Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 3/German language Wikipedia discussion
Information
editWhat group or community is this source coming from?
| name of group | German language Wikipedians |
| virtual location (page-link) or physical location (city/state/country) | de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Wiki 2030/Zyklus 3/Woche 1 |
| Location type (e.g. local wiki, Facebook, in-person discussion, telephone conference) | Local Wiki |
| # of participants in this discussion (a rough count) | 10 |
Summary
editFill in the table below, using these 2 keys.
- Key Insight
- The Western encyclopedia model is not serving the evolving needs of people who want to learn.
- Knowledge sharing has become highly social across the globe.
- Much of the world's knowledge is yet to be documented on our sites and it requires new ways to integrate and verify sources.
- The discovery and sharing of trusted information have historically continued to evolve.
- Trends in misinformation are increasing and may challenge the ability for Wikimedians to find trustworthy sources of knowledge.
- Mobile will continue to grow. Products will evolve and use new technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality. These will change how we create, present, and distribute knowledge.
- As the world population undergoes major shifts, the Wikimedia movement has an opportunity to help improve the knowledge available in more places and to more people.
- Readers in seven of our most active countries have little understanding of how Wikipedia works, is structured, is funded, and how content is created.
- Overall (either)
- supportive
- concern
- neutral
| Line | Week # | Key insight | Summary Statement | Overall | Keyword |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | A | When experts say that there are other needs for information than the classical or online encyclopedia, off course they are right. But I as an author like encyclopedias. And this is why I contribute to one. We, the community, know how to make an endylcopedia and we want an encyclopedia. If you, WMF, wants to make something different you should start looking for different contributors. But as long as the readers of your encyclopedia pay your wages you should make sure, that the encylopedic project Wikipedia gets adequately equipped and supported. | supportive | leave us alone |
| 2 | 1 | B | The questions neither surprise me nor are they suitable in any way for Wikipedia. Off course many want answers to many questions, but we can never supply those. There are countless forums for that. Emerging countries are not of interest here. German is not a language spoken in emerging countries (this might be different for other languages). Talking about YouTube, Snapchat and others is a much too narrow point of view to look at the world outside Wikipedia. We are talking about the leisure behaviour of young people. But Wikipedia is aiming at older target groups like pupils and students who want acquire enlarged knowledge. Whether Wikipedia is significant for a large or rather a small group does not matter. What matters that there will still be a community that writes, maintains and protects articles, nothing else. | concern | unimportant |
| 3 | 1 | A | Is our current encyclopedic format sustainable? It is not and there certainly is need for further expansion. The structure has to be further adapted to the en:Semantic Web to get answers faster. The encyclopedic content would remain unchanged but be written with additional variables. | supportive | Semtantic Web |
| 4 | 1 | A | Particular positions in emerging countries. Besides such projects as en:Wikipedia Zero I hope for better machine translations to faciliate the transfer. But before starting that there should be fundimental foreign aid and internet access. | neutral | foreign aid |
| 5 | 1 | A | The formal education system does not work. That is not a new information. To provide alternatives it is not enough to further extend Wikipedia. Sister projects and other projects of free education should be supported as well. Nowadays for a large parts Wikipedia and its sister projects shoulder what the eductation system does not manage. In general the education policy of teaching can be enriched by more online possibilities and the use of technology such as Wikis. | supportive | Wikis |
| 6 | 1 | A | People searching for new learning methods: from the point of view of didactics it is important to appeal to many different senses and to go beyond mere knowledge transfer. But the WikiMedia is too formal for learning for many, so that they will end up in YouTube. But I doubt that our projects can go beyond plain knowledge transfer and machine communication. Wikiversity and Wikibooks are too theoretical for many. | supportive | more practical |
| 7 | 1 | Rich knowledge: one of the most difficult questions of humankind, where does knowlege start and where does it end. I would regard the Wikimedia projects as rich, but not as comprehensively complete. Do we want to preserve all knowledge of young people from social media and pop culture resp. are we even able to do this? | neutral | Rich knowledge | |
| 8 | 1 | A | Comprehensive, standalone and/or visual engagement. Short answers you will find in Google search. Visual engagement is not always the right way for Wikipedia and its sister projects. But Wikipedia articles can be used for visual projects such as games and geocaching. | concern | visual projects |
