Monna Ry 23:54, 30 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Monna Ry's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here… Yes, I´m sitting with my 2500 books with original letters and correcting in Wiki something important(...) suddenly someone cuts it off, because it is "HIS ARTICLE"....gush... and then the discussion...my good...I could present the book, the edition, date, the page...

But in generell I´m happy that they talk together and it is very good, that they are watching the pages.

Monna Ry's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

Still I have problems to manage a new page.....if that would be easier, I would write more..

Approach seven:

Important introduce technical improvements, such as an immediate synchronous translation of the article into other languages and their direct publication in the Internet of all countries. It is irritating for everybody to read different the context in German and English. It is irritating to read texts with different content in different languages.

The ideal connecting the product through an imprint line (INDEX). A line appears with information to a keyword in the actual article.

Wikipedea should be even more accurately, for example in music, the cast members, more Fotos, more videos.

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Salix alba[edit]

This links into a discussion currently at User_talk:Jimbo_Wales. Peter Damian added "For example by making it easier for specialists to work on the project." Getting academics to contribute to wikipedia has always been difficult and they often need special care to make sure they understand the culture and are not deterred by it. Devoting some foundation resources to assisting academics could have great benefit is improving the encyclopedia. --Salix alba (talk) 00:33, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Kenavologos[edit]

Response by Kenavologos 01:32, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Top 2-3 de Kenavologos (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

5, 6, 2

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

CrisBCT[edit]

Response by CrisBCT 05:19, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

CrisBCT's response to the critical question[edit]

I don't know why Wikimedia is entering this area. There seem to be thousands of sites eager to create communities. Why waste time and resources competing with so many? is it even in our core area?

Hi, User:CrisBCT. :) Wikimedia isn't "entering" this area - it already has communities. :) It has since the first two people arrived to work on the project. They have long been at the core of the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." Our concern is making sure that our communities of volunteers remain supportive and healthy so that people can be empowered and engaged. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

CrisBCT's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

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MontanaShepherdess[edit]

Response by MontanaShepherdess 05:51, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

MontanaShepherdess's response to the critical question[edit]

I like 2, 3, and 5

Bluescityleon2000[edit]

Approach Two sounds good. Make Clarity a priority and as an Idea... reachout is important / making better articles...ie if an article is historical... tell a story with historical context..ie Jamestown was North America's first permanent English settlement in 1607 but had to be moved because to many people relied on Indians to grow food and refused to recognise and allow for winter and prepare ahead of time which lead to cannibalism.

Slowtony[edit]

Response by Slowtony 07:38, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Slowtony's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikimedia Foundation should consistently work to increase social connections among wiki contributors and to support active mentorship within each wiki community and project. The qualities that facilitate both social connections and helpful mentorship will in themselves create communities that are more welcoming to ethnic and gender diversity.

Slowtony's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two: Communities themselves need some mentorship to help increase their outreach to potential contributors. This includes outreach on social media, subject-specific forums, relevant online groups, and to external (off-Internet) sources, such as people who can be reached by existing contributors using simple print-ready flyers and How-To sheets.

Approach three: In connecting its communities, Wikimedia affiliates, and wiki kindred spirits, the Wikimedia Foundation needs to promote the culture of collaboration that creates a true community. It also needs to urge each community to find ways to reduce barriers to entry and to facilitate contributions from people who have strong topic knowledge but lower levels of technical skill or understanding of the community culture. In the days of USENET, you just started typing your wild prose on your terminal. It is more forbidding to become a wiki contributor, even though it is actually quite easy. There is wide applicability of the wiki concept and the wiki platform(s) to small local areas of both geographic and topical interest. Involving people who can use the concept and platforms is the challenge. The LocalWiki project has particular promise in this regard. Its methods and platform deserve study. Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

PNLL[edit]

Response by PNLL 08:59, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de PNLL à la question critique[edit]

...répondez ici...

Top 2-3 de PNLL (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

3-6-5

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Ricklaman[edit]

Response by Ricklaman 10:15, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ricklaman's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Ricklaman's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two

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High-storian[edit]

Response by High-storian 11:41, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

High-storian's response to the critical question[edit]

Wow. I'd say my first response is to see my response to "Reach". IMHO, the order you're asking these questions is backwards. To increase your "Reach", you must improve the quality of the product you're offering. To do that, you must (re)build your community to replace the hostile environment you developed during the bad old years with a positive, cooperative community that you started with and originally envisioned. As for which approach to take, easy: All of the above and then more! Community is your biggest weakness, right now. You need to focus on that, first, then the rest will follow.

High-storian's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches one and two are no-brainer obvious top priorities. As long as you have harasment, you will have a hostile environment, and you will drive away the very users you want here.

Approaches three and four seem to express the same thing with different words. It's basically the same underlying idea.

Approaches five and six are also the same idea in different words.

My vote's for Approaches One through Six ... which are actually 3 approaches, not six, and therefore meet the "2-3" votes permitted.

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X-Javier[edit]

Response by X-Javier 12:39, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de X-Javier à la question critique[edit]

"la meilleure manière pour la Fondation Wikimedia d'améliorer la santé, la croissance et la diversité de nos communautés" est de laisser les communautés s'autogérer.

Machine translation; please help improve
"the best way for the Wikimedia Foundation to improve the health, growth and diversity of our communities" is to let communities manage themselves.

Mozgotron[edit]

Response by Mozgotron 13:36, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mozgotron — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

Mozgotron — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

2, 4, 5.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

BlaueWunder[edit]

Response by BlaueWunder 14:31, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von BlaueWunder auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von BlaueWunder[edit]

Ansatz eins
Ansatz zwei
mein Ansatz: more transparency between the different levels of users, communities and Administration; less users´ "loss of rights" (e.g. threat of being blocked in case a user mentions the idea of legal support when he/she feels bullied or harrassed by their opponents), a more qualified administration that actually knows about the differences in the versions in question during an edit war and understands them = s.th. like a qualified jury in terms of academic and interest-free judgement; a strict "Zero-tolerance-policy" regarding misbehavior of users and administrators that disregard a civilised and polite communication. I mean phenomena such as violation of wikiquette, personal attacks, and "de-facto-immunity" of higher ranking users in the interior hierarchy who behave like mini dictators, and conspiracy of user groups aiming at overpowering and intimidating others. It should be easy to develop tools or bots that can identify expressions that obviously break the rules and that can find and delete pictures that oppose the idea of a CHARITABLE, non -profit project. To give you an example: I am writing in English as I try to minimize the risk that certain users in the German Wikipedia might read and understand my critical suggestions and consequently plot actions against me. I have witnessed these procedures many times in smooth, clandestine operations which lead to harmful consequences or bans of the critical spirit. Misuse of power and illegitimate bans of users, hurtful speculations about being a "sock puppet" and a small chance of a fair treatment or "trial" in case of complaints or requests to check the adminitrative action are common practice, unfortunately - at least in the German Chapter. Collusive behaviour on the Meta-levels (Schiedsgericht, Sperrprüfung, Checkuser) and an intransparent collaboration between Wikimedia(.de) and Wikipedia and the other projects plus a detrimental, motivation-killing practice of ignoring written requests for support do exist. These things suggest ineffective communication or lack of interest for the individual needs of users. In short: There is an obvious need for qualifying the administrators in communicative skills (e. g. non-violent-language) and for teaching them the psychological implications of arbitary actions and licentious decisions; these measures should be supported by sanctions against editors that ignore these simple human necessities, e.g. "no-money-for-projects-held-by-reckless-bullies" or degrading administrators acting against these principles. There is also an urgent need to help users and administrators who spend a great deal of their day on the project, reducing their real-life encounters to a sometimes critically low level, thus increasing their need for acknowledgement, approval, positive feedback and self-efficacy only in virtual interactions. An automatic warning to quit editing when a certain level is reached might be a first step. Real-life training is the best way to practise a pieceful communication and see how people react in face-to-face-situations. The project´s develish aspects are its anonymity, the "facelessness", the uncontrollable jungle-like-structures, the immense advantages of those who are rich in terms of time they can spend (regardless of their factual knowledge) and the chance to invest their "time wealth" on networking. These factors oppose the idea of shared knowledge based on rputable sources.
Back to communicative skills:

Money for these trainings and well-qualified coaches is a good and noble investment.

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

HG Alvarez[edit]

Response by HG Alvarez 14:36, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de HG Alvarez a la pregunta crítica[edit]

Cre que la forma de lograr esto es simplificando las herramientas de edición de Wikimedia. Si bien ultimamente se ha simplificado mucho con la creación del editor gráfico para Wikipedia, creo que todavía falta bastante para decir que los proyectos de Wikimedia son accesibles para todos. Se deben simplificar aún más las herramientas de edición, poniendo todas las opciones de edición a la vista de todos. Por otro lado se debería alentar a las mujeres a editar en proyectos de Wikimedia. Es sabido que la mayoría de los editores de los proyectos de Wikimedia somos varones. Entonces habría que crear más campañas para reducir la brecha de gńero en Wikimedia cómo la que se realizó el año pasado. Volviendo al tema de simplificar los editores me parece que se debiera llevar el editor gráfico de Wikipedia a la aplicación móvil. Además se deberían crear aplicaciones móviles para los otros proyectos de Wikimedia cómo wikicionario, wikilibros, etc.

Machine translation; please help improve
I believes that the way to accomplish this is to simplify the editing tools of Wikimedia. Although lately it has greatly simplified the creation of the graphical editor to Wikipedia, I think that there is still enough to say that the Wikimedia projects are accessible to all. It should further simplify the editing tools, putting all the editing options to view. On the other hand it should encourage women to edit Wikimedia projects. It is known that most editors Wikimedia projects are males. Then we should create more campaigns to reduce the gender gap in Wikimedia how that was done last year. Turning to simplify the editors that I think should lead the graphic editor of Wikipedia to mobile application. Furthermore, should create mobile applications for other Wikimedia projects such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, etc.

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de HG Alvarez[edit]

Los enfoques que más me gustan son el primero, el quinto y el sexto.

Machine translation; please help improve
Approaches that I like are the first, fifth and sixth.

Darmokand[edit]

Response by Darmokand 15:53, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Darmokand's response to the critical question[edit]

Likes others have said, Wikipedia is drowning in red-tape. We aren't an agile startup anymore, we're a bloated behemoth. We need a lean and agile Xerox Parc, a place where our admins have greater freedom to try out exciting new goals and interesting new workflows - all without disrupting our existing services.

  • Per SVentura (WMF) "Lower the threshold for actual contributions. Make contributing to the projects easier, value small contributions and make contributing less time/effort intensive (through micro-edits, edit suggestions mechanisms. Make contributing to the projects *fun* and rewarding"
  • Per Slowking4 "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."
  • Per WereSpielChequers: "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.
  • Per SSneg: "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"
    "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.
  • Per Milimetric (WMF): 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.
  • Per Ejegg "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 without the pressure of the main projects? The WMF could host wikis for cities / towns / regions.
  • Per Pengo "Where's the community for people who read Wikipedia, but don't (yet) edit? There's a huge Wikipedia community on reddit: /r/wikipedia (144,354 subscribers). Just people sharing interesting pages. But there isn't anything like that on Wikipedia itself. Here you have to be editing or at least asking questions to be part of the community. If you want to bring people into the community, give a way for people join it while they're still just readers. Right now there's no practical reason even to sign up for an account unless you're actually editing. Dedicate more space on front pages to what readers say they're interested in instead of what editors think they should be interested in and get readers participating with small actions such as publicly "liking" or "sharing" a page."

Per Zedshort: "I have made the suggestion of an “Ask a question, get and answer” feature that would draw in a large body of educators that would improve the WP population demographics."

Darmokand's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach six: Simplify policies and processes for building communities and wikis.

Per others, WMF desperately needs more community-building and easy wiki-creation. Reddit has 800,000 communities, Wikia has 300,000 communities. Here at WMF, we only have a few hundred. There should be safe spaces where experienced mods and new recruits can work together to create whole new "sub-wikis", just like "subreddits". Some can specialize in civility towards editors, while others could specialize in creating safe spaces (like /r/TwoXChromosomes on reddit).

Simplify the policies and processes for building new communities and wikis. Do that, and the community itself will find ways to do accomplish the other goals.


Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Terry Bollinger[edit]

Response by Terry Bollinger 16:54, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Terry Bollinger's response to the critical question[edit]

The quality of inputs to Wikipedia depends critically on how well its incentive structure encourages deep experts in a field to contribute knowledge that is unavailable to others. Wikipedia' traditional incentive strategy, however, in effect focuses on rewarding "whoever is best at not getting openly angry." Since deep experts in any field tend to have a very hard time not getting angry at people who edit their inputs without any real understanding of that topic, this "no open anger" policy can too easily encourage a form of trolling from people who actually enjoy making experts angry. All a Wikipedia anger troll has to do to have fun is make changes that they know in advance will be viewed as wrong or offensive by their selected deep-expertise target, and then respond very calmly to the resulting outbursts of anger.

A skilled Wikipedia anger troll can not only drive away deep experts from ever again adding to or participating in Wikipedia, but can do so in a fashion where they are actively rewarded by the Wikipedia for their "moderation" in dealing with "difficult" people. The reality is actually the opposite: An anger troll will generally be very aware that they are driving away experts instead of bringing them in, and will take delight in doing so because it makes their position within Wikipedia stronger.

Mathematics, due to some critical early leadership, is an exception. Deep mathematical expertise seems to be rewarded well in Wikipedia. The difficulty in that topic is that the resulting articles are so controlled by deep experts that for the most part, any attempt by a contributor to provide intuitive or tutorial support, in addition but not replacing mathematical precision, tends to be edited out over time. Consequently, for most any even moderately advanced mathematical topic, Wikipedia has in general become one of the worst places to look for help. Other sources such as Khan Academy and Stack Exchange are hugely more helpful in most cases for anyone interested in mathematical topics they do not already know in detail. For mathematics, Wikipedia has in effect become a reference book written for and useful to only people who are already experts.

Terry Bollinger's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Wikipedia needs to devise an put into place a fairly drastic change in how it encourages inputs and editing from deep subject matter. The new systems needs to be based on something close to the one used in Stack Exchange, where there is a voting system that allows both interested readers and true subject matter experts to receive support and encouragement for good answers. A critical part of this incentive is that contributors receive votes and encouragement not for how they behave in Wikipedia, but for how an audience far broader than just editors reacts to an judges the expertise of what they have entered. As with Stack Exchange, competition would need to be allowed, with highest-rated answers becoming the ones shown at top "authoritative" level.

Drastically updating the Wikipedia incentive structure in this way would also reduce the risk of entire topic areas such as Mathematics degenerating into unreadable compendiums of "expertise only for experts," since the broader voting would include people who approve of the quality of the articles because the articles helped them understand a topic they were trying to find information about.

Finally, strong incentives for good references could be added into the structure, much as in academic publishing. If anything, having experts in areas contribute good references would result in much better attribution in general.

The details of creating a per-contributor, voting-based system for Wikipedia would be complicated, particularly since it would need to work at multiple levels, from entire articles to much smaller pieces of articles. Also, Stack Exchange incentive structures can go south also, turning into cliques of bogus expertise that real experts avoid like the plague. On that point the moderating editing forces of Wikipedia would continue to play a vital role in keeping areas "attached" to accepted experts.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Rdelre[edit]

Response by Rdelre 17:40, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rdelre's response to the critical question[edit]

Anche se contribuisco da dieci anni compiuti a wikipedia, non ho mai partecipato alle attività sociali e ho difficoltà anche a partecipare al bar. Il fatto è che partecipare fisicamente a una riunione o assemblea è costoso e complicato per chi lavora e ha famiglia; partecipare a discussioni tipo "bar" con sconosciuti, d'altra parte, è poco attraente. Incentivare legami di conoscenza tramite Internet favorisce la voglia di sentirsi parte di un movimento. Bisogna anche strutturare diversamente le discussioni tipo "bar" (in modo più simile a un vero e proprio forum) e coprire meglio le esigenze delle comunità linguistiche.

Machine translation; please help improve
Although I contribute ten years old in wikipedia, I never participated in social activities and have difficulty even to participate in the Village Pump. The fact is that physically attend a meeting or assembly is expensive and complicated for those who work and family; participate in discussions like "Village Pump" with strangers, on the other hand, is unattractive. Foster ties of knowledge via the Internet favors the desire to feel part of a movement.
It should also be structured differently threads like "Village Pump" (more like a genuine forum) and cover the needs of linguistic communities.

Rdelre's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approccio due (2) - Approccio tre (3)

Nnemo[edit]

Response by Nnemo 17:41, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Nnemo's response to the critical question[edit]

Approaches One, Two, Three, Five and Six. And stop smacking / insulting / blocking / banning / censoring contributors.

Nnemo's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches One, Two, Three. And see previous section.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Gfombell[edit]

Response by Gfombell 18:32, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gfombell's response to the critical question[edit]

My alternative suggestion is to engage more with schools, colleges, universities, public labs, etc. - possibly with the help of local Wikimedia associations - to get commitment for Wikimedia contribution: making a number of modifications (language correction or more significant) could be a homework, publishing a summary of the results of a research project in the appropriate(s) article(s) could be a requirement for a qualification, etc. I can imagine a mandatory appendix to thesis: relevant modifications to Wikipedia articles. Rationale: (1) you use it, give something in return. (2) you used public resources for your project, share the outcomes . (3) provide visibility and understanding to your work and to your field.

Target is to develop communities in these structures, with volunteers within the students, teachers and researchers and the managing director as sponsor.

One first step could be to develop a solution like user group categories corresponding to existing structure, helping identifying current and previous members, a bit like social network do. E.g. Category:Professor at XYZ High School. That would help identifying best candidates for pilot projects, where a team would be easy to build.

Gfombell's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • approach two
  • approach five

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Sj[edit]

Response by Sj 23:06, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sj's response to the critical question[edit]

steps needed to answer this second question: scroll five times (to get past a long TOC), click, scroll, click, scroll to get to the textarea.

The insertion of "Go to next topic area (Knowledge)" in each and every person's answers just looks like a wiki-formatting bug; it's not clear why it is there, and isn't very helpful; though it does (awkwardly) allow for clicking through to the next section after only five scrolls, rather than having to go back to the previous pages.

If wikimedia can't find a way to make this enormously public call for participation user-friendly, it does not feel welcoming, open, or healthy to me. I can't even imagine that my answers are going to be helpful, considering how un-refactorable and messy the resulting text is.

And if this kind of wiki-formatting construct* is allowed to persist after a week and more of the survey being up, that doesn't make me feel confident that this is the right place to engage in collaborative text editing.

'harassment', 'program support', 'transparency', 'alignment', 'automation', 'policies' are all very very very distant nth priorities, compared to being able to efficiently handle things like running a survey, or inviting hundreds of people to edit simple texts together. Consider addressing the basic problem that if one wants to invite ten friends to edit a document together, etherpad and similar are 5x more effective and google docs is 20x more effective and instantly gratifying, including everything from one-click logins using existing credentials to the absence of edit conflicts to simple highlight-annotation for comments.

Hi, User:Sj. I'm sorry it feels like an error for you. It was very deliberately adopted as the best method we could come up with using existing technology to handle the complexity of questions, the need to translate material, the expected traffic, and the desire not to segregate people into different pages with their answers (by language). The insertion serves exactly the purpose you intuit - to allow people to click through to the next section. The need to have that text, too, translated keeps it awkward. The process won't hamper our reviewing responses. I thank you for your feedback. :) It sounds like your feel there's a strong need to focus on improving collaborative editing (I believe the VE team is exploring options) and ease of access. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Maggie, so nice to hear from you, and thanks for the reply. I sympathize with the simultaneous considerations. If I hadn't taken a break from editing wikis and meta in particular for 5 months, I might not have reacted the way I did -- I've implemented some of these techniques myself in the past. But as a result I would have missed experiencing how awkward this must be like for most people.

This sort of collaboration is central to what the projects are for, especially expanding beyond large monolingual communities. If there isn't yet a better way to accomplish this task, addressing this gap should take precedence over the 'nice to haves' suggested as answers to this question.

I'm a fan of what the VE team has done, and know that they think about things like integrating etherpad functionality into VE itself. But I'm not sure that "improving collaborative editing and ease of access" really gets at my suggestion. I'm saying that the very things you would need to conduct this strategic survey more smoothly are similar to things that communities of every size need within the Wikiverse, to engage one another. And that by not building tools and affordances to support this, you're allowing a central barrier to community growth to persist.

At the tool level, lot of basic things have to be missing for us to need to conduct public strategizing in this piecemeal and haphazard way:

  • Forms and polls are poorly supported, on wiki and via partner sites.
    Wikiforms aren't working. (Leading to the template-filled textarea). For instance, we've never added to core any of the many extensions that allow integrating edit-boxes and textareas directly into a rendered wikipage.
    It's too hard to create custom pageflows, such as popout windows that close on save, or navigation overlays.
  • Translation is a central need and service, but not well integrated, and 'keeps things awkward'.
    Common translation tools drastically limit what sorts of wiki pages one can build or maintain.
    A lack of discussion tools that might allow individual comments to be tagged with their own language type, leads to overuse of sections
  • No new tools have been developed to support brainstorming or collaborating at the scale of hundreds of people, for a decade.
    Some have given up entirely on public refactoring. This reverts to thousands of one-to-one discussions with any summarization happening by a small closed group
    Scrolling and navigating long pages isn't working, especially when there is no sectional hierarchy to inform a usable TOC.

Then there are the things that may be on the future VE roadmap — but that I think need lots of fast, crude experiments.

  • Spreadsheet integration just doesn't exist in any shape or form. So there's no way to take simple structured data and drop it into a large table.
  • Simultaneous editing doesn't exist, making it harder for dozens of people to work together on a complex page without edit conflics.
  • Highlight annotation doesn't exist in any form. So even short comments that would work best in that format have to be broken out as long standalone comments with their own sections.

At the organizational level, this was set up in a way that seems to require hundreds of hours of staff response, review, and refactoring - in part because it creates a highly dissipated spray of input with no obvious way for the commentators to help cluster & organize. That's one-time effort that can never be reused. No similar amount of time seems to have been spent developing related tools that would make any such effort faster or smoother in the future. While a community refactoring effort can highlight the attention and focus of a few superusers, I'm not sure any will turn up here, both reducing the depth of thought you'll get from any one person and reducing the sense of belonging generated by taking part in the process. [cf. the 2009 consultation] SJ talk  00:04, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SJ, thanks for bringing to light the importance of some of the work we have ahead of us. We are also excited about these features and others, which we believe will be transformational. I want to share with you that the Editing department sees VisualEditor is a platform more than a standalone product. By this I mean, VisualEditor allows us to accomplish many things that were far more difficult to accomplish with the Wikitext editor, usually due to UX constraints not implementation ones. Major feature enhancements have been stalled somewhat while the product has been moved out of beta and deployed more broadly. As VisualEditor is being brought to more production environments and featured the default experience on our projects, the team is starting to transition toward adding major features again.Trevor Parscal (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sj's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

See above.

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Ghosts&empties[edit]

Response by Ghosts&empties 01:31, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ghosts&empties's response to the critical question[edit]

Make the user interface easy to use and attractive

Ghosts&empties's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

In order of descending priority: 5, 2, 4

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Sone asha[edit]

Response by Sone asha 01:44, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sone asha's response to the critical question[edit]

I think there should be forums and comments to discuss before actually publishing

Sone asha's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

.1, 4, 3

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174.21.85.39[edit]

Response by 174.21.85.39 01:51, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

174.21.85.39's response to the critical question[edit]

Adopt existing COC and best practices, defer to experts who have done key research in this area like Amanda Menking (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Women_and_Wikipedia)

174.21.85.39's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach One Approach Two

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ImperfectlyInformed[edit]

Response by ImperfectlyInformed 02:03, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ImperfectlyInformed's response to the critical question[edit]

We need to monitor better how newbies are treated (revision scoring is an important step towards that), improve and simplify our processes, and make the workflow less arcane (Visual Editor is an important step there).

