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

[mathieu stumpf guntz]

Hi James,

I fail to see the relation between Erik message and you answer.

I have huge doubt that Mandarin will eclipse English anytime soon. 
Despite the Confucius institutes growing everywhere in the world, as far 
as my narrow knowledge of the world goes, PRC doesn't seem to aim 
exporting Mandarin with heavy means of soft power competing with the 
Hollywood industry.


Anstataŭe mi bone fidas ke Esperanto frue estos ĉie parolita anstataŭ, 
kiel celas nian sekretan planon de monda superrego. Fakte ni jam 
kontrolas Ĉinian politikon pri tio, kaj uzas ĝiajn rimedojn por nia 
propra propagando[1], ehe!


[1] http://esperanto.cri.cn/

Mondsuperrege,
psikosklavoj


Le 28/10/2017 à 00:39, James Salsman a écrit :

Hi Erik,

I get the feeling you would question my identity if I didn't follow up
by asking you whether they asked you to endorse the possibility that
Mandarin could eclipse English?

Best regards,
James


On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:


I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The
Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from
Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at
all, was raised on this list in July for example.

There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of
all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include
basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems
worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it
really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):

https://imgur.com/a/vchAl

I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory
snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license
statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely
doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely
unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of
the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal
action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which
WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.


If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily
shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.

Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to
attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such
attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing
providence/citations is a good idea.


An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information
available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across
a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for
immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might
gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information
overload).

It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to
externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the
point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in
degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if
[[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over
that edge. :P

That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make
a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning
platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language
learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community,
etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some
of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to
knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of
transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for
knowledge or our need to develop new skills.

I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly
effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and
appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect
of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and
excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be
habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more
addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social
media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that
keep you coming back.

In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in
STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly
impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain.
While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to
reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused
enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.

I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask
whether it results in people getting better learning experiences,
through WMF's 

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

[James Salsman]

Hi Erik,

I get the feeling you would question my identity if I didn't follow up
by asking you whether they asked you to endorse the possibility that
Mandarin could eclipse English?

Best regards,
James


On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
>> I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The
>> Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from
>> Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at
>> all, was raised on this list in July for example.
>
> There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of
> all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include
> basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems
> worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it
> really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):
>
> https://imgur.com/a/vchAl
>
> I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory
> snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license
> statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely
> doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely
> unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of
> the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal
> action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which
> WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.
>
>> If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily
>> shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.
>
> Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to
> attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such
> attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing
> providence/citations is a good idea.
>
>> An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information
>> available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across
>> a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for
>> immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might
>> gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information
>> overload).
>
> It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to
> externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the
> point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in
> degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if
> [[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over
> that edge. :P
>
> That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make
> a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning
> platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language
> learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community,
> etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some
> of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to
> knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of
> transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for
> knowledge or our need to develop new skills.
>
> I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly
> effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and
> appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect
> of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and
> excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be
> habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more
> addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social
> media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that
> keep you coming back.
>
> In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in
> STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly
> impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain.
> While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to
> reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused
> enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.
>
> I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask
> whether it results in people getting better learning experiences,
> through WMF's sites or through affiliates and partners. Personally, I
> think the long term focus on "knowledge as a service" and "knowledge
> equity" is right on target, but it's also useful to explicitly think
> about good old Wikipedia and how it might benefit directly. Here are
> some things that I think might help develop better learning
> experiences on Wikipedia:
>
> - a next generation templating system optimized for data exploration,
> timelines, etc., with greater separation of design, code, data and
> text
> - better support for writing/finding articles that target 

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

[Samuel Klein]

>
> (Oddly enough, I am more likely to read a Wikipedia article
> from beginning to end if I'm looking something up on the Kindle, while I'm
> reading a book.)
>

There's definitely some appetite for [WP-branded and -supported!] reading
and research devices tuned for this sort of work: hyperlinked referencing,
bookmarking, reading, annotating, and compiling into an overview of one's
thoughts while working through an original document [book, article,
encyclopedia article].


> I think it would be more interesting to spin off the existing
> > "Wikipedia Library" into its own international organization (or home
> > it with an existing one), tasked with giving free knowledge
> > contributors (including potentially to other free knowledge projects
> > like OSM) access to proprietary resources


Warmly agreed.  Related essential services: curating and organizing
proprietary resources, and transmogrifying them into reusable elements [cf.
ContentMine/FactMine].
A few narrow areas of this are covered by commercial services, but most are
not.

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

[Toby Negrin]

Hi everybody --

I just wanted to follow up quickly that this report has been published and
is available here:


> I know that some folks were wondering about all the consultation comments
> about features, interfaces, and product improvements that didn't get
> incorporated into the strategy. We knew from the beginning of the processes
> that we'd certainly get quite a few of these requests that were too
> specific to be integrated into long-term strategic thinking and planned
> accordingly to document them. The goal was to consider how they might be
> taken up by either Foundation staff or interested volunteer developers. As
> a result, we're publishing a “Features report” written by Suzie Nussel that
> summarizes these requests, and should be a useful starting point for
> specific improvements that could be addressed in the shorter term.


 The PDF version is at:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Movement_
Strategy_2017_-_2017_Features_and_programs_(cycle_1).pdf

and the wiki version of the report is at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/2017/Reports/
Features_and_Programs_report_summary

The Audiences team will be using this report as an input into future
product discussions and annual planning.

-Toby

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I
> haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been
> continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in
> which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic
> direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to
> create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we
> might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these
> goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and
> individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to
> acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
>
> I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed
> again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my
> drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges
> you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of
> our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals
> responding and will result in differences in implementation in each
> community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of
> source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But
> regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich,
> substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and
> most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I
> hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement
> strategy process.
>
> A few more responses inline:
>
> 2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk :
> >
> > I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
> is
> > too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take
> > away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free
> > knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't
> > expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that
> > our work is being put to good use.
>
> It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical
> assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but
> it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the
> contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do
> think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination
> for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially
> in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our
> brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most
> valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to
> build on them for long-term planning.
>
> When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and
> much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to
> provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and
> visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present
> in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct
> interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have
> on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring
> a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is
> unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's
> about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces 

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

[Erik Moeller]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The
> Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from
> Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at
> all, was raised on this list in July for example.

There is some basic attribution in the Alexa app (which keeps a log of
all transactions). As I said, I don't see a reason not to include
basic attribution in the voice response as well, but it still seems
worth pointing out. Here's what it looks like in the app (yup, it
really does say "Image: Wikipedia", which is all too typical):

https://imgur.com/a/vchAl

I'm all in favor of a legal opinion on bulk use of introductory
snippets from Wikimedia articles without attribution/license
statement. While I'm obviously not a lawyer, I do, however, sincerely
doubt that it would give you the clarity you seek, given the extremely
unusual nature of authorship of Wikipedia, and the unusual nature of
the re-use. I suspect that such clarity would result only from legal
action, which I would consider to be extremely ill-advised, and which
WMF almost certainly lacks standing to pursue on its own.

> If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily
> shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.

Regardless of the legal issue, I agree that nudging re-users to
attribute content is useful to reinforce the concept that such
attribution goes with re-use. Even with CC-0, showing
providence/citations is a good idea.

> An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information
> available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across
> a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for
> immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might
> gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information
> overload).

It's a fair question; the Internet has certainly pushed our ability to
externalize knowledge into overdrive. Perhaps we've already passed the
point where this is a difference in kind, rather than a difference in
degree, compared with how we've shared knowledge in the past; if
[[Neuralink]] doesn't turn out to be vaporware, it may push us over
that edge. :P

That said, people have to acquire specialized domain knowledge to make
a living, and the explosive growth of many immersive learning
platforms (course platforms like edX, Coursera, Udacity; language
learning tools like Duolingo; the vast educational YouTube community,
etc.) suggests that there is a very large demand. While I share some
of your concerns about the role of for-profit gatekeepers to
knowledge, I am not genuinely worried that the availability of
transactional "instant answers" will quench our innate thirst for
knowledge or our need to develop new skills.

I'm most concerned about information systems that deliver highly
effective emotional "hits" and are therefore more habit-forming and
appealing than Wikipedia, Google, or a good book. The negative effect
of high early childhood TV use on attention is well-documented, and
excessive use of social media (which are continuously optimized to be
habit-forming) may have similar effects. Alarmist "Facebook is more
addictive than crack" headlines aside, the reality is that social
media are great delivery vehicles for the kinds of little rewards that
keep you coming back.

In this competition for attention, Wikipedia articles, especially in
STEM topics, have a well-deserved reputation of often being nearly
impenetrable for people not already familiar with a given domain.
While we will never be able to reach everyone, we should be able to
reach people who _want_ to learn but have a hard time staying focused
enough to do so, due to a very low frustration tolerance.