| 9 | 1 | A | Acquiring new skills: besides Wikiversity and Wikibooks we are talking about the acquiring of theoretical knowledge. For pracitcal reasons textual and audivisual tutorials are the better solution. Which skills you acquire as an active project is another question. | neutral | skills |
| 10 | 1 | B | Changed structures in the searching and sharing of content (mostly young people): this would finally mean more search engine optimization. Semantics and integration with social networks. I can imagine that discussion culture could be developed futher (as happened in en:Wikia. | supportive | Wikia |
| 11 | 1 | A | Reliable sources are rejected often because of distrust and scpeticism: you can never trust an open Wiki, no matter what quality and control mechanisms it has. But accpetance of Wikipedia has improved. It is alarming what we accept without critically scrutinizing it. Wikipedia cannot do much against a general mistrust of reliable media. Wikipedia is only as good as its sources. | concern | Accepting |
| 12 | 1 | Young people place trust in individuals whose judgement and intellectual honesty they respect. This has never been any different. That is a very normal process of growing up. Even grownups are showing this behaviour, for example in politics. The polarisation in social media channels should be viewed critically. The Wikimedia projects should be an antithesis to this. | supportive | Trust | |
| 13 | 1 | How to reach the target group "young people": Besides technology, usability and structure what's important for the Wikimedia projects are subjects. Young people notice quickly that many articles are written for older people (for example about people with oldfashioned professions, osolete types of entertainment). Maybe at our beginning that was more balanced, because there was a higher numbers of young editors amongst us. Today much of what we do comes from special knowledge of an elder generation. Pop culture (what young people are interested in) is almost nonexistent in the German versions. So many young people prefer Wikia and others. Young people want to research themenselves with primary sources instead of acamedically researching. | neutral | older people | |
| 14 | 1 | The Wikimedia Foundation should start another project, Wikiclickydicky, to suck up to all who are not interested into an encyclopedia, like Michael and Annisa. But WMF should not damage our existing encylopedia to slaughter its high quality content for a social media trend. The high quality standard of Wikipedia is not negotiable when not everybody is interested in it. | concern | Wikiclickydicky | |
| 15 | 1 | It would be great if we could build some mobile apps. For example an app that can use bird song files from Commons to identify birds when walking around. When successfull the app would should the article about the bird. Or an app that works as a travel-guide. There might be thousands of apps. This only works when the Wiki concent is transferable to apps, meaning that apps would be writable and editable as easy as Wikipedia articles. I have no problem with those apps having a social aspects. Each app could have a community. They could have an aspect of learning, or a quiz aspect such as Wikiversity. | supportive | Apps | |
| 16 | 1 | The result of this strategy process does not matter, because the result has already been predetermined. | concern | Predetermined | |
| 17 | 1 | I agree that the result of this strategy process is predetermined. | concern | Predetermined | |
| 18 | 1 | A | We have to overcome the western-centric norms of Wikipedia. Orientation comes from "Orient", the east, but I can hardly find any of that in our articles about religion for instance. | supportive | western-centric norms |
| 19 | 1 | "Like his parents, Michael values that the content is useful, more than if it is high quality or free and neutral". But neutral for whom? How can content be usefull that is not free and neutral? This utilitarian understanding of Wikipedia cannot be a standard for Wikipedia. The challenge of this week does not generate any need for change of our projects. The opposite is the case. In all languages and projects we have to value quality, accuracy and neutrality higher than usefulness. | concern | quality | |
| 20 | 1 | Wikipedia should not only be for highfliers and highly intelligent people. For newbies it should be simple, otherwise we create our own elite. | supportive | simple | |
| 21 | 2 | Oral traditions of African peoples are basically the same as documents, archive materials, old texts and so forth: classical primary sources. Including and intepreting primary sources can never be the task of Wikipedia. Within the Wikimedia projects we might possibly think about using them for Wikisource (I don't know if we can already do that). But only in the original language of the source. For Wikipedia we should not change how we handle this: never interpreting primary sources, merely quoting the scientific interpretation of secondary sources. And for this peer review is the standard for scientific publications, worldwide, and not only in the so-called Western culture. In secondary sources about the subject do not exist we have to wait until scientists analyze the source, otherwise we cannot use it for Wikipedia. | sources | ||
