Re: [Wikimedia-l] The other side of the crisis at WMFR

[John Erling Blad]

When I first saw the posts I thought it would probably be more opinions to
them than the very clear blame-game that were going on. Having a partly
anonymous community and a chapter that only represents some of the users
are an invitation to fierce battles.

Whatever going on at WMFR, I believe it is time for reevaluating the role
of WMF in this. I'm wondering if there should be a new board for WMF,
unless they get a new chair themselves asap. Reorganize, solve the
problems, and move on.

No, I do not know any of the people involved.

John Erling Blad
/jeblad

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 3:11 PM, Marie-Alice Mathis <
mariealice.gar...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I haven’t had a real opportunity to introduce myself: I am Marie-Alice
> Mathis, 32, a now ex-member of the Board of Wikimédia France.
>
> The transition with the newly elected members of the Board is now complete
> and I gladly step down to get away from the violence, exhaustion and
> frustration of these past few months.
>
> I was a Board candidate because after completing my PhD I finally had more
> time to contribute to the projects and serve the community through the
> French chapter: after watching my husband Rémi Mathis do it for years I had
> a pretty good idea of what it meant. I did not know our ED Nathalie Martin
> or our chair Émeric Vallespi before working with them, and now that I have
> I can vouch for their hard work and attachment to the movement’s values.
>
> Today, I have lost friends or people I thought were friends because I
> defended Nathalie and Émeric in good faith during the smear campaign based
> on the community’s assumption that they were the source and cause of all
> the chapter’s problems, real or perceived. Although I have worked with them
> closely for a year, I have been repeatedly informed that I’ve been
> manipulated by Nathalie from the start and should not have blindly believed
> everything Émeric was saying. I’ve been personally attacked on WMF sites,
> email lists, and social media for weeks, my every word scrutinised,
> questioned and mocked assuming I was either ignorant or lying. I’ve been
> told by so-called feminists who were endorsing a particularly sexist rant
> against me to “stop making inflammatory comments”. I’ve been called a
> conspiracy theorist because I questioned the role of our former chair
> Christophe Henner, now chair of the Board at the WMF, in the threats to
> withdraw our chapter agreement and the cutting of half our FDC funding.
> People close to Christophe who have resigned from the WMFR Board early in
> the crisis rather than take responsibility for their mistakes now call
> themselves victims and whistleblowers. The WMF, who is perfectly aware of
> the charges of sexual harassment filed by Nathalie against Christophe for
> facts dating back to when he was her boss at Wikimédia France, is
> pretending WMFR leadership has used the threat of legal action to
> intimidate chapter members and silence opposition.
>
> Some unfounded allegations have been made on this very list by prominent
> members of the community (and what is a newbie’s word worth in that case,
> right?): from extremely serious accusations of misuse of chapter funds for
> personal gain (that strangely enough never made it to the French justice
> system despite a so-called “rather convincing rationale”), to gratuitous
> ones that Nathalie was making the Board’s decisions for us and dictating
> our communication (I am old enough to write my own emails, thank you very
> much), to ever vague ones of “quite generous expenses reimbursement“. None
> of this has been supported by proof or tangible facts, but the goal of
> spreading distrust and dissent in the chapter and the wider community has
> clearly been reached. Even now that Nathalie has left her position and the
> Board has resigned, some are still defaming her in the French media in the
> hopes of winning the stupid argument of who were the bad guys in the
> crisis.
>
> I am also extremely disappointed that no one from this list asked us (the
> Board) what was happening when these allegations were made, with only a
> handful of people suggesting to wait before all the facts were known.
> Instead, you took for granted the very short and extremely biased English
> summaries of the Board’s communications (which were instantly circulated on
> this list without our consent and in violation of our chapter’s bylaws),
> and joined in the chorus of outrage, condemnation and verbal abuse.
>
> But worse to me than all this, I am actually terrified at how easily the
> Wikimedia community can turn on a person, with no regard whatsoever for
> decency or legality, when it has made up its mind about who has no place
> there. I have personally experienced what it means to disagree with this
> angry mob: questioning the dominant opinion or calling out individuals’
> toxic behaviour makes you in turn acceptable collateral damage and a “fair
> game” target for harassment.
>
> Speaking o

Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

[Andreas Kolbe]

Hi Erik,


Nice to hear from you.