I think one way to bottom line any Wikimedia strategy is to ask
whether it results in people getting better learning experiences,
through WMF's sites or through affiliates and partners. Personally, I
think the long term focus on "knowledge as a service" and "knowledge
equity" is right on target, but it's also useful to explicitly think
about good old Wikipedia and how it might benefit directly. Here are
some things that I think might help develop better learning
experiences on Wikipedia:

- a next generation templating system optimized for data exploration,
timelines, etc., with greater separation of design, code, data and
text
- better support for writing/finding articles that target different
audiences (beginners/experts)
- tech standards and requirements for embedding rich, interactive
"explorable explanations" beyond what any template system can do
- commissioned illustrations or animations for highly complex topics
(possibly organized through another nonprofit)
- assessment partnerships with external groups to verify that learners
get what they need from a given resource

In practice, this could translate 

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

[James Salsman]

On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 4:11 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 12:51 AM, James Salsman  wrote:

>> Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services
>> relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to
>> attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the
>> transluded content is derived?

> I don't think there's a sufficiently strong justification for
> modifying the manner of attribution specified in the "Terms of Use",

If the requirement to attribute "Through a list of all authors" when
hyperlinking isn't possible, such as with read-only displays or audio
output, were replaced with requiring to say that the content is from a
Wikipedia article with a given title and date, that would certainly
give more information about the actual authorship than a list of
mostly pseudonyms.

> which in any case would only apply to re-use of future revisions of
> CC-BY-SA/CC-BY content that's not also exempted by "fair use".

I don't think it would be difficult to convince content reusers to go
along with that. It would protect them against liability from hoaxes,
provide actual attribution information for those who want or need it,
and 30 years down the road when free license grants start expiring

> As a best practice, I do believe including timestamp or version
> information is helpful both for re-users themselves and for end users.
> [[Progressive disclosure]] keeps such information manageable. In my
> own re-use of CC-0 data from Wikidata, Open Library and similar
> sources, I do include timestamp information along with the source.
> Example re-use from Wikidata:
> https://lib.reviews/static/uploads/last-sync.png

If only our brand ambassadors were as interested in best practices! I
know they are, and once fundraising season rolls around there's going
to be the usual press barrage of interviews. Let's give them something
good to say so that would-be editors know we're the kind of people who
want to protect them from unattributed hoaxes.

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

[Erik Moeller]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 12:51 AM, James Salsman  wrote:
> Erik,
>
> Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services
> relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to
> attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the
> transluded content is derived?

James -

I don't think there's a sufficiently strong justification for
modifying the manner of attribution specified in the "Terms of Use",
which in any case would only apply to re-use of future revisions of
CC-BY-SA/CC-BY content that's not also exempted by "fair use".

As a best practice, I do believe including timestamp or version
information is helpful both for re-users themselves and for end users.
[[Progressive disclosure]] keeps such information manageable. In my
own re-use of CC-0 data from Wikidata, Open Library and similar
sources, I do include timestamp information along with the source.
Example re-use from Wikidata:
https://lib.reviews/static/uploads/last-sync.png

Erik

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

Hi Katherine,


On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Katherine Maher 
wrote:

> 2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller :
> >
> > With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's
> > worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you
> > at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the
> > ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the
> > "essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components
> > maintained by different groups).
>
> There is indeed an element of aspiration in that phrase. I knew it would be
> controversial, and we talked about it quite a bit in drafting, but
> advocated that we include it anyway. After all, our vision statement is "a
> world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all
> knowledge." That's certainly inclusive (it has no single parties or
> ownership) but it is also wildly aspirational. But despite the
> impossibility of our that aspiration, it has worked quite well: we've made
> great strides toward a project that is "impossible in theory".
>


Indeed, Wikipedia has become more influential than anyone thought likely
ten years ago.



> For each person who felt we should moderate the language of the direction,
> there was another who wanted us to be more bold and recapture this
> ambition. They wanted us to believe in ourselves, and give the world
> something to believe in. As Wikimedians, we tend to prefer matter-of-fact,
> sometimes plain and noncommittal statements. While that works well for NPOV
> content, a strategic direction also seeks to inspire ambitious efforts. The
> drafting group removed much of the flowery language from the earlier
> versions of the draft, but the goal was to keep just enough to inspire
> movement actors and external partners.



I understand the psychology of stretch goals, but I'd still say that some
goals are not worth aspiring towards.

It's in the nature of the human mind to be vulnerable to ambitions for
world domination. That vulnerability is well encapsulated in the jocular
saying "Power corrupts, but absolute power is kinda cool."

Ultimately, whenever idealists have achieved such absolute domination, the
systems they established were eventually used to some ends that were
anything but cool. Checks and balances are key to a healthy system.

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

Hi Erik,

More good points here.


On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:01 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:

>
> With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's
> already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding
> information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to
> Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values
> provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not
> considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
>


That is useful.



> > If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without
> telling
> > users where it got its information from, then there is not even a
> feedback
> > form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
>
> I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like
> "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I
> certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice.
> However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear
> that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all
> requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
>


I think it would be good to do some legal work to gain that clarity. The
Amazon Echo issue, with the Echo potentially using millions of words from
Wikipedia without any kind of attribution and indication of provenance at
all, was raised on this list in July for example.

We were promised an update here on this list months ago, but no such update
has come to date. If CC-BY-SA is not enforced, Wikipedia will stealthily
shift to CC-0 in practice. I don't think that's desirable.



> Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it
> shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to
> the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.:
> https://www.bing.com/search?q=france



I agree: Bing's solution is excellent. It provides attribution and
indicates provenance, in a manner that is reasonable based on the medium,
means and context in which the licensed material is shared, which is
literally all the licence requires.



> I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to
> document best practices for re-use, ranging from local
> community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the
> "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of
> these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to
> develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice
> applications, tabular data, and so on.
>
> Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license
> compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how
> to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do"
> from "here's what we recommend".
>


Agreed. Ideally this should be complemented by a public list indicating
which providers are following the recommendations.



> There is an important distinction between "lookup" and "learning"; the
> former is a transactional activity ("Is this country part of the Euro
> zone?") and the latter an immersive one ("How did the EU come
> about?"). Where we now get instant answers from home assistants or
> search engines, we may have previously skimmed, or performed our own
> highly optimized search in the local knowledge repository called a
> "bookshelf".
>


An interesting question to me is whether, with the explosion of information
available, people will spend so much time with transactional queries across
a large number of diverse topics that there is little time left for
immersive, in-depth learning of any one of them, and how that might
gradually change the type of knowledge people possess (information
overload).

Even today, political commentators are deploring that people are making
decisions on the basis of gut reactions and snippets – isolated bits of
information that have an emotional hook, but are stripped of wider context.
There seems to be fairly wide agreement that there is at least a potential
for negative consequences, as well as positive ones.

The growth in digital assistants could conceivably have a large impact
here, because a digital assistant can only answer the questions people ask
– and sometimes more background knowledge is needed to actually know what
questions to ask.

All of these effects are hard to predict, but it seems safe to say that, as
with any other structural change of this sort, there will be upsides and
downsides.



> In other words, even if some instant answers lead to a drop in
> Wikipedia views, it would be unreasonable to assume that those views
> were "reads" rather than "skims". When you're on a purely
> transactional journey, you appreciate almost anything that shortens
> it.
>


Absolutely true, and judging by myself – most of my own journeys on
Wikipedia.org are transactional – the number of page views corresponding to
someone actually reading a Wikipedia article 

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

[Peter Southwood]

I feel much the same as Lodewijk, though it is possible that we differ in 
detail. As he says the document is rather vague and open to divergent 
interpretation after the fact. 
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Lodewijk
Sent: Friday, 20 October 2017 7:51 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of 
movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little concerned that we can have 
such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get some 
Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a consistent 
direction from those.

What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would be 
doing more of the same, and more.

This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the direction 
is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics open is only 
natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to take the next 
steps.

Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't 
really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not to 
do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at 
Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.

Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text.
It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate with my 
ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I don't feel it 
provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing a direction, 
which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.

I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may very 
well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you
(plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately 
involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let them 
summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you have not 
done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an indicator that 
unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we can enter the next 
round. Given all effort and resources that have been invested in this process, 
such sanity check may be worth while.

Warmly,

Lodewijk

ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that 
went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I 
appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm always 
feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on the 
strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process - such 
rebut would be totally fair :).

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher <kma...@wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and 
> while I haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work 
> has been continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into 
> Phase 2, in which our objective is to start thinking about how we make 
> the strategic direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's 
> an opportunity to create greater clarity about how we each understand 
> the direction, how we might set goals against it, what we may need to 
> change to achieve these goals, and how we can contribute -- as 
> projects, communities, and individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly 
> update shortly but I wanted to acknowledge the contributions in this thread 
> first.
>
> I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, 
> agreed again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have 
> to scrap my drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I 
> dig the challenges you all have put forward and appreciate the 
> diversity of opinions. Some of our differences stem from the unique 
> contexts of the groups and individuals responding and will result in 
> differences in implementation in each community. Other differences, 
> such as questioning the very concept of source credibility, will 
> certainly require additional discussion. But regardless of where we 
> end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich, substantive 
> conversation. This has been one of the best, and most 
> thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I 
> hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement 
> strategy process.
>
> A few more responses inline:
>
> 2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk <lodew...@effeietsanders.org>:
> >
> > I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, 
> > there
> is
> > too much s

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

[Yaroslav Blanter]

Hello Lodewijk,

no, you are certainly not alone in your concerns. It looks like at this
stage there is little we can do, and the only option left is to not endorse
the document.

