Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Cycle 1

Discuss the draft strategic direction

Use WikiForms rather than this wikitext template

It's not easy for arbitrary commentators to use this markup; we're inviting many non-wiki editors to contribute. Please use a public wikiform that posts to this page! –SJ talk  15:27, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Keywords: tools, forms

@Sj: There were a few alternatives, but they either rely on javascript, and/or are equally confusing to newcomers or experienced-editors (e.g. the Teahouse gadget, or Idealab wizard). The alternatives are still being considered though. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:05, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Fix the editnotice for this page :)

That's all. –SJ talk  15:32, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Heh. Or perhaps 'software modifications which eliminate the possibilities of this kind of screw-up'. - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 15:42, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

@Sj and Amgine: If you mean the layout at thinner window resolutions, then I'm looking into that now. If you mean something else, please clarify? Thanks! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:47, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Fixed by guillaume. A br clear was needed at the end. –SJ talk  11:07, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

A self-sustaining community of practice

I want to see us build networks of practice, a global community of developers and deployers and writers, the entire toolchain needed to make these projects work. Not building paid teams that function only as long as funding is available: in fact, constraining permanent central teams so that they are never the dominant participants in their area of focus. (So if we want to invest heavily in an area, we have to build out that community faster than any permanent team is built.) Draw from Mozilla's "teach everyone to program the Web", perhaps offer regular contests to recognize great work. And even where there is centralization in permanent staff, design for distributed organization (compare the distributed way we handle global PR with the central way we handle global communication to donors).

Some parts of Wikimedia are self-sustaining today: setting up WiR and museum collaborations; WLM in general.

Some are not.

Technology

MediaWiki development, wiki feature implementation (even when good ideas are implemented on non-WMF wikis or MW spinoffs, they may not be added to WM sites. In my mind, that guarantees that MediaWiki will reach its end of life within 15 years. If we're not actively building alternatives, everyone will have to migrate to a different platform (different community? perhaps captured by commercial interests) to continue contributing to shared public knowledge.

What's more, there is the sense that a time-constrained central team (WMF staff) is [solely] responsible for testing and maintaining all elements of core, meaning that accepting new features adds to the overhead of the WMF. This walling off part of the toolchain perpetuates itself: if no community members handle dev / testing / ops work, few new ones start; if all good community members in those roles are recruited as staff, it creates a poor community dynamic and noone wants to contribute *unless* they are salaried. Contrast Fedora, Drupal, Wordpress communities.

Recognize interesting tech: When a great indie interface or enhancement appears (WP for iPhone! WikiWand?), call out and reach out to that work. The wiki movement and our projects won't survive without new tools and methods; we need a thriving community experimenting with same.

Free knowledge ecosystem

Many parts of this ecosystem are fragile, don't develop especially large communities, and may fade from view when their enthusiastic founders disappear. From sheet music archives to Long Now language preservation, Wikimedia should welcome, promote, and support good efforts whether or not they run on WM servers and wiki software.

Recognize the best work promoting free knowledge, each year. It all deserve recognition and mutual support; and one thing we have in world-class quantity is visibility and respect.

Help knowledge supporters find ways to channel their work into all of these efforts. From community members looking for places to contribute, to funders looking for other initiatives to support. –SJ talk  17:01, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Could you please elaborate on the things the Fedora, Drupal, Wordpress communities are doing differently. Thanks! Pj quil (talk) 07:17, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

SJ, thank you a lot for your comment! I +1 Pj quil's request though, it would help the people not familiar with the communities mentioned to understand those examples (better). --Base (WMF) (talk) 05:29, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Sj, good ideas.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello PJ and Base!

Fedora is community run. RedHat products like RHEL are run by RedHat. RedHat supports the Fedora community but does not dominate or dictate its technical decisions. They actively find ways to honor leadership in the developer community, and after some rocky starts came to terms with the fact that hiring the best community devs can lead to unintended splits in the community, including people no longer showing up to conferences or gatherings of devs unless they're paid to be there.

Drupal has a prominent consulting company made up of its founder and many core devs, but development and testing of core modules, and decisions about what to include when, continued to have heavy community participation. The consulting group was using Drupal, but it wasn't responsible for all final software decisions.

Wordpress framed itself as empowering creators to do their thing. It designed its gatherings, of both users and devs, as something anyone could organize locally (though there are also larger global gatherings), and focused on making it easy for anyone to build and maintain plugins. Even though wordpress.com hosts a huge amount of the web on its own servers, requiring a central codebase separate from that for installing and running your own wordpress install, features for running and maintaining your own wordpress were always top priority, as was maintaining a thriving community of independent wordpress devs & users. They aggressively solved the spam and astroturfing problems that were central to people's willingness to maintain their own blog. –SJ talk  00:48, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

In contrast to the above, as a community we give limited attention to MediaWiki use outside of WP, and don't tend to recognize those uses as important to our mission (despite that fact that almost all of them are freely-licensed collections of collaborative knowledge). We've seen more and more sites to switch away from MW to other platforms w/o viewing this as a problem to solve. We haven't solved spam in vanilla installs, so no surprise that people turn to non-free hosted solutions [and losing interest in contributing to the codebase]. Wikia is a major exception. But there too, they started using VE and then moved on to a different solution. We don't seem to prioritize use of tools and features by the dev network; which leads to a less robust community of practice.