ImperfectlyInformed's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

We need to do a better job of reaching out in "real-life" by hosting more events and tracking the impact of those events.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Personman[edit]

Response by Personman 03:16, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Personman's response to the critical question[edit]

Making sure all users are treated with respect is an important first step. Beyond that, building processes that encourage (or at least, that no longer harshly discourage) new users to make real contributions without first understanding the vast complexity of the current policy tangle is extremely important. At the moment, we implicitly exclude those who do not have the time, the motivation, or the mental frameworks to operate effectively under these policies. Of course those policies exist for a reason, and various standards (of quality, impartiality, etc) must continue to be met, but there is a lot of room for creating new channels that let less enfranchised users get the meat of their contribution, suggestion, or complaint effectively incorporated into the project without the overhead. If we want to improve diversity, the onus is on us to stop creating systems that discourage people who aren't like us from participating.

Personman's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach one is a very important baseline, and should be a top priority. Approach six is a necessary next step once that baseline has been established.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Jonnymoon96[edit]

Response by Jonnymoon96 03:24, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jonnymoon96's response to the critical question[edit]

I think having a nondiscrimination policy for everyone especially protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity are a good start.

Jonnymoon96's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

i support approach two, i support approach five, and i support approach six

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Mr. Magoo and McBarker[edit]

Response by Mr. Magoo and McBarker 09:00, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mr. Magoo and McBarker's response to the critical question[edit]

About the gender gap matter: I think most editors are male because males are more likely to be aggressive. When they see something they disagree with they are more likely to react aggressively. That's pretty much why I became an editor and continue to edit. In addition I read an article which said that women on the "spectrum" exhibit less repetitive behavior. I see many editors who admit themselves that they are on the spectrum, and I see many others who most likely just are on the spectrum. I mean Wikipedia is famous for its Pokemon articles. What are Pokemon fans famous for? I'll leave that up to you. (Just joking!)

But what I would do is improve the talking function. Currently it's a mess when multiple people discuss. Edit conflicts galore. People seem to avoid talk pages. I mean just look at this thing I'm writing this on. What is this? You could really make the talk pages seem like regular discussion forums. I personally don't mind the talk pages as they are as they allow for experimentation, but I think to newcomers it looks just like editing and they don't want to edit something without a good reason. Maybe have two sections for every talk page. One is the old talk page and the other is a noticeboard where people can post forum-style posts. I don't know. People seem put off by the talk pages.

Mr. Magoo and McBarker's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

6, 5

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

АКК-Корд[edit]

Response by АКК-Корд 09:08, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

АКК-Корд — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...Создать инструмент интегрирующий тематически-информационную часть с форумом, с возможностью интеграции со сторонними ресурсами.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Create a tool integrating thematically-information part with a forum, with the ability to integrate with third-party resources.

АКК-Корд — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

...Варианты 2, 3, 4

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Jef antenne[edit]

Response by Jef antenne 09:13, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jef antenne's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

...hier schrijven...

Jef antenne's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

2-5-1

Ga naar het volgende onderwerpsgebied (Kennis)

Generator[edit]

Response by Generator 10:18, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Generator's response to the critical question[edit]

This is importand: "Approach One - Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment for contributors and editors."


Generator's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

X:: black ::X[edit]

Response by X:: black ::X 14:57, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von X:: black ::X[edit]

Priority No. 1: Approach 5,
Priority No. 2: Approach 4.

Much lesser important but also relevant, apporach 3.

Amanouz[edit]

Response by Amanouz 15:26, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Amanouz's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach "two" 2: really important

Approach "five" 5: related to approach 2 and equally as important (in my point of view). If contributing looks too complicated Wikimadia stands to lose contributions from people who have a lot to give but are daunted by a complicated process.

Amanouz's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

The french MOOC that was set up to learn how to edit in wikipedia is a great example and a good start of approach 2, but should be available in other languages. (Thanks to the people responsible for the MOOC by the way)

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Vinckie[edit]

Response by Vinckie 15:50, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Vinckie à la question critique[edit]

Approche 1

Top 2-3 de Vinckie (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

Approche 2 Approche 5

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Pulsar[edit]

Response by Pulsar 16:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Pulsar à la question critique[edit]

...1 2 3...

Top 2-3 de Pulsar (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

...répondez ici...

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Chewbacadrunk[edit]

Response by Chewbacadrunk 21:12, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Chewbacadrunk's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach seven: make the interface and editing more casual-friendly or make it not look like rocket science for someone who doesn´t know much about computers.

@Chewbacadrunk: Thanks for your feedback! Any suggestions for that beyond Visual Editor? LuisV (WMF) (talk) 00:38, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Chewbacadrunk's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two and approach five

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Israel brujan marte[edit]

Response by Israel brujan marte 21:16, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de Israel brujan marte a la pregunta crítica[edit]

...escriba aquí...

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Israel brujan marte (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

...escriba aquí...

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

Itu[edit]

Response by Itu 22:24, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Itu auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

  • Abbau des Wikimedia-Wasserkopfes. Die Dynamik sinnfreier Geldvergeudung umgehend stoppen und auf das notwendige Minimum zurückfahren.
  • Die Kontrolle über Finanzmittel umgehend an die Community zurückgeben. Kein Regieren mit Finanzmittel unabhängig von der Community.

--

  • Decrease of the wikimedia hydrocephalus. Stop dynamics of useless waste of money, descend to the necessary minimum.
  • Immediately give control back to the community. No governing with money independent of the community.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Itu[edit]

...hier schreiben...

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Gap9551[edit]

Response by Gap9551 00:48, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gap9551's response to the critical question[edit]

Primarily focus on retaining new and existing editors. Behavior that may scare away other editors needs to be strongly discouraged. Reversions should be properly explained in edit summaries, preferably referring to guidelines. Harassment, personal attacks, etc. should more often have consequences, such as official warning and eventually a temporary block.

Gap9551's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1 and 5.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

make wikipedia easier for volunteers to use. right now it is set up for people who are very knowledgeable about computers. i don't have the knowledge that i feel the rest of the volunteers have. it seems to me that the gap is betweens those who can easily maneuver through and those who struggle to figure out the system. again, simplify so i know how to do the work with easy directions. my guess is many perspective volunteers just give up.

MikeLacey[edit]

Response by MikeLacey 08:29, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

MikeLacey's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

MikeLacey's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 2

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Miguel Andrade[edit]

Response by Miguel Andrade 08:43, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Miguel Andrade's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Miguel Andrade's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2 4 1

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GerhardSchuhmacher[edit]

Response by GerhardSchuhmacher 09:00, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von GerhardSchuhmacher auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

(2), (6)

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von GerhardSchuhmacher[edit]

Regionale Gruppen (in Deutschland anhand von Landkreisen) initiieren, die die Artikelstruktur (z.B. Vernetzung) in den jeweiliegen Bereichen und die Artikel selbst qualitativ verbessern, Lücken füllen.

Initiate regional groups (in Germany based on counties), to improve the article structure (for example, cross-linking) in the respective areas and improve the article itself, and fill gaps.

Response by 82.131.69.222[edit]

82.131.69.222's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

--Brrr-NO (talk) 09:22, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

82.131.69.222's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

5, 1 and 2.

I have a lot of knowledge and is good educated (spescially history, geography/culture, christianity and religion) to find the answers in my language. I am afraid to write anything at all because I feel I get harrasments from some computernerds that only correct me in not get inn all this tecnically tools corectly. They gets up in rank on pushing new people, while I can not get a mentor to help and support me. I fear to write of that reasson - even if a lot I see on Wikipedia is wrong. I also strugle to download pictures - but nobody in Norway help me. When I see wrong information do I start a discussion, but none with branch knowledge in the subject is inteested to look into it. They only correct me on not sign my name - and do easy task instead, like write in 2 more records to a singer. While she is listed in Norway to be living in Nashville with a American artist. Only foult is that this artist is mooved to a southern state, and have a other spource - his homepage and english Wikipedia. I have taken it up in discussion, and nobody react English Wikipedia is not better, Even one of the most important issues in American history is wrong. Look at the homepage to the 2 prescident Bush, and you will see they are listed with same number as prescident!!!!!!!!!!!!! How can this pass away for so many years? --82.131.69.222 09:12, 2 February 2016 (UTC) BRRR from Norway, living in Estonia--Brrr-NO (talk) 09:21, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Brrr-NO. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your ranking. I'm sorry to hear that your experiences have been so frustrating. :( The English Wikipedia has a "teahouse" where people are helpful to newcomers at en:WP:Teahouse. If you need help on English Wikipedia, you may be able to get it there. One of the Norwegian projects has a similar page, at no:Wikipedia:Nybegynnerforum. I took a look at the two George Bush articles on English Wikipedia - en:George H. W. Bush, en:George W. Bush. The numbers seem to be okay. Maybe I am missing the problem? Or maybe you are seeing where the father was 43rd Vice President, while the son was 43rd president? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Arjunaraoc[edit]

Response by Arjunaraoc 10:44, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Arjunaraoc's response to the critical question[edit]

Communities so far consist of individuals interested in contributing. GLAM was one attempt to bring in contributors from Organisations. Some chapters tried to run wikipedia awareness sessions at organisations with limited success. Education Foundation also did some work with students in Educational institutions. Learning from such initiatives, it will be useful to develop communities from Institutions/organisations in the not for profit sector. Examples: project from Indian government: http://vikaspedia.in/InDG ,Project from State government of Karnataka, https://kanaja.in/; Project from Not profit sector: http://www.indiawaterportal.org/ . By being the lead organisation for knowledge curation/dissemination, WMF may be able to grow its communities.

Arjunaraoc's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1)Partner with not for profit organisations engaged in knowledge sectors to increase contributions to wiki projects. 2)Partner with not for profit membership based institutions to increase contributions to Wiki projects. Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Slashme[edit]

Response by Slashme 12:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Slashme's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikipedia's communication tools are improving, but are still really difficult for new editors to understand. Also the efforts to make the initial communication that new editors get, while positive, have a way to go to make them feel welcome.

Slashme's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Approach one: We need to help editors to understand what the recipient of their messages will feel, and help to empower community members to point out and act against unfriendly editors.
  • Approach five: Automated communication tools are absolutely necessary for experienced editors to welcome and educate new editors, but we have to keep looking for ways to make these communications more understandable.
  • Approach six: We need to find ways to make our policies clearer and simpler, especially in terms of article content and editor conduct, but this has to be done by the community and can only be supported, not led by the WMF.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Maikek[edit]

Response by Maikek 13:23, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Maikek auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Obwohl ich hin und wieder mal meinen Senf zu einem Artikel dazugebe, habe ich noch nie sowas wie eine "Community" gesehen. Wer genau sind die? Und wo sind die? Was machen die? Gibt's da ein Forum oder so was?

Although I admit that every now and then I put my two cents in an article, I've never seen something like a "community". Who exactly are they? And where are they? What are they doing? Is there anywhere a forum or something?
Hello, User:Maikek. Our communities are everywhere. Every time at least two people gather to work on something or to discuss something, we have a community. Communities work together on articles, talk pages, noticeboards, and meetups. They gather on WikiProjects and collaborate on giving editathons. They are Wikimedians in all their areas of work. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:26, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Unsere Communitys sind überall. Jedes Mal, wenn mindestens zwei Menschen an etwas zusammen arbeiten oder etwas zu diskutieren, haben wir eine Community. Communitys arbeiten zusammen an Artikeln, auf Diskussionsseiten, auf Metaseiten und Treffpunkten. Sie versammeln sich auf WikiProjects und veranstalten gemeinsam Editathons. Sie sind Wikimedianer in all ihren Arbeitsbereichen. :)

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Maikek[edit]

siehe oben.

see above

JediLibrarian[edit]

Response by JediLibrarian 13:36, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

JediLibrarian's response to the critical question[edit]

5, 1, 2; in that order. A robust automated system to detect and retract vandalism would be quite welcome.

JediLibrarian's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Nov6[edit]

Response by Nov6 16:41, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Nov6 à la question critique[edit]

Approche 1. Il me parait fondamental de travailler sur cette thématique, cela permettra de lever certaines inhibitions et encouragera de nouveaux contributeurs.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Approach 1. It seems fundamental to me to work on this theme, it will remove inhibitions and encourage new contributors.