Cheers
Yaroslav

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Lodewijk 
wrote:

> Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little concerned that we can have
> such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get
> some Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a
> consistent direction from those.
>
> What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would
> be doing more of the same, and more.
>
> This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the
> direction is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics
> open is only natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to
> take the next steps.
>
> Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't
> really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not
> to do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at
> Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.
>
> Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text.
> It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate
> with my ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I
> don't feel it provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing
> a direction, which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.
>
> I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may
> very well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you
> (plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately
> involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let
> them summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you
> have not done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an
> indicator that unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we
> can enter the next round. Given all effort and resources that have been
> invested in this process, such sanity check may be worth while.
>
> Warmly,
>
> Lodewijk
>
> ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that
> went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I
> appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm
> always feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on
> the strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process -
> such rebut would be totally fair :).
>
> On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while
> I
> > haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been
> > continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in
> > which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic
> > direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity
> to
> > create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we
> > might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these
> > goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and
> > individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted
> to
> > acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
> >
> > I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed
> > again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap
> my
> > drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the
> challenges
> > you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some
> of
> > our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and
> individuals
> > responding and will result in differences in implementation in each
> > community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of
> > source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But
> > regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a
> rich,
> > substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and
> > most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I
> > hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement
> > strategy process.
> >
> > A few more responses inline:
> >
> > 2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk :
> > >
> > > I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
> > is
> > > too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I
> take
> > > away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free
> > > knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't
> > > expect people to know about 

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

[Lodewijk]

Thanks for the response, Katherine. I'm a little concerned that we can have
such "vastly different" interpretations of the same text. I tried to get
some Wikimedians to give me their take-away, and have not gotten a
consistent direction from those.

What I mostly remember after reading your response is that Wikimedia would
be doing more of the same, and more.

This is a two-folded concern for me. On one hand, it feels like the
direction is too multi-interpretable. While vagueness and leaving specifics
open is only natural, I do believe that a clear direction is essential to
take the next steps.

Second, after reading your response I'm left with the feeling that we don't
really take a direction. Choosing a direction is also determining what not
to do. This was also a main criticism of the earlier version presented at
Wikimania. Directions are painful, because we're not satisfying everyone.

Currently, the WMF is asking people and affiliates to 'endorse' this text.
It has a high textual quality and says a number of things that resonate
with my ideals and those that I know to be Wikimedia's ideals. However, I
don't feel it provides the direction we need yet. I'm not keen on endorsing
a direction, which may then be interpreted in a vastly different way.

I should also note: I have little hope of changing the process. And it may
very well be that I'm alone in this concern. But I would suggest that you
(plural) select 25 (or more) random Wikimedians that were not intimately
involved with the strategic process, let them read the direction, and let
them summarize their take-aways. (that is working from the assumption you
have not done so already) If their variance is too large, that may be an
indicator that unfortunately another cycle of labor may be needed before we
can enter the next round. Given all effort and resources that have been
invested in this process, such sanity check may be worth while.

Warmly,

Lodewijk

ps: just to state the obvious: I'm highly appreciative of all the work that
went into this. It could have turned out worse in many many ways, and I
appreciate all the efforts that went into involving the community. I'm
always feeling guilty about not having been able to spend way more time on
the strategic process than I did in all the various steps of the process -
such rebut would be totally fair :).

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 10:13 AM, Katherine Maher 
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I
> haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been
> continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in
> which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic
> direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to
> create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we
> might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these
> goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and
> individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to
> acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.
>
> I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed
> again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my
> drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges
> you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of
> our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals
> responding and will result in differences in implementation in each
> community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of
> source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But
> regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich,
> substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and
> most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I
> hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement
> strategy process.
>
> A few more responses inline:
>
> 2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk :
> >
> > I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there
> is
> > too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take
> > away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free
> > knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't
> > expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that
> > our work is being put to good use.
>
> It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical
> assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but
> it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the
> contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do
> think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination
> 

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

[Katherine Maher]

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay in chiming in. It's been a busy few weeks, and while I
haven't made a public update about strategy in a while, work has been
continuing! We've now closed Phase 1, and we're heading into Phase 2, in
which our objective is to start thinking about how we make the strategic
direction into a plan of action and implementation. It's an opportunity to
create greater clarity about how we each understand the direction, how we
might set goals against it, what we may need to change to achieve these
goals, and how we can contribute -- as projects, communities, and
individuals. I’ll be sending my next weekly update shortly but I wanted to
acknowledge the contributions in this thread first.

I've read through this entire thread, and I've agreed, disagreed, agreed
again, and started emails only to see new ones come in and have to scrap my
drafts. While I found myself often agreeing with Erik, I dig the challenges
you all have put forward and appreciate the diversity of opinions. Some of
our differences stem from the unique contexts of the groups and individuals
responding and will result in differences in implementation in each
community. Other differences, such as questioning the very concept of
source credibility, will certainly require additional discussion. But
regardless of where we end up, it has been a delight to follow such a rich,
substantive conversation. This has been one of the best, and
most thought-provoking, Wikimedia-l threads I've read in some time, and I
hope that it is the first of many as we go into Phase 2 of the movement
strategy process.

A few more responses inline:

2017-10-04 11:19 GMT-07:00 Lodewijk :
>
> I don't understand what exactly that direction is headed towards, there is
> too much space for a variety of interpretation. The one thing that I take
> away though, is that we won't place ourselves at the center of the free
> knowledge universe (as a brand), but want to become a service. We don't
> expect people to know about 'Wikipedia' in 10 years, but we do want that
> our work is being put to good use.

It's always helpful to read critique as a challenge to our logical
assumptions. Lodewijk, I see where your interpretation comes from here, but
it is vastly different than how I interpret from this statement. To the
contrary, I wouldn’t say "service" and "brand" are mutually exclusive. I do
think that Wikimedia should want to continue to be known as a destination
for free knowledge, and we do want to increase brand awareness, especially
in areas and contexts where we are not yet well (or not at all) known. Our
brand (including our communities) and visibility are some of our most
valuable assets as a movement, and it would be strategically unwise not to
build on them for long-term planning.

When I think about knowledge as a service, it means that we want this, *and
much more*. It’s additive. We want to be who we are today, *and* we want to
provide a service to other institutions. We want to use that brand and
visibility to work with others in the ecosystem. We also want to be present
in new experiences and delivery channels, in order to preserve the direct
interface connection with Wikipedia's contributors and readers that we have
on the web. I see this as essential - for our readers, it's about ensuring
a core promise: that the chain of evidence for the information they seek is
unbroken and transparent, from citation to edit. For our contributors, it's
about extending ways to contribute as our digital interfaces evolve.

We know from the Phase 1 research that many readers see Wikipedia as a
utility, whether we like it or not. We know that people reuse our content
in many contexts. My interpretation of “knowledge as a service” is not that
we vanish into the background, but that we become ever more essential to
people's lives. And part of our doing so is not only enriching the
experience people have on Wikipedia, but investing in how Wikipedia can
promote the opening of knowledge overall. Today, MediaWiki and Wikibase are
already infrastructures that serve other free knowledge projects, in turn
enriching the material on which our projects can draw. What more could we
do if we supported openness more systemically?

I understand that the direction may still feel too vague. A direction for
the 2030 horizon is bound to lack specifics. I actually think this is okay.
The direction comes from a small-ish group of drafters trying to make sense
of 8 months of thousands of perspectives. In that sense, a small group can
only do so much. It is now our responsibility, as movement actors, to take
this direction and interpret it in our respective contexts, based on our
respective experiences. This will be a major part of Phase 2 of the
movement discussions.

2017-10-09 17:44 GMT-07:00 Erik Moeller :
>
> With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's
> worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would 

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

[James Salsman]

Erik,

Should interactive web, internet of things, or offline services
relying on Foundation encyclopedia CC-BY-SA content be required to
attribute authorship by specifying the revision date from which the
transluded content is derived?

