Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Discuss/Innovate in Free Knowledge

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Discussion of priorities: Increase the Sustainability of our Movement • Improve User Experience • Provide for Safety and Inclusion • Ensure Equity in Decision-making • Coordinate Across Stakeholders • Invest in Skills and Leadership Development • Manage Internal Knowledge • Identify Topics for Impact • Innovate in Free Knowledge • Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

This is an open discussion space dedicated to defining potential priorities for implementation from the Innovate in Free Knowledge recommendation.

Identifying policies that hinder knowledge equity[edit]

Consult with communities and experts to identify policies in Wikimedia projects that act as barriers of access to content related to underrepresented communities (e.g. Notability).

  • Oppose Oppose This is scapegoating policies and guidelines as main "barriers of access", isn't it? Other factors (worse than just policies and guidelines) highly contribute to barriers of access, like secrecy (families and government have secrets, for example), unreliability of (some?) primary sources, and cultural genocide. Furthermore, we already have w:WP:IAR and w:WP:PAG#Role, and we already have enough information about oral history methods, something that should be averted in Wikipedia sites. This initiative encourages lowering standards for the sake of (forced?) change, doesn't it? George Ho (talk) 03:03, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. You can waste $millions "consulting" on this all you like, it's not happening. The community is never going to permit the Foundation scrap or undermine our Notability, Verifiability, Reliable Sourcing, and related content-quality policies. Open a Blogwiki if you want to host unreliable content like flat earthers and "oral histories". Alsee (talk) 04:18, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. Please stop wasting donation $$$ on trying to make English Wikipedia weaken its notability, verifiability, and reliable-sources guidelines. Let the communities decide what's best for their sites. These guidelines were put in place for good reasons. Weakening them would be detrimental to the integrity of the information on Wikipedia. These actions also go against the spirit of Wikipedia's NPOV policy — just the phrase “knowledge equity” is a sign of left-wing bias.
We already know what will happen if you do this consultation, because we've seen things like it many times before. The vast majority of English Wikipedia community members will be opposed to any change in notability policies, but a small minority will comment in support of the W?F. The W?F will only pay attention to the comments that agree with their predetermined outcome. They will then attempt to enforce these unwanted policy changes in a heavy-handed way, the community will revolt, and the W?F will shelve the changes, but only after a lot of time and money has been wasted on forcing changes nobody wanted.
TL;DR Stop trying to make this guideline change happen. It's not gonna happen. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 16:46, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strictly speaking, if the initiative were just followed as written, it probably wouldn't be a real problem. The initiative just states that policies would be "identified". We could analyse things and determine that, yes, policies A, B, and C mean that topic areas X, Y, and Z can't be covered beyond a certain level (eg we won't take unverified non-notable content), and that anyone wanting to add further coverage on those topics beyond that level should go somewhere else. Those people would benefit, we'd benefit. Unfortunately, I suspect that the "solution" being pushed here is to change the policies and goals and principles, rather than identify their implications for the purpose of avoiding having people continually push for changes that would damage the project. --Yair rand (talk) 23:58, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose. Notability and sourcing guidelines need to be increased to stop spam, hoaxes and misinformation undermining the credibility of the project. This will only enable even more grifters to get their own Wikipedia profile. (Which is what the WMF wants, isn't it? To get the article count up so they can cite the number in their glossy materials for donors.) No means no. MER-C (talk) 19:30, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose – there is no need to repeat what is already summarized in the statements above. --DerMaxdorfer (talk) 16:24, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you all for your thorough comments and feedback. Based on results from here and the Global Conversations, there's now a dedicated part of the space to discuss the highly-prioritized initiatives for global implementation in 2021-22 (which do not include this initiative). You're invited to continue the conversation there, if interested --Abbad (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 17 December 2020 (UTC).[reply]

Policies for experimentation with projects for knowledge equity[edit]

Create pathways to new projects, create new functionalities, or encourage communities to create new policies that address these barriers. The goal is to allow the inclusion and preservation of all forms of human knowledge in all socio-cultural contexts (e.g. encourage refining reliability criteria to provide guidelines to identify reliable sources from oral or non-Western knowledge resources, encourage ensuring that notability criteria are relevant in all contexts).

Continuous experimentation, technology, and partnerships for content, formats, and devices[edit]

  • Build the necessary technology to make free knowledge content accessible in various formats. Support more diverse modes of consumption and contribution to our projects (e.g. text, audio, visual, video, geospatial, etc.).
  • Create tools and partnerships to facilitate bringing content from other data and knowledge bases to our projects
  • ..
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