Talk:Asking Wikimedians To Support Advocacy

Document background/goals

From email sent to the advocacy-advisors list:

Since SOPA, we've seen a steady trickle of advocacy groups approaching us and asking us to banner or shut down for a variety of causes/events/etc. Not surprisingly, they usually come away frustrated. (Recent example.)

I think that a lot of the frustration stems from two sources:

• misunderstanding who we are/what we do
• confusion about how best to ask us when there is a legitimate problem.

To help address those points, I put together this page as a super, super-preliminary draft that we can point people at when they ask us to do advocacy for them, telling them better what to expect, how to help themselves, etc. Please feel free to edit/hack at it/tell me it is awful :) —LuisV (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

How do you start a proposal?

How do you start a proposal? Where should you post it? Sending an email to advocacy advisors is a good starting point, but we may want to provide more direction about bringing a proposal appropriately to Wikipedia. Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

I suspect the answer here is so specific to the proposal that I don't think we can answer it generally? But open to persuasion/suggestions on that point. —Luis Villa (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

What topics are interesting?

What topics are interesting to Wikimedians? Obviously, there are many different interests and perspectives, but some topics clearly have significant shared interest (such as preserving the public domain, censorship, and laws that directly threaten our projects). Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

@Slaporte (WMF): I have tried to address this in the draft by breaking out Topics of Interest into a separate section. But it is still pretty much the text from the previous draft. Are there other things we should add? —Luis Villa (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Encouraging creativity in approaches

Might also want to consider how to nudge people in the direction of less all-or-nothing proposals - currently, everyone who comes to us wants to basically run a site-wide banner or do a blackout; getting more creativity there would probably be good. —LuisV (WMF) (talk) 01:21, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

That is a good point. A few creative approaches that Wikipedians have considered/done:

1. Blackouts, banners, and notices,
2. Posting on WMF and/or chapter blogs,
3. Curating the mainpage to focus on a topic (similar to the April Fool's Main Page tradition on ENWP),
4. Collaboratively drafting responses to a request for comment,
5. Using email lists (Wikimedia-l, the advocacy group, chapter lists, etc) to contact people and discuss the issue,

I am curious, are there any other examples? Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

The one other one I can think of is targeted WikiProjects, like Mass Surveillance, which aren't advocacy per se but fit in better with the educational mission/vision. —LuisV (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

@Slaporte (WMF): I've tried to introduce some of these ideas. Curious what you think.—Luis Villa (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Who is being asked to act?

I have the feeling that people might get confused about their "target". They can ask for Wikipedia to support a cause, for a particular language Wikipedia or for Wikimedia (Foundation or chapters). Most people don't know what the difference between these things is. We might want to explain the different possibilites better, as this will make it clearer who we are/how we operate. --Dimi z (talk) 13:58, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Stephen LaPorte (WMF) also wrote this above:

Different language projects may have slightly different rules and will probably make decisions independently. Reaching out to the community on Commons is slightly different than posting a proposal on German Wikipedia or English Wikisource. This is an idea that many Wikimedians understand, but it can be confusing to an outsider. Are there any good explanations of this topic? Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

@Dimi z: @Slaporte (WMF): I don't have a good answer on how to address this one, other than the section we've already got on Who to talk to. It just feels unmanageably complex to me. :( But open to suggestions. —Luis Villa (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Tactics to avoid section

Below is a section I am proposing, with three tactics to avoid. I feel that it would be useful for people to be presented with this guidance, as flooding OTRS with emails will result in the message being swallowed by the spam filter and flooding user talk pages or the discussion itself with messages will likely result in people turning against proposals purely because of the tactics used to promote it, and/or see the offending account blocked.

---

When asking the Wikimedia community, or one of its projects, to consider an advocacy action, there are certain tactics that may be effective in other communities or offline, but will not be effective or may even be counterproductive on Wikimedia projects.