Top 2-3 de Nov6 (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

Il me paraitrait intéressant de créer une sorte d'école des contributeurs avec pour ceux qui souhaitent contribuer mais qui n'osent pas, ne savent pas faire, etc, la mise en place de tuteurs expérimentés qui peuvent, avant publication, émettre un avis bienveillant sur ce qui est écrit, conseiller, et faire découvrir les techniques nécessaires aux contributeurs. Peut être cela existe-t-il, auquel cas il faudrait le faire connaître mieux...

Machine translation; please help improve.
It would seem to me interesting to create a kind of school with contributors for those who want to help but do not dare, do not know how, etc, the establishment of experienced tutors who can, before publication, issue a benevolent view on what is written, counselor, and discover the techniques necessary to contributors. Maybe it does it exist, in which case it should be better-known ...

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Wiklol[edit]

Response by Wiklol 17:37, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wiklol's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Wiklol's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approche 2 Approche 3

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Der Chemiker von Oz[edit]

Response by Der Chemiker von Oz 18:00, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Der Chemiker von Oz auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Die beste Methode, mehr Leute dazu zu bringen wäre meiner Ansicht nach, das Bewusstsein zu steigern, dass man an der Wikipedia mitarbeiten kann, da das Vielen nicht bewusst ist.

I think the best method to bring more people into the Wikipedia is to remind people that they can work on Wikipedia, too; many just don't know that.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Der Chemiker von Oz[edit]

Ich wäre für Ansätze 2, 4 und 5.

I would like to see the approaches 2, 4 and 5 implemented.

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Amk1925[edit]

Response by Amk1925 19:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Amk1925 — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

Упрощение работы в собственном пространстве для последующего размещения подготовленных материалов в пространство Векипедии

Machine translation; please help improve
Simplification of creating content in its own space, for the subsequent placement of the prepared materials in Wikipedia's mainspace

Amk1925 — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Подход пятый: улучшить автоматические инструменты для снижения объёмов ручной работы при управлении содержанием и проектами.

[Approach 5]

B25es[edit]

Response by B25es 19:31, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de B25es (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

Hay que reconocer que existe un problema de género que va más allá de la brecha. Siendo malo que las editoras sean pocas, es mucho peor que muchas de ellas prefieran que no se sepa que son mujeres. Para mí es el dato más preocupante en ese aspecto.
En otro orden de cosas, las comunidades tienen peculiaridades y los proyectos también tienen peculiaridades. Lo que funciona en el proyecto en lengua XXX no funciona en el proyecto YYY. Por otro lado, lo que funciona en un país no funciona en otro, aunque sean de la misma lengua. Y cuando tienes un país con varias lenguas las cuales a su vez se usan en más de un país, esto puede ser el caos. Por eso creo que los proyectos deberían tener normas estandarizadas que sirvan para todos los lugares y todas las lenguas.
Esto choca con la visión de ciertas personas en los proyectos y en las comunidades. Hay gente que no entiende, por hablar de lo que vivo, que ni el castellano es la única lengua de España, ni España el único país donde se habla castellano.
Fuera del ámbito lingüístico, nos encontramos muchas veces que hay usuarios que virtualmente controlan un proyecto. Has de tener cuidado con no molestar a XYZ, porque tendrá consecuencias. Y eso te lo dicen los que participan en ese mismo proyecto. Se sabe que eso pasa, que es injusto; la explicación más frecuente es que XYZ edita mucho. Habría que plantearse la conveniencia de ese tipo de personas y lo que cuestan en términos de potenciales editores que abandonan.
Creo que las organizaciones afiliadas deben sobre todo facilitar que los wikimedistas se conozca, se encuentren en la vida real. Eso va a reducir mucho las fricciones. Lo he visto pasar más de una vez, que gente que se odia en el mundo virtual acaba entendiéndose en el mundo real. La interacción es importante, es difícil de conseguir, porque estamos dispersos por el mundo, pero es muy positiva.
Y, por favor, hagamos menos políticas y más sencillas. Es que explicar ciertas cosas a los novatos es un reto para ellos y para nosotros. B25es (talk) 19:31, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Machine translation; please help improve
Admittedly, there is a problem that goes beyond gender gap. The fact that there are few women editors is bad, but it is even much worse that many of them prefer not to be identified as women. For me it is the most worrying thing in that regard.
In another vein, communities have quirks and peculiarities as projects also do. What works in a project in language XXX, might not work in the same project in language YYY. Moreover, what works in one country does not work in another, even when they share the language. And when you have a country with several languages ​​which in turn are used in more than one country, it can be chaos. So I believe that projects should have standardized rules that serve all locations and all languages.
This clashes with the vision of some people in the projects and communities. Some people do not understand -talking about where I live- that neither is Spanish the only language of Spain, nor Spain is the only country where people speak Spanish.
Outside the linguistic aspect, we find many times that a few users virtually control a project. You have to be careful not to disturb XYZ, because it will have consequences. And those who tell you that are the same people involved in that project. We know that it happens, it's unfair; the most common explanation is that XYZ edits lot. It should be considered the appropriateness of such people and what they cost in terms of potential publishers who leave.
I think that affiliates should especially facilitate Wikimedians getting to know each other in real life. That will greatly reduce friction. I've seen it happen more than once, that people who show hatred in the virtual world just understand each other in the real world. Interaction is important, it is difficult to get, because we are scattered throughout the world, but it is very positive.
And please, do fewer politicies and more simple ones. Explaining certain things to newcomers is a challenge both for them and for us.

Spineas[edit]

Response by Spineas 20:52, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Spineas's response to the critical question[edit]

Fully develop and implement the visual editor so that new editors do not feel intimidated by wikimarkup, and include prompts throughout articles encouraging users to update them if they discover new information.

Spineas's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

5, 6, 2

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Sergey Bolshakov[edit]

Response by Sergey Bolshakov 21:06, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sergey Bolshakov — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Третий, второй, шестой

Third, second, sixth,

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Library Guy[edit]

Response by Library Guy 22:09, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Library Guy's response to the critical question[edit]

one

Library Guy's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

one five six

it should be easy for an editor to upgrade discussion on a topic to a broader basis if they feel it is needed; automatic editor notification and grace period for proposed bot work could avoid surprises; adherence to recognized standards helps

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Z1720[edit]

Response by Z1720 22:13, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Z1720's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach two. Wikipedia needs to appeal to more people. It seems like the only people who can be decision makers on Wikipedia (admins, ARBCOM, etc) are people who have been here for ten+ years. This has created an old boys club. New members need to feel like they can one day become these important roles too. Even if admin is not supposed to matter, there are still some new members who will think that it does and feeling excluded from those groups will not encourage them to stay.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

C. Trifle[edit]

Response by C. Trifle 22:18, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

C. Trifle's response to the critical question[edit]

...A suggestion: Improve or otherwise explain the translation of the English term "References" into Polish...

C. Trifle's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...Approach five and three

The idea of References translation is explained below:

The English word "References" does not have the same meaning as Polish "Przypisy". Probably the error was made at the very beginning of Wikipedia because it was difficult to find a proper word. It has not been corrected since then. As a result, most writers do not use "Przypisy" in Wikipedia in Polish so references are not often mentioned.

What is even more surprising is that the meaning of the singular form of the word "Przypis" is explained in Wikipedia. Although the meaning is similar to that of Note, the usage history in Polish has been different. "Przypisy" in Polish books were usually written by the translators or the editors of books. The usage of "przypis" by native users of Polish in their own texts was less common.

For example , let us look at page 5 of Adam Mickiewicz "Utwory Wybrane - Listy", Czytelnik, Warszawa 1957. You see 10 small numbers above some words on page 5. Each of these numbers is used to direct the reader to an explanatory note at the end of the text. Such a note is called "przypis" or "objaśnienie" (explanation). The text is a letter from Adam Mickiewicz to Józef Jeżewski. Did Adam Mickiewicz write the letter? Yes, he did. Did Adam write the "przypisy"? No, he didn't. Who wrote them? The editors did. Why? Because they wanted to provide information for the reader to make him/her able to understand the letter. What kind of information is there? Przypis one is indicated by (1) above the name like that: "Tomasz Jeżewski1". Number 1 directs you to another number 1 in front of a 60-word-long note (appr.) that tells you who Tomasz Jeżewski was. One can find number 2 above the number 1819. It corresponds to the second endnote which tells you what Adam Mickiewicz did in the year 1819. And so on, 19 notes after the first of about 70 letters. This makes a total of about 1400 notes. All of them were written by the editors, none by the poet. Perhaps about 20% of them contain some sort of bibliographic information. Some of them can take you to another page in the book. However, not a single one of them was written as "reference".

The word "reference" also known as "citation" that uniquely identifies a source of information according to the definition in Wikipedia has no exact equivalent in Polish. The closest term might be jargon "odnośnik" which definitely does not sound beautiful to a native Pole but it is used both on the web and in some dictionaries, so after hearing it the first reaction would be "what?". This is because "odnośnik" derives from "odnosić się" (refer to sth), but there is also a verb "odnosić" which literally means "to carry sth to the place/person it was taken from". In the end it would probably be understood as "exact bibliographic information on the text and author you refer to". The word "odsyłacz" has a similar meaning. "Lista źródeł" (List of sources) would not sound good because "references" are not "the author's sources of knowledge", so some people might take offence. If you say "źródła informacji" (information sources) people will think you mean spying. If the word "Przypisy" stays, it will always cause an immediate reaction "they want me to comment", e.g. after seeing a photo in an article on vacuum cleaners, you think "My Auntie had one like that", but you don't think "they want me to give the web address of the photo and the name of the guy who took it".

In conclusion, I think most people do not associate the word "Przypisy" with what is known as "References" in Wikipedia in English, so it should either be replaced or, if this is impossible, explained in a few words. A ready template for the "References" section in Polish should be available in each article with an example how to use it. Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Leveretth[edit]

Response by Leveretth 02:22, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Leveretth's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Leveretth's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach two

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Дмитрий Кошелев[edit]

Response by Дмитрий Кошелев 02:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Дмитрий Кошелев — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

  • Необходимо каким-то образом ограничить удаление страниц. Многих начинающих участников русского раздела отпугивает то, что создаваемые ими страницы почти мгновенно попадают под удаление. Часто причины удаления обоснованны, однако где начинающим участникам научиться правилам Википедии, как не на практике? А из-за удалений они не могут наработать практики. Поэтому необходима одна из следующих мер:
    • по результатам голосования страница не удаляется, а попадает для доработки в инкубатор. Спустя полгода либо переводится в основное пространство по результатам голосования, либо удаляется окончательно;
    • ограничить право номинирования на удаление, предоставив его опытным участникам (патрулирующим, администраторам);
    • ограничить количество номинаций на удаление для одного участника (например, не более 3-5 в месяц).
Machine translation; please help improve.
  • It is necessary to somehow limit the removal of pages. Many novice participants Russian section discourages that they create pages almost instantly fall under removal. Often the reasons for the removal is justified, however, where the novice participants learn the rules of Wikipedia, but in practice? And because of the distance they can not earn practices. Therefore, you need one of the following measures:
    • by a vote of the page is not removed, and falls for completion in the incubator. Six months later, or translated into the main space by a vote, or removed completely;
    • restrict the right to nominate for deletion, leaving his experienced members (patrolling, administrators);
    • limit the number of nominations for the removal of a member (eg, no more than 3-5 per month).

Дмитрий Кошелев — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Patrug[edit]

Response by Patrug 07:05, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Patrug's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches #1 & #2 & #5.

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Bagratun[edit]

Response by Bagratun 07:07, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Bagratun's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 2 & 1

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Ryuch[edit]

Response by Ryuch 07:08, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ryuch's response to the critical question[edit]

I believe still the community can play magics. I feel 'Talk page' is not enough. It's old fashioned though it worked until now. I hope to have better tools to communicate to edit the articles. I love to have better tools to make a decision to edit. For example, in the standardization boy they use comment collection tool to create or revise standards. But we write on the talk page. I feel we can provide more productive tools. Regular Hangout(I mean video conferencing) for an article would be fine. I believe an article in a Wikipedia could bring the stake holders and anyone who want to contribute in one place where I can communicate better and produce a better article. Why don't we organize a debate meeting rather than a boring edit-a-thon? Actually I don't think the communication between the community and the foundation does not matter. The communication between editors is my concern.

Ryuch's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach three and two with the order look fine.