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 11:48 PM, Erik Moeller  wrote:

>
> The power of an open, nonprofit approach to "knowledge as a service"
> is precisely to democratize access to knowledge graph information: to
> make it available to nonprofits, public institutions, communities,
> individuals. This includes projects like the "Structured Data for
> Wikimedia Commons" effort, which is a potential game-changer for
> institutions like galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
>
> Nor is such an approach inherently monopolistic: quite the opposite.
> Wikidata is well-suited for a certain class of data-related problems
> but not so much for others. Everything around Wikidata is evolving in
> the direction of federation: federated queries across multiple open
> datasets, federated installations of the Wikibase software, and so on.
> If anything, it seems likely that a greater emphasis on "knowledge as
> a service" will unavoidably decentralize influence and control, and
> bring knowledge from other knowledge providers into the Wikimedia
> context.
>


... and it will all become one free mush everyone copies to make a buck. We
are already in a situation today where anyone asking Siri, the Amazon Echo,
Google or Bing about a topic is likely to get the same answer from all of
them, because they all import Wikimedia content, which comes free of
charge. I find that worrying, because as an information delivery system,
it’s not robust. You change one source, and all the other sources change as
well. That's a huge vulnerability. No one looking at the system as a whole
would design it that way.


Internet manipulation is a big topic in the news these days. We have
millions of people in the United States and UK wondering whether
sophisticated, targeted online manipulation put Trump into the White House
and took Britain out of the EU.[1] The same people that once expressed
unadulterated optimism about the Internet’s effect on the world, believing
it would democratise and decentralise everything (a related Berners-Lee
statement is quoted approvingly in the draft Appendix[2]), are now sounding
alarms that the Internet has opened new and far more insidious avenues of
influence, among them targeted ads and viral lies.[3]


If Wikimedia content does come to play the essential role envisaged, anyone
with a vested interest will have a powerful motive to try and subvert this
knowledge base, using the most sophisticated SEO, AI, cyberattack and
socio-political methods known today or yet to be imagined. Do we really
expect that Wikimedia will somehow be immune to such attacks? Do we expect
that volunteers will be able to keep up with this in real time?


The draft Appendix states that "In a world where some try to limit,
control, or manipulate information, we seek to be a beacon of facts,
openness, and good faith". No one can criticise such aspirations. But this
upbeat and self-flattering message ignores that on its present scale,
Wikimedia content has already been demonstrated to be politically
corruptible, serving as a handy and welcome tool in the hands of precisely
those who do seek to "limit, control or manipulate information."[4][5][6]


Even if we agree on nothing else, and you choose to be a blue-eyed optimist
and I a jaundiced pessimist, we should be able to agree that an openly
editable online database underpinning the content delivery of literally
more AI tools and digital assistants than there are people on the planet[7]
will be a sitting duck for bad-faith actors, from conflicted editors,
political factions and SEO experts to government-sponsored hackers, and
that there will be challenges to be faced and prepared for.

Speaking about AI development, Elon Musk warned earlier this year that
people will sometimes "get so engrossed in their work that they don’t
really realize the ramifications of what they’re doing"[8] and that even
with the best intentions, it's perfectly possible to "produce something
evil by accident."[9] He's right.


People get carried away by new technological possibilities, and fail to
look at potential downsides of what they are doing. They’re not always
obvious. I mean, take Facebook. Millions of people flocked to the free
platform, using it as a welcome means to stay in touch with friends and
family. Nobody in their wildest dreams would have thought that their
participation in that trend, just so they could keep up with cousin Pete
and reconnect with old school friends, might one day undermine democracy.
Yet that is exactly what is being investigated now.[1] As we speak,
Congress and the Senate Intelligence Committee are still trying to find out
from Facebook, Twitter and Google exactly what happened.[10] Meanwhile,
Trump is in power. Whatever the eventual findings, these very public
discussions and worries should make clear that successful, well-timed
manipulation of content delivered automatically by AI tools to vast numbers
of people can have staggering global consequen

[Wikimedia-l] The other side of the crisis at WMFR

[Marie-Alice Mathis]

Hello all,

I haven’t had a real opportunity to introduce myself: I am Marie-Alice
Mathis, 32, a now ex-member of the Board of Wikimédia France.

The transition with the newly elected members of the Board is now complete
and I gladly step down to get away from the violence, exhaustion and
frustration of these past few months.

I was a Board candidate because after completing my PhD I finally had more
time to contribute to the projects and serve the community through the
French chapter: after watching my husband Rémi Mathis do it for years I had
a pretty good idea of what it meant. I did not know our ED Nathalie Martin
or our chair Émeric Vallespi before working with them, and now that I have
I can vouch for their hard work and attachment to the movement’s values.

