[Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong

[Ashwin Baindur]

I agree with Butch Bustria.

Considering that the WMF is not short of funds, and there appears to be
adequate funds to establish fund deposits outside WMF and fund third party
organisations not directly involved in the core vision of the Movement,
i.e. to make the sum of human knowledge available to all (paraphrasing
here), it is hard to understand how funds are a constraint as one
understands by the lead of the Product Team.

Without delivery of the most modern and highest quality content, all other
activities such as Movement strategy, offline activities etc are
meaningless activity that can be done away with.

There is urgent need for a vision that gives primacy to the platform, it's
capabilities and tools to support those that make the content. If it
requires substantial investment and time, so be it, but at present there
seems to be no sign on ground that the infrastructure is being improved us
a substantial rewrite or major upgrade.

The activities mentioned by the Products lead are reasonably important but
they are just isolated disjunct things while the creaking infrastructure
isn't addressed as a whole.

I hope this changes in the near future and we get the strong framework that
will enable graphs, video, interactivity, accessibility and all modern
features of the future.

AshLin

On Wed, 7 Feb 2024, 09:50 Butch Bustria,  wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> My earnest hope that the Wikimedia Foundation on its 2024-2025 Annual
> Financial Plan prioritize and I mean put first among all is the technical
> infrastructure among all its budgetary items. We can scale down budgets to
> 3rd party organizations like the Knowledge Equity Fund, Movement Strategy
> Governance funding, campaign grants, and other "wants" to accomodate a
> highly technically reliable and stable Wikimedia online projects ("needs"),
> future proof, and user friendly experience which require investments on
> quality manpower, hardware, applications and the like. We love open source
> but we also be pragmatic and wise on selection of choices because we want
> our content be conveniently available and reliable to our readers, users,
> consumers and also editors.
>
> A welcome development is the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference,
> the successor to EMWCon.
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_2024
>
> The said conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, from April 17–19,
> 2024.
>
> I also hope the Foundation invest in more technical gatherings, both
> onsite, hybrid or online to engage and reach out to more technical
> contributors, within and beyond the Wikimedia movement. I also hope WMF to
> start exploring eastward to Asia or elsewhere in the world as well fully
> diversify the technical community.
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> *Butch Bustria*
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 7, 2024, 4:54 AM Brion Vibber  wrote:
>
>> Thanks for weighing in, Marshall!
>>
>> I agree wholeheartedly that we need to do a proper architecture for a
>> sandbox for interactive media, that will be safe (first and foremost),
>> perform well in the browser, work across device types (desktop web, mobile
>> web, mobile apps), and maintain our key requirements on editability and
>> reusability, balanced against the security and privacy needs of users if
>> we're going to invest the effort.
>>
>> Backing up to do it right rather than patch up Graphs “one more time” is
>> the right thing, and I’m very happy to see a confluence of interest around
>> this now!
>>
>> My hope is we can figure out how to make that architecture & testing work
>> happen in the near term until we collectively (inside WMF and out) can
>> wrangle resources to make the implementation production-ready.
>>
>> Once we have a common infrastructure to build on, it’ll be easier for
>> work to progress on individual types of media (graphs, charts, maps,
>> animations, editable simulations, coding examples, etc, as well as classics
>> like panorama viewers and integrating the audio/video player into a sandbox
>> for heightened security).
>>
>> My biggest hope is that we’ll enable more work from outside WMF to happen
>> – letting volunteers and other orgs who might have their own specialty
>> areas and work funding to progress without every change being a potential
>> new security risk.
>>
>> When we have succeeded in the past, we have succeeded by making tools
>> that other people can use as their own basis to build their own works. I’m
>> confident we can get there on interactive media with some common focus.
>>
>> Let's all try to capture some of this momentum while we've got it and set
>> ourselves up for success down the road.
>>
>> – b
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 6, 2024, 12:27 PM  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone – My name is Marshall Miller, I am a Senior Director of
>>> Product at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I work with many of the teams that
>>> are involved with the user experience of our websites and apps, such as the
>>> Editing, Web, Growth, and Mobile Apps teams (among 

[Wikimedia-l] Feedback invited on proposed requirements for affiliates & user groups recognition changes

[Nataliia Tymkiv]

Dear all,

I would like to share with you the outputs of the Wikimedia Foundation
Affiliate Strategy process [1], and to invite you to give feedback on the
proposed changes to requirements for all affiliates & to user groups
recognition process (more below).