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 7:01 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
>> Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing
>> discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]
>
> Tensions between different communities with overlapping but
> non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like
> Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically
> reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to
> benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more
> expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few
> examples include:
>
> - Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition
> - Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
> - Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene Wiki
>
> This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of
> maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of
> conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability
> challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like
> templates, which shift information out of the article space,
> disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is
> constructed from its parts.
>
> I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single
> biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for
> Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has
> already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective
> propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and
> notifications. Much more will need to follow.
>
> With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's
> already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding
> information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to
> Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values
> provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not
> considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.
>
>> If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling
>> users where it got its information from, then there is not even a feedback
>> form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.
>
> I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like
> "Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I
> certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice.
> However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear
> that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all
> requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".
>
> Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it
> shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to
> the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.:
> https://www.bing.com/search?q=france
>
> I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to
> document best practices for re-use, ranging from local
> community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the
> "Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of
> these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to
> develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice
> applications, tabular data, and so on.
>
> Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license
> compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how
> to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do"
> from "here's what we recommend".
>
>>> Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about
>>> a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The
>>> more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in
>>> an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country
>>> population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate
>>> representation of the source material. Even when a large source
>>> dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say),
>>> you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of
>>> copies.
>
>> Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.
>
> At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal
> data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated
> database reports as well as on-demand lookup via
> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks
> in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field,
> or mark a 

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

[Erik Moeller]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 7:31 AM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing
> discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1]

Tensions between different communities with overlapping but
non-identical objectives are unavoidable. Repository projects like
Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons provide huge payoff: they dramatically
reduce duplication of effort, enable small language communities to
benefit from the work done internationally, and can tackle a more
expansive scope than the immediate needs of existing projects. A few
examples include:

- Wiki Loves Monuments, recognized as the world's largest photo competition
- Partnerships with countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums
- Wikidata initiatives like mySociety's "Everypolitician" project or Gene Wiki

This is not without its costs, however. Differing policies, levels of
maturity, and social expectations will always fuel some level of
conflict, and the repository approach creates huge usability
challenges. The latter is also true for internal wiki features like
templates, which shift information out of the article space,
disempowering users who no longer understand how the whole is
constructed from its parts.

I would call these usability and "legibility" issues the single
biggest challenge in the development of Wikidata, Structured Data for
Commons, and other repository functionality. Much related work has
already been done or is ticketed in Phabricator, such as the effective
propagation of changes into watchlists, article histories, and
notifications. Much more will need to follow.

With regard to the issue of citations, it's worth noting that it's
already possible to _conditionally_ load data from Wikidata, excluding
information that is unsourced or only sourced circularly (i.e. to
Wikipedia itself). [1] Template invocations can also override values
provided by Wikidata, for example, if there is a source, but it is not
considered reliable by the standards of a specific project.

> If a digital voice assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling
> users where it got its information from, then there is not even a feedback
> form. Editability is of no help at all if people can't find the source.

I'm in favor of always indicating at least provenance (something like
"Here's a quote from Wikipedia:"), even for short excerpts, and I
certainly think WMF and chapters can advocate for this practice.
However, where short excerpts are concerned, it's not at all clear
that there is a _legal_ issue here, and that full compliance with all
requirements of the license is a reasonable "ask".

Bing's search result page manages a decent compromise, I think: it
shows excerpts from Wikipedia clearly labeled as such, and it links to
the CC-BY-SA license if you expand the excerpt, e.g.:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=france

I know that over the years, many efforts have been undertaken to
document best practices for re-use, ranging from local
community-created pages to chapter guides and tools like the
"Lizenzhinweisgenerator". I don't know what the best-available of
these is nowadays, but if none exists, it might be a good idea to
develop a new, comprehensive guide that takes into account voice
applications, tabular data, and so on.

Such a guide would ideally not just be written from a license
compliance perspective, but also include recommendations, e.g., on how
to best indicate provenance, distinguishing "here's what you must do"
from "here's what we recommend".

>> Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about
>> a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The
>> more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in
>> an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country
>> population time series data represented in Wikidata is an accurate
>> representation of the source material. Even when a large source
>> dataset is mirrored by Wikimedia (for low-latency visualization, say),
>> you can hash it, digitally sign it, and restrict modifiability of
>> copies.

> Interesting, though I'm not aware of that being done at present.

At present, Wikidata allows users to model constraints on internal
data validity. These constraints are used for regularly generated
database reports as well as on-demand lookup via
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ConstraintReport . This kicks
in, for example, if you put in an insane number in a population field,
or mark a country as female.

There is a project underway to also validate against external sources; see:

  
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase_Quality_Extensions#Special_Page_Cross-Check_with_external_databases

Wikidata still tends to deal with relatively small amounts of data; a
highly annotated item like Germany (Q183), for example, comes in at
under 1MB in uncompressed JSON form. Time series data like GDP is
often included only for a single point in 

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

Hi Erik,

Really meaty post. Great stuff. Comments below.


On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 1:44 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:
>
> > ... 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 wouldn't call information from Wikimedia projects a "mush", but I
> think it's a good term for the proprietary amalgamation of information
> and data from many sources, often without any regard for the
> reliability of the source.



In my view, whether it's a mush or not largely depends on how it is used,
and to what extent it mixes solid and flaky, verifiable and non-verifiable
content.

Wikidata has its own problems in that regard that have triggered ongoing
discussions and concerns on the English Wikipedia.[1] Wikidata does not
require users to cite sources. It contains millions of statements sourced
only to some Wikipedia language version, without identification of the
article, article version, or source originally cited in that Wikipedia (if
any) at the time of import. It lacks effective Verifiability and BLP
policies.



> Google is the king of such gooey
> amalgamation. Its home assistant has been known to give answers like
> this, sourced to "secretsofthefed.com":
>
>  "According to details exposed in Western Center for Journalism's
>   exclusive video, not only could Obama be in be in bed with the
>   communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a
>   communist coup d'état at the end of his term in 2016."
>
> See, e.g., this article
>
>   https://theoutline.com/post/1192/google-s-featured-
> snippets-are-worse-than-fake-news
>
> for other egregious examples specifically from Google's featured responses.
>


Thanks for the link to that article. Really important. I'm in complete
agreement with you on that.



> For Google, I suggest a query like "when was slavery abolished?"
> followed by exploring the auto-suggested questions. In my case, the
> first 10 questions point to snippets from:
>
> - pbs.org (twice)
> - USA Today
> - Reuters
> - archives.gov
> - Wikipedia (twice)
> - infoplease.com
> - ourdocuments.gov
> - nationalarchives.gov.uk



Being on the other side of the pond, I got slightly different results. Here
they are, just for fun: Wikipedia is in the answer box, and 4 of the first
10 suggested questions link to Wikipedia:

– makewav.es
– Reuters
– archives.gov
– Wikipedia
– nationalarchives.gov.uk
– Wikipedia
– abolition.e2bn.org
– Wikipedia
– USA Today
– Wikipedia

(The 11th linked to Wikibooks.)



> It's the universe of linked open data (Wikipedia/Wikidata,
> OpenStreetMap, and other open datasets) that keeps the space at least
> somewhat competitive, by giving players without much of a foothold a
> starting point from which to build. If Wikimedia did not exist, a
> smaller number of commercial players would wield greater power, due to
> the higher relative payoff of large investments in data mining and AI.
>


Yes, arguably so, although various ways remain in which Wikimedia might
become a victim of its own success, depending on the amount of ubiquity its
content achieves. The more ubiquitous it is, the higher the stakes, and the
higher the pressure on volunteers will become.



> > 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.
>
> As noted above, this is not actually what is happening. Commercial
> players don't want to limit themselves to free/open data; they want to
> use AI to extract as much information about the world as possible so
> they can answer as many queries as possible.
>


To the far-from-negligible extent that they all do and will regurgitate
Wikimedia content, it will happen.

By the same token, their drawing on alternative sources as well as
Wikimedia content, even proprietary ones, is also potentially a good thing.
It increases diversity.



> And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance
> is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for
> Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making,
> transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate
> to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a
> safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through
> a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
>


Indeed, but it helps if re-users indicate provenance. If a digital voice
assistant propagates a Wikimedia mistake without telling users where it got
its information from, then there is not even a feedback form. Editability
is of no help at all if people can't find the source.

This is 

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:43 AM, James Salsman  wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM, Leinonen Teemu 
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea.
> >
> >> On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> >> And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance
> >> is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for
> >> Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making,
> >> transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate
> >> to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a
> >> safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through
> >> a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
> >
> > Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary
> service providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the
> Wikimedia content to include a statement if their reuse is from a "native
> version of live Wikimedia” and also this way tell that they do not?
>
> That is a fantastic idea! CC-BY-SA says, "You must attribute the work
> in the manner specified by the author or licensor."
>
> Is there anything preventing us from specifying attribution in a
> manner that makes clear the revision date?
>


Well, Wikidata was, after some to-and-fro and a little controversy,
assigned the CC-0 licence, which does not require any attribution
whatsoever from re-users. In my view, that was a really big mistake,
because it obscures data provenance for the end user.

Given the amount of data Wikidata bots import from Wikipedia, is was also
quite possibly a violation of Wikipedia's content licence.

The legal situation is admittedly complex, but don't let anyone tell you
that "facts cannot be copyrighted, and that is the end of it." The WMF's
own legal department disagreed with that view.[1]



> I would love to see the re-users have to do that. Are there any downsides?



As for re-users of CC-BY-SA Wikipedia content, I refer you to the Amazon
Echo discussion that started here on this list in July:

https://lists.gt.net/wiki/foundation/828583

In that discussion, concerns were expressed that the Amazon Echo's "Alexa"
voice assistant reads snippets from Wikipedia in response to queries,
without identifying Wikipedia as the source. Adele Vrana said she would
inquire with Amazon and get back to us probably in September. Last I heard
from her, she said she was continuing to ping Amazon, but hadn't heard
anything. This month, Adele has been out of the office and will be for
another week or so.