| 22 | 2 | Including primary sources is not the task of Wikipedia, at any rate not at the moment. But it can be the task of some other Wikimedia project. We might upload an audio file to Wikiquote, Wikisource or Commons, or to a newly created Wikimedia project with a name like Wikioral or Wikiwitness, but have to think about the following:
When conducting the interviews one could look at the scientific approach of for example ethnologist and empirical social researchers as best practice. We should achieve a legal certainty about the audio files. When using this primary sources we should apply high standards on the verification of the sources. |
sources | ||
| 23 | 2 | In some Wikipedias we could integrate oral traditions as a large citation with additional descriptive text. I can recall that somebody was explaining a recipe. Should there be variations of this they could also be included, again accompanied with article text from regular sources. But for the beginning this should be allowed for the Wikipedia that actually want that. | supportive | citations | |
| 24 | 2 | At first glance large citations violate many of our rules: 'Verfiability', 'No original research', 'Quotations', 'What Wikipedia is not'. And you cannot simply cancle those out. Ultimately such ideas collide with our most important principle: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. In case this fundamental principle gets weakend there has to be a discussion (this is already the second week that WMF questions the so-called "western encyclopedic model"). They should start seperate projects for this. You might profit from the hugh reputation of Wikipedia but won't water down Wikipedia's attempts at quality and reliability. | concern | citations | |
| 25 | 2 | Honestly I am shocked that all our core principles are seen as negotiable. We're not talking about 'change aversion' here. What is not acctable is to replace the whole project including the communiy for generating articles that have an improved machine readability just for not having to deal with those annoying Europeans. In case the model Wikipedia is obsolete you just have to deal with having a standstill. Then you have to start a new project. | concern | machine readability | |
| 26 | 2 | I think that Wikis can try to use oral sources in case there are no other sources available. This could apply to Wikis in African languages. Of course they can keep writing articles about international pop stars and politicians in African languages, but that is not sufficient. So maybe oral history would help these Wikis, but that would take a bigger effort than just translation from en.wikipedia. Now what about quality and reliability? On our projects we normally try to use the best sources. There are enough reliable sources about scientific facts and you can use those - and there are subjects where you have to rely on press materials. So I think extending our sources through oral ones, because they can hardly be worse than many press releases. Especially when you look at the international press, the quality is dubious. Or does anybody really think that press releases in the former GDR are in any way usable as sources for Wikipedia? 'Fake news' would be terrible for us, yet in many countries they are standard. | supportive | oral sources | |
| 27 | 3 | And again this study is besides the point and is almost worthless regarding Wikipedia. The statements has no meaning for Wikipedia, which is defined as an encyclopedic project. They are mostly about other projects resp. ideas for ruther projects. For all problems mentioned here there is an established solution: en:Wikipedia:Verifiability. Only reliable sources can be a basis for information in Wikipedia. In case there are no reliable sources we cannot write about it. Content and access are subjects for authors and in the forseeable future I do not see the collapse of acamedical and qualified institutions in the German-speaking area. So information for authors will be as accessible in the forseeable future as they are now, if not even better. About the epistemological question if objective evidence is (still) possible and how can you perceive objective evidence I would like to point out to de:Christoph Neubergers essay in the newest edition of M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft about journalistic objectivity (Volume 65, Issue 2 (2017), pages 406–431). Neuberger examines the possibility to establish and detect objectivity in journalism under the impression of the discussion about fake news and the further statements about loss of trust. He comes to the conclusion that it is possible and postulates criteria for establishing trust. Professional quality journalism and the Wikipedia can be an orientation for objectivity. | neutral | objectivity | |
| 28 | 3 | E | Regardless of the information value of Considering 2030: Misinformation, verification, and propaganda the Concluding thoughts and questions are plausible, reasonable and viable. They ought to be prioritized as follows:
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supportive | tracking |
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If you need more lines, you can copy them from Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Lines.
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