• Do not email the projects: Each project has a "Contact us" page which lists one or more email addresses. These email addresses are designed to assist readers that are having trouble editing or have concerns about specific articles, and are responded to by a select group of volunteers from the projects. Other than the advocacy advisors mailing list linked to above, there is no mailing list that is tasked or equip to handle advocacy emails. If you do send an email on an advocacy issue to one of the "Contact us" addresses, you will most likely be directed back to this page.

• Do not canvass for support on user's talk pages: Each project has a small number of central discussion forums, and any consideration of your advocacy proposal will happen either on one of those project-specific forums, or on Meta, which serves as a central forum for discussions that effect all projects. Speaking with individual editors by leaving messages on their talk pages is perfectly acceptable if those users have already participated in the discussion and you are addressing comments that they have made. Reaching out to people that are not already involved in the discussion and asking them to support your proposal, however, is considered "canvassing", and is prohibited on many projects.

• Do not stack the discussion with support votes from your organization or its supporters: Ultimately, any decision about advocacy on the projects has to be made by the existing communities on those projects. You as the proposer are encouraged to be an active participant in the discussion, and have the right to address concerns and offer counter-arguments to people voicing opposition. You should not, however, encourage members of your organization (or its supporters) to come to the discussion and flood it with support votes. This is considered "meatpuppetry" (Wikimedia's term for astroturfing), and not only will such comments be ignored by the community leaders that close the discussion and assess the consensus, but it will negatively effect how the project's community views your organization, and in turn, your proposal. Additionally, unlike in traditional politics where the raw number of individuals expressing a specific viewpoint is often heavily focused on, in Wikimedia's consensus system, one well thought out, well articulated argument often has a significantly stronger impact on a discussion than a flood of generic or identical messages.

---

Please feel free to suggest edits to these, or support/oppose them in general. Sven Manguard (talk) 21:52, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

@Sven Manguard: Sorry I didn't see this when you posted it! Question: do we have evidence that these things are a problem in advocacy-related discussions? They're obviously tempting, but as I see it the primary problem is that no one even starts discussions at all. So I'm tempted not to address it. Otherwise the substance is obviously good/correct, I just wonder if it is C2:PrematureOptimization. —Luis Villa (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Hey Luis Villa (WMF), no worries about the timing. Based on my observations, which in this realm apply only to English Wikipedia, the third one happens very often (I would say that it happens more often than not), and the second one is uncommon (but has happened enough, and has caused enough backlash, that I am aware of it). I can't think of any cases where the first one happened, although I think that in one case large number of users were emailed about either an advocacy request or a survey request a few years ago, to considerable backlash.

The first point actually came from my experience seeing advocacy campaigning in the political sphere. In that sphere, many organizations, especially the less politically savvy ones, use the "flood their inbox, their mailbox, their telephone lines, and their fax machine" tactic. I'm not sure if it's actually effective, but it does happen regularly, and it is is tremendously disruptive to the people on the other end. The second and third point, though, came directly from nasty incidents on English Wikipedia.

Cheers, Sven Manguard (talk) 21:32, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Feedback for Luis Villa

I believe net neutrality actually falls into a separate primary interest for Wikimedians.

Initiatives such as Zero strongly suggest that internet infrastructure should be unbiased, and access should be free where possible. An underlying purpose of tiered service is to make free/open knowledge services such as Wikipedia less viable and useful. This is particularly true where service providers offer competing products, such as in Canada where Bell - a streaming media provider as well as the largest internet services provider - deliberately targeted its competitor en:NetFlix, effectively blackmailing them into purchasing high priority services over Bell's networks.

This might fall under speech/censorship, but as there is no law preventing anti-competitive service provision (e.g. Baidu paying Bell to *negatively* affect Chinese language packets to/from zh.WP as well as prioritizing Baidu Baike packets) it really falls into a different category of corporate concerns. - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 17:27, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Status

This is finished? This will be continued? This page will proposed for some "no-draft" status? This page has a need for translation? --Kaganer (talk) 15:55, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Kaganer, this is still a work in progress. We've now published some position statements on the public policy site, and we'll plan on revising this document in the upcoming month or two. Thanks! Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. --Kaganer (talk) 17:35, 9 October 2015 (UTC)