The 2017 Strategic Direction
 says
that we, the Wikimedia Movement, would build “the services and structures
that enable others to … advance our world by collecting knowledge that
fully represents human diversity” while carrying on “our mission of
developing content”. As Wikimedia affiliates are a key and integral part of
the Wikimedia movement and have knowledge and expertise to share, the
movement’s success depends greatly on affiliates as they help people join
us in doing mission-aligned work. The Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates
Strategy report [2] identified a need to streamline the role of the
Affiliations Committee (AffCom) on recognition of Wikimedia Affiliates, and
identified issues with the current state of the process.

After conversations with AffCom, the Board liaisons to AffCom identified
two areas for improvement. These areas are about the relevant work and
mandate of the Board related to affiliate recognition:

1) requirements for affiliates; and

2) improving the workflows around the process for the creation and
recognition of a user group.

The proposal on Meta [3] is suggesting to change the requirements for all
existing Wikimedia affiliates, not just the legal entities. There are ten
proposed criteria for a healthy affiliate. Examples include focusing on
continuity by being an active group and welcoming new users, having good
governance, and actively delivering on mission goals. Compliance with these
requirements would be self-reported by the affiliates. The Board liaisons
will work with the Affiliations Committee to publish a resolution outlining
how affiliates would be expected to fulfill these requirements to remain in
good standing.

Throughout the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliate Strategy process, there was
also feedback about user groups. Initially, user groups were meant as a
first step toward creating chapters or thematic organizations. Over the
years, user groups have evolved and there are now legally incorporated user
groups, user groups with boards, etc. Getting started does need to be easy,
but also needs to make sense, and so there is a proposal for changes to the
current workflow. The recommendations [3] include an outline of the
sequential steps of a revised process.


The feedback can be given from today up till March 20, 2024 (Anywhere on
Earth). Hopefully a fairly long feedback period will allow affiliates to
consult with their membership, thinking it through practically.

To provide your feedback, please review the page here, on Meta, [3] and
leave comments on the talk page. Alternatively, you can join an open
call (February
14 and 28 at  14:00 to 14:30 UTC) or request a conversation as a part of
Talking:2024
.
You can use the Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Talking:
2024#Let’s Talk|Let’s Talk

feature to sign up for a time to speak with me and other trustees about
this conversation or any other topic regarding the Wikimedia Foundation
Board, Movement Strategy, and more.

Note: New user group applications will be placed on hold for the duration
of this conversation – but the ones received before will be reviewed
according to the current process.

Best regards,

Nat & Mike & Lorenzo
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Liaisons to the Affiliations
Committee

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Affiliates_Strategy


[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard/Wikimedia_Foundation_Affiliates_Strategy:_Summary_and_Report


[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Affiliates_Strategy/Review

Best regards,
antanana / Nataliia Tymkiv
Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

*NOTICE: You may have received this message outside of your normal working
hours/days, as I usually can work more as a volunteer during weekend. You
should not feel obligated to answer it during your days off. Thank you in
advance!*
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[Wikimedia-l] Sign up for the language community meeting on February 21st, 12:00 pm UTC!

[Srishti Sethi]

Hello all,

The next language community meeting is coming up in a few weeks - *February
21st, 12:00 pm UTC*.

If you're interested, you can sign up on this wiki page: <
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Language_engineering/Community_meetings#21_February_2024
>.

This meeting is for individuals involved in creating content or managing
technical aspects across different language communities. This will be a
participant-driven meeting, where we collectively discuss specific
technical issues related to language wikis and work together to find
possible solutions. This could involve anything from fixing a broken
template on the Kurdish wiki to brainstorming ideas for growing content on
the Tulu Wiktionary, currently in the Wikimedia Incubator, or celebrating
the creation of Fon Wikipedia, to using MinT for content translation.