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Samwilson[edit]

Response by Samwilson 08:30, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Samwilson's response to the critical question[edit]

Make people feel welcome! Proactive inclusive personal reaching-out. To feel harassed is awful, but to not feel welcomed is just sort of neutral — and yet, is more common and for many people means they won't bother carrying on with any contribution.

Samwilson's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Two and three.

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Yannmaco[edit]

Response by Yannmaco 08:59, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yannmaco 對關鍵問題的回應[edit]

策略五

Yannmaco 的前2或前3優先順序(或分享您自己的想法)[edit]

策略三與策略四

下個主題領域(知識)

VIGNERON[edit]

Response by VIGNERON 09:03, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de VIGNERON à la question critique[edit]

  • Approach 5 is a wishful thinking; it can be very tricky, some peoples rejects it (see what sadly happens with Wikidata) and there a huge load of pedagogy (both towards editors and deeloppers) to do before beginning to work on the technical issues.

Top 2-3 de VIGNERON (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

  • Approach 3 is the most important, by far.
  • Approach 4 in second position

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

ElieLeLazy[edit]

Response by ElieLeLazy 09:28, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de ElieLeLazy à la question critique[edit]

Top 2-3 de ElieLeLazy (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

2, 4

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

.mau.[edit]

Response by .mau. 10:32, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

.mau.'s response to the critical question[edit]

Wiki used to be a simple way to write nicely formatted text: now it isn't anymore. That's necessary, because we need to structure information so that it may be reused not only by people but also by automatic tools. But this means that there is not a place where newbies may add unstructured text and have somebody explaining them how to write it in a structured way, with the help of the community. This is how I read Approach two and three. Gender gap and harassment issues belong to the first question about reach, not to this one.

.mau.'s top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

3, 2, 7

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Chints247[edit]

Response by Chints247 11:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Chints247's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Chints247's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

approach two, approach three and approach five

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K.Nevelsteen[edit]

Response by K.Nevelsteen 12:42, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

K.Nevelsteen's response to the critical question[edit]

Increase ease of use and make the community more apparent. On the latter point, there is a community behind Wikipedia, but you don't really feel it. Only when you see a voting or a discussion do you realize it. I think it would be interest to foster the community more by making the community more apparent.

K.Nevelsteen's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1, 5

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Sannita[edit]

Response by Sannita 13:43, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sannita's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach number 3, above all.

Sannita's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

3 and 2.

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ElectricRay[edit]

Response by ElectricRay 13:58, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ElectricRay's response to the critical question[edit]

Approaches 5 and 6 are the key ones. Approach 1 & 2 a waste of time. Make it easier for people to understand and use the Wikimedia tools. Haters gonna hate.

Lele giannoni[edit]

Response by Lele giannoni 14:26, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Lele giannoni's response to the critical question[edit]

I think our goal shouldn't be expanding communities, but improving the quality of existing editors, or attracting quality editors. So, we should train wikipedians to be quality editors: tutoring is good not to encourage new partecipants, but to enhance the quality of those already working.

Lele giannoni's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach three is also important to improve reciprocal confidence among wikipedians. And also approach five, to spare time for more important jobs.

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OSeveno[edit]

Response by OSeveno 15:21, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OSeveno's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

Hoewel enorm lastig om te realiseren, zou een wereldwijd gedeeld statuut, opgesteld door en voor de community van bewerkers, mogelijk een houvast kunnen bieden om nieuwkomers, maar ook minderheden, te verwelkomen en te behouden. Uitgangspunt zou moeten zijn hetgeen dat de Wikipedia community wereldwijd verbindt, alsmede de mensenrechten zoals verwoord in bijvoorbeeld de Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van de Mens, alsmede latere aanvullende verklaringen zoals de Universele Verklaring van de Rechten van het Kind. Ook het goed uitdragen van de basisprincipes van Wikipedia is van groot belang. Zelf gaan we misschien te makkelijk uit van een goede reputatie op dit gebied. Echter, incidenten die voorkomen kunnen ervoor zorgen dat misvattingen onder groepen lezers kunnen optreden. Het is goed mogelijk dat met een wereldwijd Wikipedia-statuut een groep bewerkers gaat afvallen, omdat zij de inhoud daarvan niet ondersteunen, maar ik vind dat het niet de taak van Wikipedia is om ook xenofoben vast te houden als bewerkers van artikelen die mogelijk door onze kinderen worden gelezen. En, waar bewerkers afvallen zal een statuut waarschijnlijk ook nieuwe bewerkers aantrekken.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Although enormously difficult to achieve, would be shared globally statute, by and for the community of editors, can potentially provide guidance to newcomers, but also minorities, to welcome and retain. The starting point should be that which connects the Wikipedia community worldwide, as well as human rights as expressed for example in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and subsequent additional statements such as the Universal Declaration of Children's Rights. The good propagation of the basic principles of Wikipedia is very important. Itself we might go too easily from a good reputation in this field. However, incidents occur which may ensure that misconceptions among groups of readers may occur. It is quite possible that with a worldwide Wikipedia statute will lose a group of processors, because they do not support their content, but I do not think it is the job of Wikipedia to determine xenophobes also hold as the authors of articles that possible through our children are read. And where workers lose a statute will probably attract new editors.

OSeveno's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

1, 3 en 4 lijken mij zeer waardevol. In aanvulling daarop kan mogelijk een reputatiesysteem positief bijdragen en zowel de inspanning voor Wikipedia als het gevoel van erkenning vergroten. Dit kan zich het beste uiten op de Gemeenschapspagina's, zoals in het Gebruikersportaal. Ik stel niet voor om gepersonaliseerde avatars in te voeren, maar misschien wel enkele basisstatistieken over de individuele gebruikers bij de berichten te delen. Hoe dit het beste kan worden vormgegeven weet ik nog niet.

Machine translation; please help improve.
1, 3 and 4 seem to me very valuable. In addition, a reputation system can potentially contribute positively and increase both the effort of Wikipedia as the feeling of recognition. This can best express the Community Pages, as in the portal. I do not propose to introduce personalized avatars, but perhaps share some basic statistics on individual users in the messages. How this can best be shaped, I do not know.

Ga naar het volgende onderwerpsgebied (Kennis)

Housiemousie[edit]

Response by Housiemousie 17:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Housiemousie's response to the critical question[edit]

The numbered suggestions have a mix of strategies - some of which I view as good, some not so good...

1 - patient and honorable moderators are a must for all internet communities, as harassment (from any source) can easily drive away people sensitive to conflict

2 - I fear that a recognition system could breed the wrong kind of competition

3 - yes

4 - yes

5 and 6 - no.

Madame Curieuse[edit]

Response by Madame Curieuse 18:50, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Madame Curieuse's response to the critical question[edit]

involve the youngest: ask schools to have pupils "adopt" pages or topics (looking for errors, gaps etc. in the present information under the guidance of teachers); make them aware of the fact that acquiring/maintaining high quality requires (somebody's !) integrity, care, efforts and time.

Madame Curieuse's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 2 (and possibly also 5)

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

HГq[edit]

Response by HГq 20:26, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von HГq auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Ansatz zwei und fünf. Die Motivation zum Weiterarbeiten ist ein echtes Problem; viele springen tatsächlich ab, weil sie die Arbeit irgendwann für sinnlos bzw. "nicht lohnend" halten.

Approach two and five. The motivation to continue working is a real problem; many actually quit because they eventually feel it's pointless or "not worthwhile" to keep working.

Bobbyshabangu[edit]

Response by Bobbyshabangu 21:23, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bobbyshabangu's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach one: Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap to facilitate a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment for contributors and editors. Approach two: Create and support programs to increase volunteer participation such as recognition, facilitated mentorship, and personalized re-engagement. Approach three: Increase communication and transparency with and between our communities and across Wikimedia affiliates.

Bobbyshabangu's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I think different regions face different challenges. It would be prudent to engage with Chapters and UG to hear what their challenges are pertaining their communities. This way the foundation will have a better view of how to deal with specific problem in specific regions rather than a blanket approach.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Matthias Buchmeier[edit]

Response by Matthias Buchmeier 22:51, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Matthias Buchmeier's response to the critical question[edit]

Making contributions by new and occasional users an easier and more pleasant experience. It will be very helpful to simplify formatting and content guidelines and improve their documentation.

Matthias Buchmeier's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1,5,6

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Magedq[edit]

Response by Magedq 03:43, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Magedq's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 2: with a focus on giving user's recognition. This can be in the form of just a friendlier display in contributions than current contributions page.


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Maferlona[edit]

Response by Maferlona 04:50, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Respuesta de Maferlona a la pregunta crítica[edit]

Creo que esencialmente sería reducir las brechas entre la comunidad de todo tipo para fomentar la diversidad y el enriquecimiento de este. También creo que es importante animar a la comunidad a acercarse a los demás dentro y fuera de proyectos para fortalecer los vínculos y crear nuevos.

Machine translation; please help improve.
I think essentially would reduce the gap between the community of all kinds to promote the diversity and enrichment of this. I also think it is important to encourage the community to reach out to others in and out of projects to strengthen ties and create new ones.

Las 2 o 3 mejores opciones de Maferlona (o comparte tu propia idea)[edit]

  • Idea 1
  • Idea 2
  • Idea 6

Ir a la próxima área temática (Conocimiento)

Gingersnappy[edit]

Response by Gingersnappy 08:51, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Gingersnappy — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

Хочу обратить ваше внимание на текущие проблемы в обществе. Они были и будут, но нельзя, чтобы они прогрессировали, усугублялись в худшую сторону. Нужно направлять людей, стараться помочь их развитию, в том числе духовному.

Machine translation; please help improve.
I want to draw your attention to the current problems in society. They have been and will be, but it is impossible that they have progressed, compounded by the worse. It is necessary to guide people, to try to help their development, including the spiritual.

Gingersnappy — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

Первый, второй, третий.

Machine translation; please help improve.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Maproom[edit]

Response by Maproom 09:29, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Maproom's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Maproom's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

The page does not define "community", and I have not been able to deduce what it means in this context. Wikipedias are developed by editors, who often talk to each other. What are these "communities"?

Hi, @Maproom:. :) In terms of the internet, communities are "group[s] of people interacting by electronic means for social, professional, educational or other purposes". Our communities are editors who work together on projects, or uploaders or curators or reporters (not all projects have editors) who do the same, as well as chapter members and affiliate organizations and everyone who pulls together towards the common goals of our movement. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:31, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your answer. I don't doubt that you are right, but it seems hopelessly vague. For instance, I have no idea whether I would be considered a member of any "community". To me, seeing a whole page of a questionnaire devoted to such a woolly concept suggests that the WMF is completely out of touch with how the actual work gets done. Maproom (talk) 23:43, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Pomptidom[edit]

Response by Pomptidom 11:09, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pomptidom's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Pomptidom's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

4, 5

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Jon E. Dalton[edit]

Response by Jon E. Dalton 16:57, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jon E. Dalton's response to the critical question[edit]

All six posted items are cogent points, and at this moment I cannot think of much more to add until I am more familiar with using the site for more then mere research.

OlEnglish[edit]

Response by OlEnglish 19:32, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OlEnglish's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach two makes the most sense to me. Especially recognition. Provide more rewards and incentives for editing, it makes Wikipedia even more addicting than it already is!

OlEnglish's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches one and two.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Koroleva Evgenia[edit]

Response by Koroleva Evgenia 20:01, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Koroleva Evgenia — ответ на насущные вопросы[edit]

...пишите здесь…

Koroleva Evgenia — выбранные 2-3 предпочтительных подхода (или собственная идея)[edit]

5, 2 и 6 подходы.

Перейти к следующей тематической области: «Знания»

Tryptofish[edit]

Response by Tryptofish 21:01, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tryptofish's response to the critical question[edit]

WMF should have more professional staff in positions dedicated to dealing with sensitive issues such as harassment, instead of leaving it to volunteers on each project.

Tryptofish's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Strong support for 1.

Rslocked[edit]

Response by Rslocked 00:55, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rslocked's response to the critical question[edit]

I believe the best way to help your communities is to always be there to help them when needed showing attention to your communities makes us feel needed and motivates us to keep up the good work.