I think this is a fairly important matter, and I'm somewhat disappointed
with the lack of progress to date. It's a potential thin-end-of-the-wedge
thing: if the WMF lets Amazon get away with infringing the CC licence (if
indeed it is an infringement – to determine that, we would first need to
have a response and legal rationale from Amazon and have lawyers examine
it), then others will follow.

My fear – largely based on the Wikidata decision – is that some within the
WMF are not really interested in enforcing attribution, preferring to make
things as convenient as possible for for-profit companies in order to
maximise re-use. I'd find that repugnant, because transparent data
provenance is important for a whole host of reasons. But I am not convinced
WMF folks see it as important at all. The lack of response to date to the
Echo question tends to reinforce my doubts in that regard.

Best,
Andreas

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] September 28: Strategy update - Final draft of movement direction and endorsement process (#25)

[Chris Keating]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 1:44 AM, Erik Moeller  wrote:
>
> I wouldn't call information from Wikimedia projects a "mush", but I
> think it's a good term for the proprietary amalgamation of information
> and data from many sources, often without any regard for the
> reliability of the source

Is there an award for the most intelligent and insightful contribution
to this list all year? If so I would like to nominate this email.
Thanks Erik!

Regards,

Chris

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

[James Salsman]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 9:38 AM, Leinonen Teemu  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea.
>
>> On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller  wrote:
>> And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance
>> is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for
>> Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making,
>> transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate
>> to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a
>> safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through
>> a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.
>
> Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary service 
> providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the Wikimedia content 
> to include a statement if their reuse is from a "native version of live 
> Wikimedia” and also this way tell that they do not?

That is a fantastic idea! CC-BY-SA says, "You must attribute the work
in the manner specified by the author or licensor."

Is there anything preventing us from specifying attribution in a
manner that makes clear the revision date?

I would love to see the re-users have to do that. Are there any downsides?

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

[Leinonen Teemu]

Hi all, 

This is super interesting and important discussion. One idea. 

> On 10 Oct 2017, at 3.44, Erik Moeller  wrote:
> And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance
> is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for
> Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making,
> transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate
> to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a
> safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through
> a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.

Would it make sense to help and maybe even demand the proprietary service 
providers and AI application (Siri, Google, etc) using the Wikimedia content to 
include a statement if their reuse is from a "native version of live Wikimedia” 
and also this way tell that they do not? 

I think this can be compared to the consumer movement requiring that the origin 
of food products should be trackable all they way to the original producer (eg. 
farm).

I was thinking that if the service providers are taking data dumps of Wikimedia 
for their own use, today we do not know if they have made some edits in it.

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

[Erik Moeller]

On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> ... 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 wouldn't call information from Wikimedia projects a "mush", but I
think it's a good term for the proprietary amalgamation of information
and data from many sources, often without any regard for the
reliability of the source. Google is the king of such gooey
amalgamation. Its home assistant has been known to give answers like
this, sourced to "secretsofthefed.com":

 "According to details exposed in Western Center for Journalism's
  exclusive video, not only could Obama be in be in bed with the
  communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a
  communist coup d'état at the end of his term in 2016."

See, e.g., this article

  
https://theoutline.com/post/1192/google-s-featured-snippets-are-worse-than-fake-news

for other egregious examples specifically from Google's featured responses.

It's certainly true that Wikipedia is an easy target for ingestion,
not just because of its copyright status, but also because it is
comprehensive, multilingual, unrestricted (as in, not behind a paywall
or rate limit), and even fully available for download. But copyright
status is not really a major barrier once you are talking about fact
extraction and "fair use" snippets.

For Google, I suggest a query like "when was slavery abolished?"
followed by exploring the auto-suggested questions. In my case, the
first 10 questions point to snippets from:

- pbs.org (twice)
- USA Today
- Reuters
- archives.gov
- Wikipedia (twice)
- infoplease.com
- ourdocuments.gov
- nationalarchives.gov.uk

Even for its fact boxes, where Wikipedia excerpts often feature
prominently, Google does not exclusively rely on it; the tabular data
contains information not found in any Wikimedia project. Even the
textual blurbs often come from sources of unclear provenance; for
example, country blurb text (try googling "France" or "Russia") is not
from WP.

This amalgamation will get ever more sophisticated and more
proprietary (specific to each of these corporations) as AI improves.
That's because it lets companies pry apart "facts" and "expression":
the former are uncopyrightable. As textual understanding of AIs
improves, more information can be summarized and presented without
even invoking "fair use", much in the same way as Wikipedia itself
summarizes sources.

It's the universe of linked open data (Wikipedia/Wikidata,
OpenStreetMap, and other open datasets) that keeps the space at least
somewhat competitive, by giving players without much of a foothold a
starting point from which to build. If Wikimedia did not exist, a
smaller number of commercial players would wield greater power, due to
the higher relative payoff of large investments in data mining and AI.

> 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.

As noted above, this is not actually what is happening. Commercial
players don't want to limit themselves to free/open data; they want to
use AI to extract as much information about the world as possible so
they can answer as many queries as possible.

And for most of the sources amalgamated in this manner, if provenance
is indicated at all, we don't find any of the safeguards we have for
Wikimedia content (revisioning, participatory decision-making,
transparent policies, etc.). Editability, while opening the floodgate
to a category of problems other sources don't have, is in fact also a
safeguard: making it possible to fix mistakes instead of going through
a "feedback" form that ends up who knows where.

With an eye to 2030 and WMF's long-term direction, I do think it's
worth thinking about Wikidata's centrality, and I would agree with you
at least that the phrase "the essential infrastructure of the
ecosystem" does overstate what I think WMF should aspire to (the
"essential infrastructure" should consist of many open components
maintained by different groups). But beyond that I think you're
reading stuff into the statement that isn't there.

Wikidata in particular is best seen not as the singular source of
truth, but as an important hub in a network of open data providers --
primarily governments, public institutions, nonprofits. This is
consistent with recent developments around Wikidata such as query
federation.

Wikidata will often provide a shallow first level of information about
a subject, while other linked sources provide deeper information. The
more structured the information, the easier it becomes to validate in
an automatic fashion that, for example, the subset of country
population time series data represented in 

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 

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

[Erik Moeller]

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 4:10 AM, Andreas Kolbe  wrote:

> Reading between the lines of statements like "Knowledge as a service",
> "essential infrastructure", "tools for allies and partners to organize and
> exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia", etc., my sense is that the
> document, without saying so explicitly, is very much written from the
> perspective that the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Bing (and anyone else
> developing digital assistants and other types of knowledge delivery
> platforms) should be viewed as key partners in the exchange of free
> knowledge, and served accordingly, through the development of interfaces
> that enable them to deliver Wikimedia content to the end user.
>
> My problem with that is that those are all for-profit companies, while the
> volunteers that contribute the free content on which these companies'
> profit-making services are based are not only unpaid, but actually incur
> expenses in contributing (mostly related to source access).

This seems to be a somewhat prejudiced "reading between the lines".
For-profits like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft will extract as much
information as they can from as many sources as they can giving back
as little as they have to (which includes some activity designed to
maintain and increase goodwill, which itself has value), _regardless
of what Wikimedia does or doesn't do_. They have built knowledge
graphs without the use of Wikidata and without significant assistance
from WMF, incorporating information from countless proprietary sources
alongside free sources.

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.

I had no involvement with this document and don't know what focusing
on "knowledge of a service" really will mean in practice. But if it
means things like improving Wikidata, building better APIs and content
formats, building better Labs^WCloud infrastructure, then the crucial
point is not that companies may benefit from such work, but that
_everybody else does, too_. And that is what distinguishes it from the
prevailing extract-and-monetize paradigm. For-profits exploting free
knowledge projects for commercial gain? That's the _current state_. To
change it, we have to make it easier to replicate what they are doing:
through open data, open APIs, open code.

Erik

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

[Ziko van Dijk]

Hello Guillaume,

Thank you for sharing your point of view. But I cannot agree with you that
this is a case of „negativity bias“ or „tunnel visions“ or „begrudging
fashion“. I have fundamental concerns about the redefinition of the
community and the widening of the movement‘s purpose, and I fully join
Frank Schulenburg‘s statement that the draft paper says hardly anything to
the average Wikipedian.

As I do not know your prerogatives given from above, I cannot judge about
your personal role. I don’t want to and I have nothing against you
personally, on the contrary. Indeed, you took some of the most terrible
things from the paper - such as the „oral traditions“. But they still
appear as a residue in the „Appendix“, and how could it happen in the first
place that they were ever pushed forward by the WMF? Challenge 2 called our
work with reputable sources a „Western bias“. Where did that come from? Not
from the communities (my definition), but from „experts“ such as a man who
runs a company for storytelling and claims that he can trace his ancestry
to the middle ages via „oral traditions“!

