Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Iteration 2/Diversity/1

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it.

Most likely, new comments will not be taken into account by the new three Working Group members in their work of developing the final Recommendations. You are free however to continue discussing in the spirit of "discussing about Wikipedia is a work in progress". :)

Content is the first priority

You're going to alienate a lot of people by opening with a proposal to drop the prioritising of content and replace it with the prioritising of people. Wikimedia, and Wikipedia in particular, is about content – people use it because of its content, not because of its creators. Sure, seek ways to involve more/different people, but that should be done to help the primary goal of improving content; involving more/different people shouldn't be the main goal in itself.

Statements such as "obtaining 'the sum of human knowledge' is just a means to educate people on their process of understanding..." similarly show a confusion between primary and ancillary goals. This is an encyclopedia with other bits and pieces, not a school project: people can learn about learning/understanding through using Wikimedia/Wikipedia, but that's not why it's being created and isn't the main reason it's used. It's used because of its content; any proposal to change the primacy of that needs to be rethought. EddieHugh (talk) 20:04, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

I agree that it is fundamentally wrong to design an encyclopedia focusing in "people oriented principles". It should be primarily about content, not people. "people oriented principles" is what is behind oriented advertising, spam, destructive COI, and all kinds of bad stuff that generally stay at Wikimedia borders, menacing our projects. We don't need the WMF to roll out the red carpet for them. Also people (editors) before content is one of the principles that seem to have dictated the fast decadence, ruin and obliviousness of long forgotten Citizendum. --- Darwin ^Ahoy! 11:19, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

This proposal is heavy on buzzwords and light on specifics, but so far as "people-oriented" vs. "content-oriented", no. It is the content that ultimately matters, and that is what serves the people who read our work. We don't need some kind of "people-centered" bit that sacrifices quality in favor of sparing someone's feelings; we should instead hurt someone's feelings to preserve quality of content. Sorry if that calculation seems a bit blunt, but that's exactly how we need our project to work. Seraphimblade (talk) 00:00, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

By all means start some new projects to play at social engineering, and keep them if they work, but do not attempt to contaminate our hard-won credibility for verifiability and notability with "truth by popular opinion", unverifiable information that someone "knows must be true", or protecting incompetents and disinformationists. If you want a place where everyone must play nicely and we are not allowed to call out bad actors, do not call it Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, or any of the other established projects. Those belong to the communities which built them, and we care about quality.
If you want more people with more diverse backgrounds to edit the content focused projects, teach them how to do it first. That way everone wins. When they have developed enough competence and understand the concepts of neutrality, notability and verifiability, they will fit in much better. When they apply those principles they will be welcomed.
Try running a survey with the donors, and ask them whether the people or the content are most important to them, and whether they would continue to donate if the content went downhill.
Every day there is more content to curate. Some is good, some is not. Getting more garbage because we are obliged to be nice to the vandals and fools is not a good use of limited resources, and much of the reason for incivility to newbies is overwork by the curation crew, who are constantly struggling against the backlogs. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:39, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Sensible re-articulation of existing goals

To me this reads as a re-articulation of familiar goals, and I'm having trouble understanding what kinds of practical consequences this would have (everything here seems pretty abstract). My sense of WMF activities is that they have never focused on content, but rather on the people who make that content (or are interested in making that content). A possible exception is in the development of the technical infrastructure, but there, too, most developments I'm aware of in the past several years have likewise focused on new user experience rather than the existing editor base.

In general, this seems like an entirely sensible and worthwhile approach for an organization like WMF. It doesn't make sense for them to be primarily engaged directly with content. So the focus will be on the people. Of course, they're not actually in opposition, since it's inescapable that all of this will inevitably be directly connected to the content regardless. I would prefer to see a little bit more attention paid to the existing community of hard-working contributors to do things beyond outreach, but it's hard to write that kind of thing into a strategic direction. :) Ultimately, I don't see anything here that would indicate much change. The only thing of real concern is the proposed change to community policy (e.g. notability, reliable sources), but that's a separate discussion. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:27, 21 September 2019 (UTC)