Rslocked's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

1. Approach one is without a doubt the most important strategy to maintain proper health, growth and diversity within your communities. 2. I would like to see number two actively maintained as well unifying us in a greater term. 3. Number seven I would think starting exploration initiatives to new areas in the world to start new communities to better represent world knowledge's would be vital for your community bases and overall information center.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Abrimaal[edit]

Response by Abrimaal 02:53, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Odpowiedź użytkownika Abrimaal na główne pytanie[edit]

There are 2 types of Wikimedia editors. These who don't care because they can play a newest game, go to a swimming pool, a night club, a theatre. These who care, but can't do as much as they want because of slow computer hardware, outdated software, insufficient work safety. Wikigrants are a great idea, but it is restricted to larger projects, not to daily work with Wikimedia and Wikipedia. Sharing knowledge costs time and work while an editor has no contract, no insurance and uncertain future. The current methods limit the active editors to those who must share their potential between Wikimedia as a volunteer and another company where they can earn money for often useless work, the other active group is retired or sponsored by parents.

Główne 2-3 koncepcje wg użytkownika Abrimaal (albo podziel sie swoim pomysłem)[edit]

2

Przejdź do następnego obszaru tematycznego (Wiedza)

ThurnerRupert[edit]

Response by ThurnerRupert 03:47, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ThurnerRupert's response to the critical question[edit]

...an important question. but the suggested approaches show the main mental challenge WMF faces: it focuses on "key" initiatives. this would be like focusing wikipedia on the article about barack obama. popular, excellent, important, but pointless. nobody is interested in wikipedia for obama, i can find thousands of sources for him. but the small, unimportant pieces contained in wikipedia i find nowhere else. this makes wikipedia so interesting, and a real knowledge base. such contents comes from thousands of volunteers working on estranged topics. most important is to let them meet. also with new persons, not only with themselves again and again.

ThurnerRupert's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...approach one to six do sound like creating facebook again, on a technical level. would be for sure an approach. approach seven: spend 20% of the money on members of the community, i.e. 15 mio, compared to close to zero currently (1 mio maybe, wikimania travel grants and some chapters community projects can be counted as such). i would donate money for such a case. while i would not give money into a 80mio unrestricted global pool as my money does not make a difference. but - i am aware it is not very intelligent to make such a proposal here, to somebody who has a very differing view of the world, who prefers to have an employee in the community department causing 100'000 USD annual cost instead of spending this sum into the volunteer base.

approach eight would be to really create, on a technical level, something like facebook. the internet consists of tweeds and blogs nowadays, not only ecyclopaedias and newspapers. a possibility would be to slowly open up wikinews. start putting WMF blog entries there. let others blog as well there. add "like" and feeling functionality. i know that it is difficult because the WMF employees refuse to write wikitext and will invest time to find a zillion of excuses why it does not work. but it is the core to eat our own dogfood. for me i know i use facebook more for wikipedia than i do use wikipedia sites. then you wonder about traffic, and communities. i am sure there are other channels, like whatsup, viber, etc for other generations.

approach nine would be to create an easy support chat, like amazon has it. a lot of effort, i know. and it must be local to make most of it, to allow meeting later on. this global large user base which can extend into real life is something nobody else can duplicate easily.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Nico.wiedemann[edit]

Response by Nico.wiedemann 10:22, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Nico.wiedemann auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

2: Das größte Problem an der deutschen Wikipedia ist meiner Meinung nach, dass sowohl neue (und sicherlich auch einige bereits länger aktive) Autoren von den bestehenden Autoren oft rigoros und detailversessen an Änderungen oder dem Erstellen neuer Artikel gehindert werden. Man muss sich nur einmal die Diskussionsseiten nahezu jedes Artikels mit mehr als 10 Zeilen ansehen und findet einen Editwar in dem deutlich wird, dass die bestehenden Autoren nicht Willens sind neue Meinungen zu akzeptieren und auch nur ein stückweit von Ihrer Position abzurücken. Gleiches gilt für neue Artikel, die fast regelmäßig mit Löschdiskussionen überzogen werden, die jede Form von Engagement im Keim ersticken. Wenn der Terminus Relevanzkriterien fällt weiß man schon, dass an dieser Stelle ein potentieller Autor das letzte Mal etwas geschrieben hat. Hier sollte sich die deutsche Wikipedia mehr an der englischsprachigen orientieren, die hier ein deutlich besseres Augenmaß gefunden hat und im Zweifel erstmal etwas zulässt.

2: The biggest problem at the German Wikipedia is, in my opinion, that both new (and certainly some longterm active) authors are often prevented from modifying or creating new items by existing authors who are obsessive and rigorous in their expectations. One only has to look at those discussion pages for almost every article with more than 10 lines and you will find an editwar in which it is clear that existing authors are not willing to accept new opinions and move away even a bit from their position. The same applies to new articles that are almost always covered with deletion discussions that nip any form of involvement in the bud. If the term Relevanzkriterien (notability criteria) is used, you already know that at this point a potential author has written something for the last time. Here the German Wikipedia should be more oriented to the English language one, which has found a much better sense of proportion and, when in doubt, first allows something.

StupidChangSonla[edit]

Response by StupidChangSonla 13:41, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

StupidChangSonla 對關鍵問題的回應[edit]

⋯⋯在這裡寫⋯⋯

StupidChangSonla 的前2或前3優先順序(或分享您自己的想法)[edit]

⋯⋯在這裡寫⋯⋯ 3 4 下個主題領域(知識)

Fantomeoz[edit]

Response by Fantomeoz 13:50, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fantomeoz's response to the critical question[edit]

5

Fantomeoz's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

TeeVeeed[edit]

Response by TeeVeeed 14:12, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

TeeVeeed's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

TeeVeeed's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I am strongly in favor of approach number two. I think that the Wikipedian in residence needs to expand and be offered on a much wider scale. I'm thinking that offering grants to public libraries, which they could offer to library patrons, in exchange for providing Wikipedia services such-as uploading documents and photos to the project, or hosting edit-a-thons for novice to experts on a local level with local themes, would bring Wikipedia into communities and help train new editors, and gain content. Specifically, something like offering a $10,000 grant to librarys, where half goes to the institution, and half goes to a designated Wikipedian to provide 3 services, upload local content, community outreach, and 3-provide assistance to people interested in using and editing the project for a contracted period of time, say 6 months of service or a certain amount of hours. Also, expand this into community service programs with certain criminal rehabilitation projects. TeeVeeed (talk) 14:12, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]


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Donne Cena[edit]

Response by Donne Cena 00:09, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Donne Cena's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here…

Donne Cena's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

I think there should be a general forum for all Wikipedians to use, for free. I support numbers five, two, and three. Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Buitenisbinnen[edit]

Response by Buitenisbinnen 00:17, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Buitenisbinnen's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

Benadering 1 ik kan hier ook een nadere toelichten op geven mocht het nodig zijn

Machine translation; please help improve
Approach 1, I can give a detailed explanation on here if needed
@Buitenisbinnen: Yes please! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Buitenisbinnen's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

benadering 7: het is al laat voor mij ik ben erg moe van de afgelopen dagen. maar wat nu in mij opkomt is dat de industrie minder geautomatiseerd moet worden zodat er meer werk komt voor een doelgroep waar meestal overheen gekeken word.

Machine translation; please help improve
Approach 7: It's getting late for me, I am very tired from the last few days. But what now comes to me is that the industry should be less automated so that there is more work for an audience that usually gets overlooked.

Ga naar het volgende onderwerpsgebied (Kennis)

NOrbeck[edit]

Response by NOrbeck 01:11, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

NOrbeck's response to the critical question[edit]

Comments regarding option #1. It is claimed that reducing the gender gap would make Wikipedia safer and more welcoming/supportive. This is sexist. Diversity is desirable because it leads to higher quality content, not because male editors are less welcoming/supportive than female editors.

It is wrong to assume without evidence that the gender gap is a fixable problem, and wrong to assume that Wikipedia or its editors are at fault.

Wikipedia editors are volunteers. Unlike becoming President or serving on a board, any woman can wake up tomorrow and become a Wikipedia editor. In the US, women volunteer far more of their time than men. So the question isn't "How can we get thousands of women currently volunteering at schools and hospitals to quit and volunteer at Wikipedia instead?", the question is "Should we?".

Perhaps male editors could be called upon to increase the number and quality of female biographies, articles on friendship bracelets, or other topics stereotypically deemed of interest only to women; while female editors could be called upon to review and contribute to articles that are currently predominantly edited by men.

NOrbeck's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Option #7: Do nothing, save they money and effort for future problems should they arrive.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

NinjaRobotPirate[edit]

Response by NinjaRobotPirate 08:58, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

NinjaRobotPirate's response to the critical question[edit]

Most of the problems in the community probably need to be solved by the community itself. However, there are some things that the community can't do, and there are ways the WMF can empower the community.

NinjaRobotPirate's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Approach 1. The community needs more ways to deal with these issues. It struggles to deal with long-term abuse cases, and Check User alone is not enough to stop a technologically sophisticated troll. The WMF needs to send cease-and-desist notices to these people. With regards to harassment, this is something the community probably needs to resolve. However, the WMF can help, even if it's something simple like holding drives to remove degrading commentary from file descriptions of erotic photographs on Commons.
  • Approach 2. People love shiny things. Also, programs to integrate new users into the community and give them mentoring would probably help a lot. New users have no idea that Wikipedia even has rules, inclusion criteria, or a deletion process. Since Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge, they don't understand why they can't create an autobiography, and they don't understand how to contest it when it's nominated for deletion. They don't understand our policies, so they claim they're being bullied when their POV-pushing is reverted. It's a huge strain on the community to have to deal with all this. If new users were introduced to Wikipedia better, they might have a better experience.
  • Approach 3. The alternative is for someone to fork Wikipedia, which doesn't seem like such a ridiculous concept any more. If the community rejects a feature, maybe that feature shouldn't be forced on them with superprotect. Otherwise, you may find that you no longer have a community.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Cwenrich13[edit]

Response by Cwenrich13 10:08, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cwenrich13's response to the critical question[edit]

Continue to invest in the development of female coders and contributors. But also finding partnerships to help expand the availability of knowledge resources to those who can not reliably accesses them currently.


Cwenrich13's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Listed in order: Approach Two Approach Three Approach Five


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Monopoly31121993[edit]

Response by Monopoly31121993 10:27, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Monopoly31121993's response to the critical question[edit]

6,5

Monopoly31121993's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...write here…

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Arvidex[edit]

Response by Arvidex 11:06, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Arvidex's response to the critical question[edit]

6

Arvidex's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2, 1

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Drahtloser[edit]

Response by Drahtloser 15:23, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Drahtloser auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

...hier schreiben...

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Drahtloser[edit]

Make up a count for deletions and mergers by an author and set a limit ratio compared to his own original contribution. That should improve the willingness to contribute before the nuisance of stupid deletion happens.

Atulkherde[edit]

Response by Atulkherde 18:31, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Atulkherde's response to the critical question[edit]

...Enhancing sustainability of Wikipedia beyond current crop of authors and editors... Approaches 2 and 5 seem to be the best at the moment. But read on...

Atulkherde's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

...Foundations of Wikipedia were built by people who wrote code in 80 X 25 text format using text editors. The initial crop of authors too were heavily selected as only the best people in academics could reach a computer / Internet in the earlier days. These people respected grammar and other conventions. Naturally, the entire concept is TEXT-HEAVY. However, with non-text media becoming popular, the quality of language teaching and learning across the world is on a decline. Grammar, correctness, and other quality parameters of written matter are fast eroding. So, while the principles of Wikipedia remain applicable, we will have to be ready to look at alternate non-text forms of realizing the Wikipedia concept. I can see two more generations at the most, of active authors and editors - say the first till 2019 and another till 2022-25 getting excited about writing in Wikipedia. By that time alternative forms will be so overwhelming in their appeal that the text-based Wikipedia will start to lose the charm and may become a relic of the past by 2031. However, it will not die out for even a hundred more years, as a few interested people will keep the website alive for personal choices and nostalgia long past its active utility. Also for some applications such as law, etc. the written word will rule for quite some time, so people in the highest echelons of society will still have access to good quality language skills.

(No intention to be harsh - but the decline will be only of the form, not of the concept.)