As Andreas pointed out, there is much more in the Appendix such as the
cooperations with Youtube and Google, „new incentives“ etc. and also the
opinion that „Wikimedia“ should become more „political“. Certainly, I was
against SOPA and like to see the WMF fight copyright problems. But what I
saw at Wikimania made me wonder about the common ground. The WMF is
partnering up with the ACLU that endorses the freedom of speech for the
KuKluxKlan. The WMF is already approaching EU laws from an American point
of view and dismisses the possibility that Europeans may think differently.

If we keep all those things in the draft paper and in the Appendix - the
WMF will have carte blanche to do literally anything it likes, being a
social movement fighting whatever technical, political or social inequity.
But well, the WMF will claim that that is what the „community“ wants -
given the new definition of community, that would even be true. :-(

Certainly, people can set up a page on Meta to express their concerns about
such an unready draft paper. Is this an announcement that endorsements of
the draft paper will be welcomed at the main gate, while the concerns will
have to use the backyard entrance?

Kind regards
Ziko






Guillaume Paumier  schrieb am Mo. 2. Okt. 2017 um
22:36:

> Hello,
>
> If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing
> preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However,
> I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's
> going.
>
> Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy-2030-discussions/
> ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference.
> People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you
> from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a
> difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly.
> But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of
> a large part of the movement.
>
> As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did
> consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version
> is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple
> Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group,
> from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
>
> While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single
> comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and
> endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not
> every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too
> familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and
> feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
>
> High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can
> be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia
> article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I
> had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large
> group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
>
> Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive,
> fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the
> opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd
> probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be
> other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
>
> However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me
> realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the
> process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and
> needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to 

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

[Chris Koerner]

Hey Yuri,
IMHO, this section is the closest thing (thus far) to an 'elevator pitch'
for the direction of the movement:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction#Our_strategic_direction:_Service_and_Equity

You could probably even knock it down to "The Wikimedia movement serves
open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities. We break
down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from
accessing and contributing to free knowledge."

Anything that short is sure to lose the nuance in the longer document
(which I'm sure we've all read!), but it might be a little closer to what
you're looking for. Adapt as necessary.

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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Ziko van Dijk  wrote:

> Hello Joseph,
>
> We must distinguish between the community, the movement and partners of the
> movement.
>
> The Wikimedia movement is not a community, it consists of several
> communities. Such as the community of Wikipedia in French, of Wikidata or
> of Mediawiki.org.
>
> Staffers of the WMF are part of the movement, as the WMF is part of the
> movement, as a chapter is part of the movement. Individual staff members or
> chapter board members can belong to communities.
>
> Donors can be part of the movement, if they like to see themselves as such.
> I doubt that many people who donate 10 euros think of themselves as
> "community".
>
> Staff from our GLAM partners are partners, not community, not movement.
>
> I wonder if the WMF will say in future "we asked the community and it
> approved it", what will be the meaning of "the community"?
>
> Kind regards
> Ziko



Reading between the lines of statements like "Knowledge as a service",
"essential infrastructure", "tools for allies and partners to organize and
exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia", etc., my sense is that the
document, without saying so explicitly, is very much written from the
perspective that the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Bing (and anyone else
developing digital assistants and other types of knowledge delivery
platforms) should be viewed as key partners in the exchange of free
knowledge, and served accordingly, through the development of interfaces
that enable them to deliver Wikimedia content to the end user.

My problem with that is that those are all for-profit companies, while the
volunteers that contribute the free content on which these companies'
profit-making services are based are not only unpaid, but actually incur
expenses in contributing (mostly related to source access).

Given that one of the documents' stated aims is social justice, I am always
amazed that there seems to be a fairly large blind spot in the Wikimedia
universe when it comes to the starkly exploitative element in the free
knowledge economy. The assumption seems to be that volunteers can't help
contributing, that they are adequately compensated by the personal
satisfaction they derive from seeing their contributions shape the
knowledge landscape, and thus do not need to be given any special
consideration.

Given the Wikimedia Foundation's ever-increasing revenue, I'd like to see
more emphasis on reducing the costs of participation and supporting the
volunteer community, to create a little more social justice within the free
knowledge economy, bearing in mind who does the work, and who profits
financially from it.

Speaking about the future development of the knowledge landscape in
general, I would not like to see Wikimedia become the default provider of
knowledge, to the point where the origin of content is obscured and
knowledge becomes synonymous with Wikimedia content. If that's what's being
striven for, I don't like it – monopolies are inherently unhealthy, for
reasons that should be obvious. I'd like to see a more diverse and less
monolithic knowledge system in our future than that implied here. Part of
that is that knowledge providers basing their products on Wikimedia content
should always identify the relevant Wikimedia project as a source.
Knowledge is only knowledge when it is traceable to its sources, rather
than arriving "ex machina".

On a related issue, we discussed in early August the fact that Amazon's use
of Wikipedia content in the Amazon Echo appears to be partly in breach of
that principle (and indeed in breach of Wikipedia's Creative Commons
licence). We were told that Amazon would be contacted, and that we would
likely be given an update in September. But apart from a brief and
inconsequential flurry of posts last month, we do not seem to have made any
progress on this issue. Please step up your efforts in this regard: surely
it cannot be too difficult to get Amazon to state their legal rationale.

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

[Yuri Astrakhan]

For a while I have had a strong sensation, possibly unjustly so, of a
highly over-complicated result. There are many good words, but I keep not
seeing a simple, concise, intuitively understood statement.  I feel we are
still missing an understandable elevator pitch.  If asked, I seriously
doubt I would be able to explain where things are headed.

It is easy to explain in a complicated way.  It is very hard to explain it
simply.  Or as Einstein put it, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't
understand it well enough.”

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 4:35 PM, Guillaume Paumier 
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing
> preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However,
> I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's
> going.
>
> Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy-2030-discussions/
> ]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference.
> People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you
> from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a
> difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly.
> But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of
> a large part of the movement.
>
> As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did
> consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version
> is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple
> Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group,
> from affiliates, from staff, and so on.
>
> While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single
> comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and
> endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not
> every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too
> familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and
> feedback from a large group of people at the same time.
>
> High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can
> be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia
> article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I
> had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large
> group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.
>
> Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive,
> fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the
> opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd
> probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be
> other perfectionists to feed my obsession.
>
> However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me
> realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the
> process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and
> needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of the
> accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I
> think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions
> widen and meet.
>
> One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this process,
> is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means
> recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the
> asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that a
> few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and
> motivated to participate.
>
> From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last
> version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals,
> groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not
> everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the
> Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree with
> enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for the
> next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.
>
> I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a few
> weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you
> enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the
> movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree
> with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in a
> shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope that
> we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically
> Wikimedian begrudging fashion.
>
>
> 2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk :
>
> > Hello Katherine,
> >
> > This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away 

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

[Guillaume Paumier]

Hello,

If you feel a strong urge to reject the text, there is obviously nothing
preventing anyone from creating a Meta-Wiki page to that purpose. However,
I would first ask to reflect on the process, its outcome, and where it's
going.

Strategy is complicated. Building a movement strategy even more so [
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/19/wikimedia-strategy-2030-discussions/
]. One person's serious issue may be another person's slight preference.
People's serious issues may be at odds with each other (and I can tell you
from experience that they are indeed). Balancing all those priorities is a
difficult exercise, and I certainly don't claim to have done it perfectly.
But I do think the outcome we've arrived at represents the shared vision of
a large part of the movement.

As I was writing, rewriting and editing the text of the direction, I did
consider everything that was shared on the talk page, and the last version
is indeed based on those comments, as well as those shared during multiple
Wikimania sessions, individual chats, comments from the Drafting group,
from affiliates, from staff, and so on.

While I did consider all of those, I didn't respond to every single
comment, and there is little I can do about that except apologize and
endeavor to do better. I should have set clearer expectations that not
every comment would be integrated in the text. I ran into an issue all too
familiar in the Wikiverse where one person had to integrate comments and
feedback from a large group of people at the same time.

High-level vision and strategy integration isn't really something that can
be spread across a group of people as easily as writing an encyclopedia
article, and so I ended up being a bottleneck for responding to comments. I
had to prioritize what I deemed were issues that were shared by a large
group, and those that seemed to be more individual concerns.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not the "everything must be positive,
fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one" type. If anything, I'm rather the
opposite, as I think many Wikimedians are. If we had unlimited time, I'd
probably continue to edit the draft for years, and I'm sure there would be
other perfectionists to feed my obsession.

However, others in my personal and professional circles have helped me
realize in the past few weeks that even getting to this stage of the
process is remarkable. As Wikimedians, we often focus on what's wrong and
needs fixing. Sometimes, our negativity bias leads us to lose focus of the
accomplishments. This can clash with the typical American culture, but I
think somewhere in the middle is where those respective tunnel visions
widen and meet.

One thing I've learned from Ed Bland, my co-architect during this process,
is that sometimes things can't be perfect. Sometimes, excellence means
recognizing when something is "good enough" and getting out of the
asymptotic editing and decision paralysis loop. It means accepting that a
few things annoy us so that a larger group of people is excited and
motivated to participate.