Today, I have lost friends or people I thought were friends because I
defended Nathalie and Émeric in good faith during the smear campaign based
on the community’s assumption that they were the source and cause of all
the chapter’s problems, real or perceived. Although I have worked with them
closely for a year, I have been repeatedly informed that I’ve been
manipulated by Nathalie from the start and should not have blindly believed
everything Émeric was saying. I’ve been personally attacked on WMF sites,
email lists, and social media for weeks, my every word scrutinised,
questioned and mocked assuming I was either ignorant or lying. I’ve been
told by so-called feminists who were endorsing a particularly sexist rant
against me to “stop making inflammatory comments”. I’ve been called a
conspiracy theorist because I questioned the role of our former chair
Christophe Henner, now chair of the Board at the WMF, in the threats to
withdraw our chapter agreement and the cutting of half our FDC funding.
People close to Christophe who have resigned from the WMFR Board early in
the crisis rather than take responsibility for their mistakes now call
themselves victims and whistleblowers. The WMF, who is perfectly aware of
the charges of sexual harassment filed by Nathalie against Christophe for
facts dating back to when he was her boss at Wikimédia France, is
pretending WMFR leadership has used the threat of legal action to
intimidate chapter members and silence opposition.

Some unfounded allegations have been made on this very list by prominent
members of the community (and what is a newbie’s word worth in that case,
right?): from extremely serious accusations of misuse of chapter funds for
personal gain (that strangely enough never made it to the French justice
system despite a so-called “rather convincing rationale”), to gratuitous
ones that Nathalie was making the Board’s decisions for us and dictating
our communication (I am old enough to write my own emails, thank you very
much), to ever vague ones of “quite generous expenses reimbursement“. None
of this has been supported by proof or tangible facts, but the goal of
spreading distrust and dissent in the chapter and the wider community has
clearly been reached. Even now that Nathalie has left her position and the
Board has resigned, some are still defaming her in the French media in the
hopes of winning the stupid argument of who were the bad guys in the crisis.

I am also extremely disappointed that no one from this list asked us (the
Board) what was happening when these allegations were made, with only a
handful of people suggesting to wait before all the facts were known.
Instead, you took for granted the very short and extremely biased English
summaries of the Board’s communications (which were instantly circulated on
this list without our consent and in violation of our chapter’s bylaws),
and joined in the chorus of outrage, condemnation and verbal abuse.

But worse to me than all this, I am actually terrified at how easily the
Wikimedia community can turn on a person, with no regard whatsoever for
decency or legality, when it has made up its mind about who has no place
there. I have personally experienced what it means to disagree with this
angry mob: questioning the dominant opinion or calling out individuals’
toxic behaviour makes you in turn acceptable collateral damage and a “fair
game” target for harassment.

Speaking of this, the movement as a whole needs to address the issue of
staff-volunteers relations exemplified by the rapid turnover of executive
staff across chapters. Nathalie stayed at WMFR an almost record breaking 4
years, but at what cost? I’m being extremely serious in adding that this
conversation needs to take place before something irreversible happens as a
result of harmful group behaviour within the community.

Sincerely,
Marie-Alice Mathis // AlienSpoon


PS: for your information about my position regarding the WMF’s role in this
crisis and their recent unilaterally added conditions [
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grant_expectations_for_Wikimedia_France_-_2017-2018]
for payment of our FDC-attributed grant, I attach my email to Katy Love
from Sept 20.

Katy, (Cc WMFr Board 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] what made me happy this week: the offline app

[James Salsman]

Yes, mobile app page views are much closer to 1.5% than 0.0006%, my
mistake, I used the WAP row with 116,000 page views in 2015 instead of
the 784,000,000 pageviews of the mobile app.

I caught the error after pressing "Send", but I decided that it didn't
need to be corrected, given that the Strategic Direction document
still says, "in the next 15 years, the languages that will be the most
spoken are primarily those that currently lack good content and strong
Wikimedia communities," citing a table which predicts the most widely
spoken languages in 2050, which in turn cites a report which says
nothing about 2050, but does say, "Mandarin is the most spoken
language globally."

Mandarin is not the most widely spoken language:
https://assets.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/1510B15-languages-most-speakers-english-chinese-chart.png

And it's growing much more slowly than English is:
https://revolutioninlearning.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/14j3i4hyjvi88-0p0ofe-english-speakers-learners-1.jpg

I would have corrected the error promptly if there was evidence that
respect for the truth was more highly regarded.


On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:04 AM, Legoktm  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Nuria Ruiz  wrote:
>> You have data about app pageviews in several places, the most popular tool
>> to see that kind of data has numbers, for example app pageviews
>> for en.wikipedia.
>>
>> The notion of what is an app pageview fluctuates more than what is a web
>> pageview, but numbers are quite far away from being less than 1%
>>
>> https://tools.wmflabs.org/siteviews/?platform=mobile-app&source=pageviews&agent=user&range=latest-20&sites=en.wikipedia.org
>
> Using the tool you linked, I selected "All projects", and then divided
> the number of mobile app views by the total views to get: around 1.5%.
> Is that figure accurate for the amount of page views coming from
> mobile apps?
>
> -- Legoktm
>
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