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Awikimate[edit]

Response by Awikimate 19:23, 6 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Awikimate's response to the critical question[edit]

In order to be democratic, diverse and relevant, Wikipedia must make its processes for review and elimination of articles simpler; increase awareness of how the articles are reviewed by the community, as many believe anyone any time can just write whatever one wants; engaje the academia in its efforts (especially in developing countries where free access to information is a particularly relevant issue), by working out ways of recognising their efforts. Recognition is one of the main currencies in academia.

Awikimate's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2, 5

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Hollth[edit]

Response by Hollth 09:05, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hollth's response to the critical question[edit]

...write here… I actually think the way forward is to create some kind of club, similar to how groups of gamers meet up physically even though they could play online. Some kind of WMF endorsed 'club' thing at universities and libraries is something I can see making headway. And if these things already exist then the need is to get the information out there! It may be that the problem of reach, community and knowledge can all be rectified with a little marketing.

Hi Hollth, Welcome to the club, and do join the movement. Please see the page Wikimedia movement affiliates to discover 41 chapters, 1 thematic organization and 51 user groups endorsed by the WMF. Maybe one them suits your needs, or you can start one yourself! Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 16:02, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hollth's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

two, five. Mentorship seems to be a big one, based on the feedback from a past WMF survey, where many of the users who dropped off found it too confusing. Five would allow people to focus more on content and less on the mundane things.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Hendrikvander[edit]

Response by Hendrikvander 10:35, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hendrikvander's response to the critical question[edit]

five

Hendrikvander's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Option Two is my second choice. Own suggestion: There is a very strong psychological factor involved in this area; I believe that people want to feel part of a bigger plan and contribute to the greater good. Make the slogan of Wikimedia: 'The Evolution of Knowledge; Leave your mark'. The key to a strong community is sharing the same ideals; reinforce the ideas that a contributor is part of this evolution by contributing; however: teaching is as much about learning and being corrected as it is about imparting knowledge. For handling conflict, use the idea: 'Attack the facts, not the person'.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Wieralee[edit]

Response by Wieralee 17:54, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Odpowiedź użytkownika Wieralee na główne pytanie[edit]

Najbardziej blokującą użytkowników sprawą jest brak odgórnych wytycznych edycyjnych. Starzy edytorzy spierają się między sobą od lat, a nowicjusze nie wiedzą, co robić, bo -- którejkolwiek z wersji by nie wybrali -- zawsze się komuś narażą.

Przykładem jest np. polityka Commons odnośnie nazewnictwa kategorii. Jedni preferują format zapisu Category:Milan (Italy) a inni Category:Milan, Italy. I tak trwa przenoszenie plików z jednego miejsca na drugie -- i odwrotnie... Takich kwestii jest bardzo wiele. Co więcej, strony pomocy w poszczególnych wersjach językowych nie są ze sobą kompatybilne, co oznacza, iż różnojęzyczni userzy mają różne zasady.

Problem jest także w polityce -- wielu power-userów nie chce się narażać innym, więc nie próbują nawet niczego zmieniać i czegokolwiek uzgodnić. Powszechny chaos sprzyja niejasnej polityce edycyjnej i niejasnych, szczególnie dla nowicjuszy, zasadach.

Konieczność poparcia dla administratorów (wybory, weryfikacja) sprawia, że nikt nie chce zamknąć sobie "drogi wiki-kariery" i nikt nie podejmuje drażliwych lecz koniecznych tematów. Są kwestie, które omijają wszyscy, choć wszyscy wiedzą, że "coś" należałoby z tym zrobić.

Machine translation; please help improve
Most blocking issue for users is the lack of top-down editing guidance. The old editors argue among themselves over the years, and novices do not know what to do, because - either version would not choose - someone is always endangered.
An example is eg. The policy regarding the naming of Commons category. Some prefer using the format Category: Milan (Italy) and others Category: Milan, Italy. And so files are moved from one place to another - and vice versa ... These issues are prolific. What's more, the help pages in different language versions are not compatible with each other, which means that various languages have different rules.
The problem is also in politics - many power-user do not want to expose to others, so do not even try to change anything and to agree on anything. Widespread chaos favors the unclear policy of editing and unclear, especially for newcomers principles.
The necessity of support for administrators (elections, verification) makes no one wants to close a "road wiki-career" and no one takes sensitive but necessary topics. These are issues that bypasses all, even though we all know that "something" should be done.

Główne 2-3 koncepcje wg użytkownila Wieralee (albo podziel się swoim pomysłem)[edit]

  1. WMF powinno ustalić wytyczne, które po przegłosowaniu przez społeczność stałyby się "obowiązujące"
  2. WMF powinno wprowadzić "administratorów WMF", którzy podejmowaliby niepopularne decyzje i dbali o jedność projektów.
  3. W przypadku braku ochotników, powinno się powierzyć tłumaczenie stron zaleceń i pomocy zawodowym tłumaczom.
Machine translation; please help improve
1) WMF should determine guidelines that would be "applicable" after a vote by the community
2) The WMF should introduce "WMF administrators" who make unpopular decisions and care about the unity of the projects.
3) In the absence of volunteers, the translation of the guidelines should be entrusted to professional translators.

Aspiriniks[edit]

Response by Aspiriniks 18:49, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Aspiriniks auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

Approach seven: In the recent years, the Foundation has done much to annoy the community: The planned image filter has only been stopped after massive protests by the community, and it was the same with the forced use of VisualEditor. Superprotect again showed that there is the will to disturb the community in their work of building an Encyclopædia, by putting an instrument of power into the hand of people who don't have any legitimation. Most of all, the fact, that those elected by the community are only a minority within the board, and that one of them recently became arbitrarily removed from the board, left a bad impression that doesn't raise the motivation of the community at all. The board should exclusively consist of members who are elected by the community, and nobody except the community should have the right to remove one of them.

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Aspiriniks[edit]

None of the other approaches will have an enduring effect, if the problem described above will not be fixed.

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

HHill[edit]

Response by HHill 22:20, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

HHill's response to the critical question[edit]

Echoing what others have said before, the Wikimedia Foundation should not try to prescribe and force specific efforts but instead highlight and support community-led initiatives that have shown to work well.

HHill's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  • Approach three


Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Kein Einstein[edit]

Response by Kein Einstein 09:56, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Antwort von Kein Einstein auf die Hauptfrage[edit]

1

Top 2-3 (oder teile uns deine eigene Idee mit) von Kein Einstein[edit]

5, 3

Gehe zum nächsten Schwerpunkt (Wissen)

Baruneju[edit]

Response by Baruneju 10:37, 8 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Baruneju's response to the critical question[edit]

The health of a community could be increased by either reducing the bad behaviours or empowering those who foster a nice environment. In both cases, we no longer get a community of equals: in one case, contributors acting in good faith but perceived as poisonous could be sent off, while on the other case the "not empowered" ones may harshly judge the behaviour of "empowered ones". Diversity cannot be forced in a community: the environment can be more welcoming and inclusive, but we can't force people in even if the environment is adequate for their needs (i.e. one should be a volunteer on its own, and even when one is a volunteer, maybe there is a preference towards other kinds of activities). Also, a project like Wikipedia can be seen as "establishment", so small groups may prefer to avoid it to keep playing the underdogs against the "big mainstream brainwashing machine".

Something that could be perceived as harassment may be the required compliance to the policies: deleting a picture due to copyright infringement, modifying a text due to non neutral point of view and asking for reliable sources could be perceived as "other users are messing with me", "they are against may content/point of view", "this is my bio, is about me". More awareness of such topics on perspective and current users could mitigate such cases.

Baruneju's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

6,7

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Chris Rodgers[edit]

Response by Chris Rodgers 10:46, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Chris Rodgers's response to the critical question[edit]

One simple word: INCLUSIONISM.

Chris Rodgers's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach 7: If you can't get the inclusionism right, the rest of it (#5 is nice but still not the critical one) is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

ArnoldReinhold[edit]

Response by ArnoldReinhold 21:15, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ArnoldReinhold's response to the critical question[edit]

I think the most important step would be to restore trust between the Foundation and the volunteer communities. I think there is a sense, and least in the English volunteer community, that we are less a partner with the Foundation and more a problem the Foundation is trying to fix. One way to do this would be to dedicate some developer resources to making fixes and improvements that the community wants. Harassment and gender gap issues need tone addressed in the volunteer community and I think there is much that could be done. The best path for the Foundation is to help us think through and develop ways to improve communication between old-timers and new editors, particularly women.

ArnoldReinhold's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

My priorities would be 5, 1 and 3.

Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Thuthu77[edit]

Response by Thuthu77 09:19, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thuthu77's response to the critical question[edit]

Once again, the first approach seems to be the the best step to go forward with. Through this strategy the Wikimedia community will be able to figure out the key issues facing the platform and find solutions to it. While Wikimedia projects hasn't been known much for being an environment where harassment issues occur, there had been incidents in the past where such problems did happen. That's why this approach is quite important as it will shape the future of Wikimedia for the better. Creating and supporting programs to increase volunteer participation as mentioned in approach two is also a great way to better the health and growth of Wikimedia, as is approach three.

Thuthu77's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

As for my own idea, I would just want a creative solution for the Wikimedia community to be always transparent, diverse and free for all as it possibly could be. no matter what obstacles that might come our way. Go to next topic area (Knowledge)

Ad Huikeshoven[edit]

Response by Ad Huikeshoven 13:27, 10 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ad Huikeshoven's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

What do you think is the best way for the Wikimedia Foundation to help improve the health, growth and diversity of our communities to help them be more welcoming and open so that the movement is sustainable?

Not for everybody is clear what communities are. Spread the word! Communities are imho the group of active editors/users of one of the Wikimedia wikis. Wikipedia is an ongoing success for the past 15 years. The Wikimedia movement continues to be overwhelmed by this continuing success reaching a global audience of half a billion readers each month. Volunteer editors around the globe, and thousands of them, have accomplished that. However the exponential growth stopped in 2007, and after 2007 there has been no positive growth in the number of volunteers.
  • The best way for the Wikimedia Foundation is to learn, read and study community management, for example, there are many resources about community management. Take your pick. Have a look at How to build a community or a list of free online community management resources.
  • Develop a community strategy and use the community strategy framework;
  • Analyse what you've got. Not every wiki is in the same stage of its life cycle.
    • Please be aware that 90% of the languages do not have their own Wikipedia
    • Of the remainder about 100 Wikipedias are in their inception phase, with less than ten thousand articles and most of them endowed with only a small number of active editors
    • There are about 75 Wikipedias that are well established, with between ten thousand and one hundred thousand articles and quite some editors
    • There are about 45 Wikipedias that are well established, with between with between one hundred thousand and a million articles with say a couple of hundred active editors
    • There are say 10 Wikipedias with over a million articles and over a thousand active editors. Some call this mitosis stage
  • What the Wikimedia Foundation can do for the different communities - not only Wikipedia communities, but also Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource and so on, wildly depends on the development stage of each project. Volunteers for projects in the inception phase need a lot of encouragement and outreach support to attact new contributors. The biggest projects have their own challenges. There are a lot of volunteers helping you guys out with managing the community like sysops, admins, moderators, bureaucrats, stewards, arbcom members, coaches and so on. Self organization is great, but has its limits. You do not want to end up in a Hobbesian world where life is brute, nasty and short.
  • Review how WMF staff scores on professional community management skills

Ad Huikeshoven's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

  • Train sysops / admins of the big projects in basic community management skills including conflict resolution. An one day annual training should be mandatory. The Red Cross requires of their volunteers to be trained and certified in first aid and do annual training. So yes, you can require volunteers to accept training.
  • Roll out the ally skills workshop to the top level of sysops.
  • Start measuring and reporting on sense of community.
  • Delegate in a wise manner community management of some projects to affiliates; make community management part of impactful programs of affiliates - suggested metric: sense of community index.
Thank you, Ad, for your extremely detailed and thoughtful response. :) I know that assessing the different needs of communities in various stages of development has been an increasing focus for Community Engagement. I think you're spot on that figuring out how to support communities in scaleable ways (which includes making sure sysops and others are given the necessary physical and knowledge tools to do their jobs) is only going to become more critical if we want the movement to thrive. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 01:15, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Romaine[edit]

Response by Romaine 05:16, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Romaine's antwoord op de kritieke vraag[edit]

  • Have more face to face meetings. People do feel less borders when they do not know other participants in Wikipedia.
  • Reach out more to external organisations with knowledge that can be shared, and people that can share that knowledge. Facilitate these kind of collaborations more.
  • Have inside communities more possibilities for forming groups to work together, that is the only way to socialise and work together in a natural way.
  • But the far most important thing for the Wikimedia Foundation to do is have all staff at multiple occasions, spread, etc, participate in Wikipedia trainings, workshops, the practical situation of every days work. To see the difference between theory and practise, to see how inexperienced new user struggle every day, to see what people struggle with when they have a Wikipedia class in school, and so on.