From everything I've heard and read in the past two months, the last
version of the direction is agreeable to a large part of individuals,
groups, and organizations that have been involved in the process. Not
everyone agrees with everything in the document, even within the
Foundation, and even me. But enough people across the movement agree with
enough of the document that we can all use it as a starting point for the
next phase of discussions about roles, resources, and responsibilities.

I do hope that many of you will consider endorsing the direction in a few
weeks. While I won't claim to know everyone involved, I think I know you
enough, Ziko and Fæ, from your work and long-time commitment in the
movement, to venture that there is more in this document that you agree
with than that you disagree with. I hope that the prospect of moving in a
shared direction will outweigh the possible annoyances. And so I hope that
we'll endorse the direction together, even if it's in our typically
Wikimedian begrudging fashion.


2017-10-02 6:56 GMT-07:00 Ziko van Dijk :

> Hello Katherine,
>
> This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being
> a useful and appropriate document for our future.
>
> The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
> rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> feedback you offered."
>
> You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
> endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I
> remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community
> how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against
> it.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
> uselang=en
> 
>
> The drafts tries to enforce a 

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

[Yaroslav Blanter]

As I mentioned earlier on a different occasion, at the very first step we
at the Russian Wikivoyage have taken the strategy discussion seriously and
compiled this document (Russian + translation to English),

https://ru.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82:%D0%A1%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%8F

It was essentially ignored: We never received any feedback, and there was
no indication any of our points were taken to Step 2, or, in fact, that
anybody ever read it. (Which indeed corresponds with the existing proposal
to define all Wikivoyage communities as least developed - "(lower impact;
don't merit *proactive* investment)").

After that, none of us participated in the subsequent strategy discussions.
I am clearly not going to endorse the resulting strategy document, though I
appreciate the time and effort of people who compiled it.

Cheers
Yaroslav

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 4:12 PM, Joseph Seddon 
wrote:

> Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki
> developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate
> Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who
> evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
>
> To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness
> that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
>
> Seddon
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ  wrote:
>
> > Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything
> > must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on
> > with how the foundations remain flawed.
> >
> > Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
> will
> > never keep you there.
> >
> > Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful
> > improvements, please.
> >
> > Fae
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
> > http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
> >
> > On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk"  wrote:
> >
> > Hello Katherine,
> >
> > This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
> being
> > a useful and appropriate document for our future.
> >
> > The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
> > rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
> the
> > feedback you offered."
> >
> > You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
> > endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
> I
> > remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
> community
> > how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
> against
> > it.
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
> > uselang=en
> >
> > The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
> > editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
> > were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
> > as volunteers.
> >
> > I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
> future
> > more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
> the
> > community.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Ziko van Dijk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> > > including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
> movement
> > > strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
> > >
> > > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> > > Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> > > endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> > > thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
> > have
> > > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
> > strategic
> > > direction.
> > >
> > > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
> involve
> > > developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
> built
> > > together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
> of
> > > course offer an update as they become available.
> > >
> > > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
> the
> > > draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> > > feedback you offered.
> > >
> > > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> > > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
> > invited
> > > to endorse the direction, in a show of 

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

[Ziko van Dijk]

Hello Joseph,

We must distinguish between the community, the movement and partners of the
movement.

The Wikimedia movement is not a community, it consists of several
communities. Such as the community of Wikipedia in French, of Wikidata or
of Mediawiki.org.

Staffers of the WMF are part of the movement, as the WMF is part of the
movement, as a chapter is part of the movement. Individual staff members or
chapter board members can belong to communities.

Donors can be part of the movement, if they like to see themselves as such.
I doubt that many people who donate 10 euros think of themselves as
"community".

Staff from our GLAM partners are partners, not community, not movement.

I wonder if the WMF will say in future "we asked the community and it
approved it", what will be the meaning of "the community"?

Kind regards
Ziko





2017-10-02 16:12 GMT+02:00 Joseph Seddon :

> Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki
> developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate
> Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who
> evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
>
> To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness
> that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
>
> Seddon
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ  wrote:
>
> > Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything
> > must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on
> > with how the foundations remain flawed.
> >
> > Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
> will
> > never keep you there.
> >
> > Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful
> > improvements, please.
> >
> > Fae
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
> > http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
> >
> > On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk"  wrote:
> >
> > Hello Katherine,
> >
> > This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
> being
> > a useful and appropriate document for our future.
> >
> > The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
> > rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
> the
> > feedback you offered."
> >
> > You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
> > endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
> I
> > remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
> community
> > how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
> against
> > it.
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
> > uselang=en
> >
> > The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
> > editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
> > were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
> > as volunteers.
> >
> > I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
> future
> > more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
> the
> > community.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Ziko van Dijk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> > > including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
> movement
> > > strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
> > >
> > > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> > > Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> > > endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> > > thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
> > have
> > > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
> > strategic
> > > direction.
> > >
> > > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
> involve
> > > developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
> built
> > > together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
> of
> > > course offer an update as they become available.
> > >
> > > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
> the
> > > draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> > > feedback you offered.
> > >
> > > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> > > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
> > invited
> > > to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
> > > building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the 

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

[Amir E. Aharoni]

I don't read Ziko's concern as one that suggests to exclude developers or
teachers.

I read it as a suggestion that "... and beyond" is too inclusive, and thus
it doesn't mean much. This is a concern that I share myself. I'm all for
being inclusive, but the whole point of defining something is that it
should have _some_ limits.

If Ziko have meant something else, I'll be happy to know.

I'm assuming good faith on everybody's behalf. We come from different
cultures, we have different ideas, and we have different native languages.
That's precisely why we need clearer definitions, not fuzzier ones.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2017-10-02 17:12 GMT+03:00 Joseph Seddon :

> Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki
> developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate
> Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who
> evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
>
> To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness
> that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
>
> Seddon
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ  wrote:
>
> > Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything
> > must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on
> > with how the foundations remain flawed.
> >
> > Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
> will
> > never keep you there.
> >
> > Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful
> > improvements, please.
> >
> > Fae
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
> > http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
> >
> > On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk"  wrote:
> >
> > Hello Katherine,
> >
> > This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
> being
> > a useful and appropriate document for our future.
> >
> > The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
> > rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
> the
> > feedback you offered."
> >
> > You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
> > endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
> I
> > remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
> community
> > how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
> against
> > it.
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
> > uselang=en
> >
> > The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
> > editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
> > were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
> > as volunteers.
> >
> > I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
> future
> > more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
> the
> > community.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Ziko van Dijk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> > > including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
> movement
> > > strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
> > >
> > > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> > > Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> > > endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> > > thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
> > have
> > > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
> > strategic
> > > direction.
> > >
> > > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
> involve
> > > developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
> built
> > > together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
> of
> > > course offer an update as they become available.
> > >
> > > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
> the
> > > draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> > > feedback you offered.
> > >
> > > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> > > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
> > invited
> > > to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
> > > building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
> > and
> > > timeline.
> > >
> > > *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in 

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

[Fæ]

All possible stakeholders and participants in our 'value chain' should be
consulted and be part of developing strategy.

That does not make them all the same as the community that create our
projects or sustain our content long term. It's a mime that has been pushed
and stretched until the community of unpaid and "nonprofessional"
volunteers feel like second class citizens without a vote when it ever
matters.

Fae
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
http://telegram.me/wmlgbt

On 2 Oct 2017 15:12, "Joseph Seddon"  wrote:

> Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki
> developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate
> Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who
> evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?
>
> This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.
>
> To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness
> that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.
>
> Seddon
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ  wrote:
>
> > Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything
> > must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on
> > with how the foundations remain flawed.
> >
> > Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but
> will
> > never keep you there.
> >
> > Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful
> > improvements, please.
> >
> > Fae
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
> > http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
> >
> > On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk"  wrote:
> >
> > Hello Katherine,
> >
> > This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from
> being
> > a useful and appropriate document for our future.
> >
> > The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
> > rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on
> the
> > feedback you offered."
> >
> > You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
> > endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft?
> I
> > remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the
> community
> > how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be
> against
> > it.
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
> > uselang=en
> >
> > The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
> > editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
> > were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
> > as volunteers.
> >
> > I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in
> future
> > more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing
> the
> > community.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Ziko van Dijk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> > > including your most recent input into the lastest version of the
> movement
> > > strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
> > >
> > > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> > > Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> > > endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> > > thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
> > have
> > > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
> > strategic
> > > direction.
> > >
> > > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will
> involve
> > > developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have
> built
> > > together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will
> of
> > > course offer an update as they become available.
> > >
> > > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on
> the
> > > draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> > > feedback you offered.
> > >
> > > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> > > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
> > invited
> > > to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
> > > building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
> > and
> > > timeline.
> > >
> > > *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
> > volunteers,
> > > staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we
> > > transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
> > ones
> > > created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
> > >
> > > 

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

[Joseph Seddon]

Based on your definition of community does that mean that mediawiki
developers are not part of the Wikimedia community?