Feel free to add any *technical updates* related to your project or ideas
for *problem-solving* discussion that you would like to share during the
meeting to the notes document here: <
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-february-2024>.

If you need interpretation support from English to another language, please
let us know by sending an email to sse...@wikimedia.org.

Looking forward to your participation!

Cheers,
Jon, Mary & Srishti

*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation 
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong

[Gnangarra]

Hi

I just like to highlight one point, that raises concerns;


perhaps enabling other platforms/apps to use our content to make
interactive or video materials there.


While this sounds like an easy solution we run into a number of hidden
costs.  These are significant when we push for reusers to present what we
are doing in better ways we lose the movement's revenue stream as less
people see our donation banners.  With less direct traffic we also
sacrifice the ability to convert readers into contributors which has always
been our primary source of community sustainability and growth.   I know
other providers will find different ways to present our efforts in part or
in whole that is part of our purpose, to do our mission and achieve our
goals we need prioritise internal solutions.

This also leads us to a related issue that our mission is to make the sum
of all knowledge freely available. When we look to outside parties to share
our efforts we lose our ability to ensure that the information is neutral,
and that it's freely accessible.  Butch is right in noting that when we put
funding into third party sites it is taking resources away from the
movement, yet those same funds were donated to us on the basis of
maintaining and building our infrastructure.  It would be a wise investment
to enable some of those much needed interactive and video content here
through purchasing rights.

On Wed, 7 Feb 2024 at 12:20, Butch Bustria  wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> My earnest hope that the Wikimedia Foundation on its 2024-2025 Annual
> Financial Plan prioritize and I mean put first among all is the technical
> infrastructure among all its budgetary items. We can scale down budgets to
> 3rd party organizations like the Knowledge Equity Fund, Movement Strategy
> Governance funding, campaign grants, and other "wants" to accomodate a
> highly technically reliable and stable Wikimedia online projects ("needs"),
> future proof, and user friendly experience which require investments on
> quality manpower, hardware, applications and the like. We love open source
> but we also be pragmatic and wise on selection of choices because we want
> our content be conveniently available and reliable to our readers, users,
> consumers and also editors.
>
> A welcome development is the MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference,
> the successor to EMWCon.
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_2024
>
> The said conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, from April 17–19,
> 2024.
>
> I also hope the Foundation invest in more technical gatherings, both
> onsite, hybrid or online to engage and reach out to more technical
> contributors, within and beyond the Wikimedia movement. I also hope WMF to
> start exploring eastward to Asia or elsewhere in the world as well fully
> diversify the technical community.
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> *Butch Bustria*
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 7, 2024, 4:54 AM Brion Vibber  wrote:
>
>> Thanks for weighing in, Marshall!
>>
>> I agree wholeheartedly that we need to do a proper architecture for a
>> sandbox for interactive media, that will be safe (first and foremost),
>> perform well in the browser, work across device types (desktop web, mobile
>> web, mobile apps), and maintain our key requirements on editability and
>> reusability, balanced against the security and privacy needs of users if
>> we're going to invest the effort.
>>
>> Backing up to do it right rather than patch up Graphs “one more time” is
>> the right thing, and I’m very happy to see a confluence of interest around
>> this now!
>>
>> My hope is we can figure out how to make that architecture & testing work
>> happen in the near term until we collectively (inside WMF and out) can
>> wrangle resources to make the implementation production-ready.
>>
>> Once we have a common infrastructure to build on, it’ll be easier for
>> work to progress on individual types of media (graphs, charts, maps,
>> animations, editable simulations, coding examples, etc, as well as classics
>> like panorama viewers and integrating the audio/video player into a sandbox
>> for heightened security).
>>
>> My biggest hope is that we’ll enable more work from outside WMF to happen
>> – letting volunteers and other orgs who might have their own specialty
>> areas and work funding to progress without every change being a potential
>> new security risk.
>>
>> When we have succeeded in the past, we have succeeded by making tools
>> that other people can use as their own basis to build their own works. I’m
>> confident we can get there on interactive media with some common focus.
>>
>> Let's all try to capture some of this momentum while we've got it and set
>> ourselves up for success down the road.
>>
>> – b
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 6, 2024, 12:27 PM  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone – My name is Marshall Miller, I am a Senior Director of
>>> Product at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I work with many of the teams that
>>> are involved with the user experience 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong

[Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga]

Thanks Marshall for your pointing out an official answer from the WMF,
Let me say that this is not only disappointing, you are also presenting a false 
dichotomy where we can only "save a kitten" OR "plant a tree", while we have 
budget, staff and enough talented volunteers to do both. The dichotomy is 
presented in a way that makes us think that an estimation of the cost of 
solving this problem has been done and it is out of all the possibilities, but 
we don't know what the estimation is. Is there an estimation of how much would 
this cost? If so, could you please share it so we know why this is out of our 
possibilities?

I say that this dichotomy is false and I will try to explain why:

  *   When Maryana Iskander assumed her CEO role, she pointed that the way the 
annual plan is done should be changed, because the previous monolithic 
assumption that only things reflected in the annual plan can be done (and 
nothing else) was preventing us from going forward. You can read it the full 
reflection 
here:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Maryana%E2%80%99s_Listening_Tour/My_Incoming_Priorities.
 Claiming that a high priority problem can't be solved now because it wasn't 
planned one year ago is not the way it was supposed this to be done.
  *
The message is not about the Graphs extension. It has some weight there, but 
reading this message about interactive content in terms of "if we solve the 
graphs issue, our job here is done" is also a wrong reduction. But let's think 
that, indeed, this was the only problem we should solve. Arguing that it is not 
in the Annual plan so it can't be solved is a fallacy, as explained above, but 
even then, the annual plan was done AFTER the graph extension was broken. 
Waiting two years for a high importance problem to be solved can't be the way 
to do things.
  *
Two weeks after Iskander's message, Yael Weissburg wrote in Diff this post: 
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/28/what-does-the-world-need-from-us-now-external-trends-to-watch/.
 In this post Weissburg wrote about "trends that we should expect to accelerate 
in the years to come because they relate to key changes in how people access, 
interact with, and share knowledge". You can read the post by yourself, but 
there is an important takeaway: people is searching for content in another way, 
and we should give them "rich content". Whatever it takes.
  *
One year after Iskander assumed she wrote an update. There we can read that the 
number 2 priority is "Re-centering the Foundation's responsibility in 
supporting the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement by understanding the 
needs of our contributor communities, as well as emerging topics like machine 
learning/artificial intelligence and innovations for new audiences." We should 
be doing that "innovations for new audiences", but from you message it seems 
that we still need "a conversation to happen" 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Chief_Executive_Officer/Updates/Year_One_Update
  *
Later that year, Selena Deckelmann wrote that "The Foundation needs to exhibit 
better accountability in maintaining essential services (e.g. 2-factor 
authentication), and to be explicit about the technical tasks that it is 
definitely leaving for volunteers to own." 
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Executive_and_Leadership_teams/Chief_Product_and_Technology_Officer/Selena%27s_Listening_Tour).
 Yes, I understand that the example given is another one, but the idea is 
there: "the foundation needs to exhibit better accountability in maintaining 
essential services". The message follows with an elephant in the room, but we 
are not going to talk again about the elephant, for sure.
  *   Finally, last two years annual plans were said to be rooted in the 2030 
Strategy (which talks about this issue) and, more specifically, on the 2019 
Medium Term 
plan.https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019.
 This Medium Term plan (which, again, is the one used as a roadmap) has only 
two high priority topics, the second one being: "2. Modernize our product 
experience. We will make contributor and reader experiences useful and joyful; 
moving from viewing Wikipedia as solely a website, to developing, supporting, 
and maintaining the Wikimedia ecosystem as a collection of knowledge, 
information, and insights with infinite possible product experiences and 
applications.". Then, there's a priority named "Platform evolution" which says 
literally this: "The Platform Evolution priority encompasses improving and 
modernizing Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem to respond to a landscape where 
Artificial Intelligence is creating content, rich media dominates learning, 
content is structured, and collaboration tools work across multiple devices and 
have minimal technical