Romaine's top 2-3 (of deel je eigen idee)[edit]

Approach 1 and 2: harassment is demotivating (and not just for the involved people) + projects/activities that are intended are too much demotivated while they should be helped, supported and promoted much more than currently is the case.

Ga naar het volgende onderwerpsgebied (Kennis)

Popo le Chien[edit]

Response by Popo le Chien 08:50, 12 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Popo le Chien's response to the critical question[edit]

Bad behaviour, harassment and other unpleasant online attitudes are the real problem : older editors are unwelcoming to new ones (it's a sociological issue unrelated to WP), and infighting (or the inability to effectively deal with trolls) drives old editors away. Anythign else is largely out of the Foundation and chapters' hands.

Popo le Chien's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Maybe you should consider implementing an upvote/downvote system (sort of like what's on Reddit). A weighted system would make sure to give more credit to mainspace edits (not so much reverts than actually adding content; lest you want to encourage older editors to chase new ones away), and let people be downvoted into oblivion when they spend to much time talking and annoying everyone else. My experience is that the vocal minority is left largely untouched because the silent majority cannot bother putting them back in place. A downvote button would put a discrete pressure on negative edits in the meta space. Once a certain level is reached, used sh/could be blocked. It's fine to say unpleasant things every once in a while. It becomes an issues when unpleasantness is the norm (and that's how long-term trolls are being a nuisance).

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Ghilt[edit]

Response by Ghilt 09:17, 12 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ghilt's response to the critical question[edit]

3

Ghilt's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

2

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Discott[edit]

Response by Discott 22:13, 12 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Discott's response to the critical question[edit]

Wikimedia ZA did a survey in 2015 asking South African editors what they felt were the biggest barriers to editing was a difficulty in learning/using the http markup text followed by a perceived hostility towards new editors due to them not knowing the rules. People seem afraid of making mistakes and getting shouted at. When meeting people who are representative of groups who do not typically edit Wikipedia the biggest reason for their lack of editing was a lack of awareness that they could or are welcome to do so followed by a lack of awareness in how to go about editing.

Discott's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  1. As par one of my answers to the previous question: "A suggested approach I have is to find partner organisations (such as Library networks, professional organisations/groups representing professions, groups representing cultural/historial/social groups) that have a significant membership that is relevant to the particular projects and work with them to 1) inform their members/networks that they can edit Wikipedia and 2) how they can get involved. Wikimedia ZA has found this approach to be a productive way to introduce large groups of interested and enthusiastic people to Wikipedia and contribute on particular topics."
  2. Approach 5
  3. Approach 4

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Ashaio[edit]

Response by Ashaio 21:05, 14 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ashaio's response to the critical question[edit]

I see approaches 1 and 2 as two sides of the same effort: approach 2 is to increase friendliness, and approach 1 – to reduce "un-friendliness" in the communities.

Ashaio's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches 1 and 2.

NickK[edit]

Response by NickK 03:03, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

NickK's response to the critical question[edit]

First of all, the best way for the WMF to help solve these issues is to listen to the community. To the entire community: both those who are harassed and those who are not, both those who represent minorities and those who not, both English Wikipedia editors and, say, Kurdish Wikiquote, to those subscribed to Wikimedia-l and to those not etc.

And in general: we know little about successes and failures of other projects. We have too few opportunities to share: we need more meetups, not fancy ones in Hilton but simple one where we can discuss and share our experiences. We are not good at documenting our experiences online: we have learning patterns but they are so poorly structured that they are hardly usable (it is a mistake to make learning patterns have just one author as we need to put experiences of different people together in the same pattern).

Then point by point:

  • growth: this is a first step for any new user, i.e. how can we make them make their first edit? We need to find ways to give newbies a more welcoming experience, for instance, we suck at collaborative editing as we cannot offer anything more than a simple talk page (which is clearly feasible as there are many services for collaborative editing in Latex). We need to find ways to encourage more people join our projects, not only on Wikipedia but also on sister projects, not only in English but also in small languages.
  • health / more welcoming: second step for a new user, i.e. how we can help them go beyond their first edits and remain active? we have an eternal problem of challenge between established users and newbies, which would be a problem of any similar community, not just of our community. We should look into creative ideas of welcoming and motivating newcomers: develop pages where newbies can get quick answers to the question, more user-friendly help pages (perhaps with a much better search), less biting newcomers (perhaps finding creative ways to clean up behind newcomers?). At the same time, too much WMF here can destroy local communities: there is little point in forcing German community simplify their policies, this will only cause rejection.
  • diversity: much more difficult point, as stereotypes are our main obstacle. It is hard to find an approach that fits everything: we need women, we need senior editors, we need ethnic minorities (and we want them edit both English Wikipedia and a Wikipedia in their mother tongue at the same time) etc. I can imagine two directions: 1) analyse motivations of existing editors belonging to these groups: what worked well for them, do they feel any different from other editors, what advice would they give? 2) how can we involve underrepresented groups, what do we lack to make them edit? — NickK (talk) 03:03, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

NickK's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

  1. Definitely appoach three, and transparency should start with the WMF. Affiliates have members who are usually well-informed and need to support local communities in order to continue being their legitimate representatives (or see WMMK if you want to know what happens otherwise), while WMF has no members and is not really concerned with acting as a legitimate representative of the global community or not. The fish rots from the head, thus WMF should show a good example and be a standard here. At the same time, we need much better channels for learning.
  2. Approach four
  3. Not a fan of any of these four phrasings, but I would more support volunteer participation (with an emphasis that these programmes cannot be WMF-driven, they must be community-driven) — NickK (talk) 03:03, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Papischou[edit]

Response by Papischou 08:39, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Réponse de Papischou à la question critique[edit]

Le financement des communautés ne parlant pas l'anglais par la Fondation reste encore faible, l'accès à l'info et les procédure étant essentiellement accessible en anglais.

Machine translation; please help improve.
Financing by the Foundation for communities which don't speak English remains low, access to information and the procedure is essentially available [only] in English.

Top 2-3 de Papischou (ou partagez vos idées)[edit]

Appoche 6

Approach 6

Aller au domaine suivant (Connaissance)

Pakeha[edit]

Response by Pakeha 11:23, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pakeha's response to the critical question[edit]

More professors should ask for Wikipedia contributions rather than study papers, so that a new generation of students starts editing, even if it'll just be a short phase in their life. I hope the Wiki Ed Foundation is progressing with this and WMF should support them to find partners in countries outside of North America.

Pakeha's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approaches 1 and 2 seem to be almost identical, approach 5 is also useful.

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Charles Matthews[edit]

Response by Charles Matthews 19:44, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Charles Matthews's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach Two: mentorship matters. If only we had materials ... the fact that "coaching" is not the same as "mentorship" was very striking when a professional trainer put it to me. Localise to our own, highly specialised environment. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:44, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Charles Matthews's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Approach One has always needed doing. We have always been able to see what is "bad for business", at one level. It turns out that this is a maturity issue, rather than anything else: perceptions need to override the "noise" of snarky relationships.

A decade of WP drama ought to have produced documentation, rather than just the throwing up of hands. Where, exactly, do we read a sober discussion of the problem user, and recommended and deprecated responses? It is not as if allowing people to remain autodidacts on the social issues has worked well. Why are the "five pillars" revered when they ignore the real issues behind civility, in other words what "collegiality" means in a quotidian sense? I think we should be told, and not by activists with an external agenda. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:44, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Tar Lócesilion[edit]

Response by Tar Lócesilion 20:43, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Odpowiedź użytkownika Tar Lócesilion na główne pytanie[edit]

I wish I had more time to answer properly. Most of users care only about what they do (namely: what they edit), and WMF won't make them more involved or enlightened, because, simply, they're volunteers. We're facing lack of community-community communication, lots of redundant work, new reinventions etc. Instead of becoming 'the centre to the Movement', WMF should act softly towards transaction costs reduction, such as: make more research useful also for communities, organise more events, reduce maintenance effort (approach 5), reduce communication channels distribution (by creating and supporting some sort of a communication hub? #brainstorm).

Główne 2-3 koncepcje wg użytkownila Tar Lócesilion (albo podziel sie swoim pomysłem)[edit]

3, 4 and 5.

Aegis Maelstrom[edit]

Response by Aegis Maelstrom 23:09, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Aegis Maelstrom's response to the critical question[edit]

Oh dear, where to start with?

Depending on how we set priorities: from avoiding systemic bias with broadening the contributors' base through avoiding complete burnout of volunteers' base and losing their critical mass to maintaining minimum organizational health and learning from other sources than the Bay Area office, the hierarchy will differ:

  • Utilize the global capacity: engage local agents and even create local competence centres, encourage co-operation and sharing the experiences, learn from local leaders and their best practices, use more of the wiki principles (basing on self-organization) on the Wikimedia level.
  • Go Back to the Fun Days: wikis should be fun, wikis should be welcoming, wikis should make people passionate and light their eyes. In 2016, in times of faster (more wiki!) social media, high entry barreer, old UX and Wikipedia taken for granted, we need to refresh our incentives.
  • New projects, interfaces, production and usage models are needed. Commons, references and links should be structured and converted to Wikidata. More games and tasks with new UX (e.g. a game where players verify particular claims, with simple tablet, smartphone UX) should be introduced. Additional namespaces e.g. to gather relevant links, with simplified policies, should be considered. Additional namespaces with heavily relaxed rules, e.g. collaborative discussion merged with information, with no NPOV etc. (sth like old c2 or MeatBallWiki) could be considered.
  • Remember that we are neither an educational organization (despite the fact that we do educate and our old mission kept saying so), nor tech organization (despite the fact we do use tech and need to invest 'more in it). We are a distributed co-operation organization; what is truly unique and successful is our content production and wikimanagement model, where volunteers were truly independent to act upon the shared values. We need to build on that, not trim that with global policies and whatnots.
  • Keep the organization healthy and connected to our original values: of free knowledge as in free software, of open access to both the knowledge and all the processes, to the friendliness and openship. This means that transparency, distributed and participatory management, flat structures and recruiting volunteers are our core values and a direct "business model". The volunteers are their to scratch their itches. All the other things like institutional co-operation are afterthoughts used to fill the (important) gaps left.

Aegis Maelstrom's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

It has been 15 years from the start and ca. 13 years from the last big UX change, ca. 9 years from the observed pages and reference policies introduction; the projects need some bigger tech and organizational shakeup.

Approach seven: give new tech and projects/namespaces, keep it friendlier, keep it transparent and distributed, all the other points.

Alexmar983[edit]

Response by Alexmar983 23:32, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Alexmar983's response to the critical question[edit]

Approach 1 is too vague. Why does everybody care about the gap as if it something to "fill"? The first step in front of a gap is to make good use of the rssource we have. if you don't act on this area, the following step is more image than substance. Approach 2 is ok. We should use the SUL as a framework for these programs. For example: who is the most thanked user on a platform? Who is the most pinged user? Can I see these data on a SUL interface? Approach 3 is welcome. Approach 4 is not perfect, we could make a list of typical strategy and than see who picks what. I think we still need more experimentation than alignment. Approach 5 I always support, although certain tools are not welcome (but opt-outs is always there to avoid contrast, if needed). Approach 6 is critical. You have to simplify policies and processes for building communities and wikis, but you ned to create wikis when needed, not just empty shells.

Alexmar983's top 2-3 (or share your own idea)[edit]

Talking about Approach 4: what about a centralized transnational archive for volunteers? My local chapter has started to centralize some selection procdure but it is still quite confusing. I think that for wikimetric purpose certain selection step should be more homogeneous. A single interface to post job/GLAM/WIR position in more than one language will increase the share of expertise. Also a clear evaluation scheme is not a bad idea, especially to compare profile with results amongst different chapters.

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