Are people who volunteer in the real world or teachers who incorporate
Wikipedia into their classes not part of the Wikimedia community?

Members of staff of GLAM institutions who we partner with and who
evangelise on our behalf? Are they not part of the Wikimedia community?

This more inclusive definition has long been used by some affiliates.

To exclude these individuals would be against the very values of openness
that we claim to represent and to be blunt, simply alienating.

Seddon

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Fæ  wrote:

> Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything
> must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on
> with how the foundations remain flawed.
>
> Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but will
> never keep you there.
>
> Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful
> improvements, please.
>
> Fae
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
> http://telegram.me/wmlgbt
>
> On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk"  wrote:
>
> Hello Katherine,
>
> This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being
> a useful and appropriate document for our future.
>
> The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
> rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> feedback you offered."
>
> You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
> endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I
> remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community
> how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against
> it.
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
> uselang=en
>
> The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
> editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
> were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
> as volunteers.
>
> I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future
> more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the
> community.
>
> Kind regards,
> Ziko van Dijk
>
>
>
>
>
> 2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> > including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement
> > strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
> >
> > We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> > Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> > endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> > thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you
> have
> > made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
> strategic
> > direction.
> >
> > In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve
> > developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built
> > together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of
> > course offer an update as they become available.
> >
> > *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the
> > draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> > feedback you offered.
> >
> > *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> > organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be
> invited
> > to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
> > building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process
> and
> > timeline.
> >
> > *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the
> volunteers,
> > staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we
> > transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
> ones
> > created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
> >
> > *Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from
> > Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
> Wikimedia
> > CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a
> > series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
> CEE.[3]
> > Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
> such
> > a wonderful event!
> >
> > *In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate
> these
> > updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking
> to
> > the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic
> > planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep
> the
> > feedback coming.
> >
> > Since my last update, our 

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

[Fæ]

Ziko's point may not fit the rigid Americanocentric ideal of everything
must be positive, fantastic, yeehaw-we-are-number-one, but he's spot on
with how the foundations remain flawed.

Only ever hearing congratulations and thanks can get you to a win, but will
never keep you there.

Return to the talk page and use the criticism to help meaningful
improvements, please.

Fae
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LGBT+
http://telegram.me/wmlgbt

On 2 Oct 2017 14:56, "Ziko van Dijk"  wrote:

Hello Katherine,

This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.

The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
feedback you offered."

You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against
it.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
uselang=en

The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
as volunteers.

I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the
community.

Kind regards,
Ziko van Dijk





2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :

> Hi all,
>
> Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement
> strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
>
> We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have
> made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared
strategic
> direction.
>
> In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve
> developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built
> together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of
> course offer an update as they become available.
>
> *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the
> draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> feedback you offered.
>
> *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited
> to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
> building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and
> timeline.
>
> *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers,
> staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we
> transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new
ones
> created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
>
> *Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from
> Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual
Wikimedia
> CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a
> series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for
CEE.[3]
> Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for
such
> a wonderful event!
>
> *In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these
> updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to
> the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic
> planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the
> feedback coming.
>
> Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and
> often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the
> Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been
> affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch
> with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we
> can.
>
> Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the
> process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite
> you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
>
> We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am
> incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank
> you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have
> more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
>
> Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: 

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

[Ziko van Dijk]

Hello Katherine,

This is actually sad news. In my opinion, the draft is far away from being
a useful and appropriate document for our future.

The serious issues from the talk page are only partially addressed in the
rewrite. So I contest your claim: "The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
feedback you offered."

You have announced that organizations and individuals are invited to
endorse the draft. Will there also be a possibility to reject the draft? I
remember the 2011 image filter referendum, when the WMF asked the community
how important it finds the filter, but not giving the option to be against
it.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image_filter_referendum/en;
uselang=en

The drafts tries to enforce a new definition of the "community": "from
editors to donors, to organizers, and beyond". I thought that "community"
were people who are contributing to the wiki Wikipedia on a regular basis
as volunteers.

I am very positive of having an open Wikimedia *movement*. But if in future
more or less everybody will be *community*: that is in fact abolishing the
community.

Kind regards,
Ziko van Dijk





2017-09-30 22:28 GMT+02:00 Katherine Maher :

> Hi all,
>
> Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
> including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement
> strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]
>
> We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
> Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
> endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
> thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have
> made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared strategic
> direction.
>
> In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve
> developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built
> together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of
> course offer an update as they become available.
>
> *Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the
> draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
> feedback you offered.
>
> *Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
> organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited
> to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
> building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and
> timeline.
>
> *Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers,
> staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we
> transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new ones
> created in their place. We'll keep you updated.
>
> *Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from
> Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual Wikimedia
> CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a
> series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for CEE.[3]
> Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for such
> a wonderful event!
>
> *In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these
> updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to
> the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic
> planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the
> feedback coming.
>
> Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and
> often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the
> Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been
> affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch
> with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we
> can.
>
> Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the
> process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite
> you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]
>
> We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am
> incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank
> you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have
> more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.
>
> Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),
>
> Katherine
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction
> [2]  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017
> [3]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_%
> E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf
> [4]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-
> September/088654.html
> [5]  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters
>
> --
> Katherine Maher
> Executive Director
>
> *We're moving on 

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

[Isaac Olatunde]

Thanks for the update, Katherine.

Regards,

Isaac

On Sep 30, 2017 9:29 PM, "Katherine Maher"  wrote:

Hi all,

Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]

We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared strategic
direction.

In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of
course offer an update as they become available.

*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
feedback you offered.

*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and
timeline.

*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we
transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.

*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a
series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for such
a wonderful event!

*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the
feedback coming.

Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and
often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the
Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been
affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we
can.

Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]

We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am
incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have
more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.

Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),

Katherine

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction
[2]  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_%
E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf
[4]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-September/088654.html
[5]  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters

--
Katherine Maher
Executive Director

*We're moving on October 1, 2017!  **Our new address:*

Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104

+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
+1 (415) 712 4873
kma...@wikimedia.org
https://annual.wikimedia.org
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Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 

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

[Katherine Maher]

Hi all,

Since my update last month, we have been collecting, processing, and
including your most recent input into the lastest version of the movement
strategic direction. This version is available on Meta-Wiki.[1]

We're so close! The direction will be finalized tomorrow, October 1.
Starting tomorrow, we will begin to invite individuals and groups to
endorse our movement's strategic direction. I want to share my greatest
thanks and appreciation for the work and contributions so many of you have
made throughout this first phase (Phase 1) of developing a shared strategic
direction.

In the coming weeks we will be preparing for Phase 2, which will involve
developing specific plans for how we achieve the direction we have built
together. I do not have many more details to share right now, but will of
course offer an update as they become available.

*Strategic direction*. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the
draft introduced at Wikimania. The version on Meta-Wiki is based on the
feedback you offered.

*Endorsements*. Once the strategic direction closes tomorrow,
organizations, groups, and individuals within the movement will be invited
to endorse the direction, in a show of support for the future we are
building together. We'll be sending an update next week on the process and
timeline.

*Concluding Phase 1*. Please join me in offering thanks to the volunteers,
staff, and contractors who came together to make this possible! As we
transition into Phase 2, some of these roles will be concluded and new ones
created in their place. We'll keep you updated.

*Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017*. I was fortunate to join Wikimedians from
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) last weekend at the sixth annual Wikimedia
CEE Meeting[2] in Warsaw, Poland. Nicole Ebber and Kaarel Vaidla led a
series of discussions on the direction, including what it means for CEE.[3]
Thank you our hosts, Wikimedia Polska, and to all of the attendees for such
a wonderful event!

*In other news.* I've heard from many people how much you appreciate these
updates as a means of keeping track about what is going on. I'm talking to
the Communications department about keeping them going once the strategic
planning process concludes, with a focus on more general updates. Keep the
feedback coming.

Since my last update, our planet has reminded us of its incredible and
often unforgiving strength. My thoughts, and those of many within the
Wikimedia Foundation, are with our Wikimedia family which have been
affected by the natural disasters of recent weeks. We have been in touch
with our affiliates in the areas impacted, and will offer any support we
can.

Finally, as our CFO Jaime mentioned last week,[3] the Foundation is in the
process of moving into our new office, in One Montgomery Tower. We invite
you to visit its new page on Meta-Wiki.[4]

We are at the halfway mark of this movement strategy process, and I am
incredibly proud of the work we have done together on the strategy. Thank
you, again, to everyone for your contributions to this process. We have
more work ahead but should be proud of what we have achieved already.

Ten cuidado (Spanish translation: “Be safe”),

Katherine

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction
[2]  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2017
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CEE_meeting_2017_%E2%80%93_Movement_Strategy.pdf
[4]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-September/088654.html
[5]  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_headquarters

-- 
Katherine Maher
Executive Director

*We're moving on October 1, 2017!  **Our new address:*

Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104

+1 (415) 839-6885 ext. 6635
+1 (415) 712 4873
kma...@wikimedia.org
https://annual.wikimedia.org
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