We have similar problems with other centrally-managed projects. A few examples:

• The first big "skin redesign" project managed by staff was expensive (which often means: runs under a process that ends suddenly when the budged ended), brought in outside contractors who did not remain as community designers, and made little use of the excellent design expertise already in the community. Rather than drawing on the hundreds of designers already there, and welcoming more into the community, we invested in outsiders who left once their contracts were over, and alienated some of the good internal designers.
• The first strategy process tried to bridge a thriving community of creative thinkers and a consulting team. Again, it was expensive & ended promptly on schedule, despite important loose ends left on the table. Some truly talented community strategists had filtered up through the process, but it was unclear to them what more they could do. The idea that the process was "finished" and needed expert guidance from outside the community, led people to think they could not iterate and improve on it. Even though essential follow-ups such as defining metrics fore each goal, and clearly described areas for future research, were laid out; there was the sense that this had to be done by "someone else" (either the WMF, or some new unspecified consultation, depending on who you asked).
• This current strategy process is being even more carefully managed. Most people doing the managing are community members, so hopefully some that experience and expertise will stay within the community this time. But many are being paid, to be liaisons across languages. We will see how that turns out. As with translation, I suspect there is something along the lines of "providing free language training and skill development for 100 people" which has a more sustainable impact than "hiring 10 people", and I'd like to see us do both in parallel. In any case, honing a strategy, and being tactical in decision-making and prioritization, are life skills for a movement: they require continuous interest and thought. "Planning" should not be framed as a complex process that can only be done when the stars align. That is hard to sustain.
• Translation and language networks: our communities have many thousands of bilingual or multilingual editors, most of whom don't self-identify as 'translators' but who edit in languages other than their first language. We also have thousands of people who explicitly help translate strings and messages. Beyond this, when there are important documents, announcements, or time-sensitive projects, the centralized parts of the movement (our global and regional foundations) have regularly paid consultant translators. This is generally not done in a way that introduces or integrates those ranslators into the community; nor is it generally accompanied by investment in language courses and translator-training for current community members who want to improve their skills and throughput. Since language barriers are one of the essential challenges to a global project, and to global agreement on facts and knowledge, this should be taken more seriously as an aspect of community-building and -health.

–SJ talk  00:48, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

MediaWiki is a place criticized from before of its unreliability by experts because of its central dominant platform where paid people work to make it better till they are paid by funding. Because of which its difficult to make it a community driven knowledge base, resulting exclusion of community that includes expert people too who want to enlighten the world. Things are bit biased based on Non- toolchain activity due to which certain info are changed easily compared to certain info that require changes but are not having because of Biased methods of working. References sometimes are non- approachable due to unavailability but due to absence of Sustainable Community Driven Practices its vulnerable to stop if Fundings are hit. Bishalbaishya2012 (talk) 18:42, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

a community of practice with a code of conduct. if we had more people curating images, and fewer enacting their ideology, maybe we could have a welcoming community. until then it will be a battleground not a community. Slowking4 (talk) 14:26, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

My answers

Q What will guide our work together over the next 15 years

A All of us of course. Not one entity, but the community as a "Team".

Q What impact or change do we want to have on the world over the next 15 years?

A Every year more. More readers, more respect through more reliability.

Q What is the single most important thing we can do together over the next 15 years?

A Show more proof that our statements are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Stop fake news!

Q What will unite and inspire us as a movement for the next 15 years?

A Respect for each and every single one of us as a person, an editor and a human being without feeling status as an admin or higher.

Q What will accelerate our progress over the next 15 years?

A bots and templates can be of help to make editing faster, smoother and more reliable if they are well made of course.

Q What will we be known for in the next 15 years?

A High reliability is for me the keyword.

Kind regards from Amsterdam, nl  Klaas `Z4␟` V:  08:17, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Some comments:

• The community is a bit like the Snark, It is hard to define, and hard to find. And the people who invoke it the most tend to use the principle of "what I say three times is true" I.e. shouting louder and invoking the vaguely defined community in the hope of making themselves more influential. (see w:The Hunting of the Snark) (apologies for obscure literary allusions, but they are fun)
• Verifiability, not truth. The truth would be nice, but who is going to agree on what is truth? Certainly not the "Community", Are we talking about "truth" by available evidence, "truth" by consensus "truth" by authority, or the Platonic ideal, which may never be known? (my preference is for available evidence, but some will think me biased)
• There is a base-line level of respect that is due everyone as a fellow human. This is modified by one's actions. Intentions are generally opaque, so we have to make do with what can be seen, which is what we do in public. Anonymity does not help with earning respect. Sad, but probably true. It is part of the matter of what can be seen. It is hard to respect someone who is in your opinion flagrantly and willfully wrong, and we are all that person to someone else.
• Other than that, I am mostly in agreement with the above Q&A. Cheers. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:59, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

wrt Verifiability, not truth I think Wikipedia does a great job educating its contributors and editors about what this means and why this message has value. Maybe a good goal for the next 15 years is pushing that message into the global subconscious as hard as possible. Especially since agenda driven information is exploding and will continue too, there is no better mantra that will help the public from being taken advantage off and drowned. I see very few orgs worldwide with the capacity to be able to do this. Pj quil (talk) 07:53, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Get the women involved!

Wikipedia lacks women authors. Getting more women to actively participate will initially require effort and time and manpower, but will eventually pay off in various ways: More articles, a more even demographics of authors, more authors (… and very likely also a more friendly tone in internal discussion). IMHO, large WPs e.g. English, German, French could very nicely begin by having a designated commission with full-time employees for "More women in Wikimedia!". I suggest collaboration with organizations of women in media, in journalism, film, television, active bloggers etc. These organizations have existing networks to propel the message to their - usually pretty active and mostly very knowledgeable - constituents who often are in a position to spread the message.

Key-words: Gender-Gap, women, involvement of existing networks --Satu Katja (talk) 11:16, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree. I would even go so far as suggesting that Wikimedia should create a Task Force to combat antidiversity in usership and administratorship, as well as the removal of patriarchal and sexist language from wikipages. Nicole Sharp (talk) 02:39, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Disorganized thoughts by MER-C

• We've seen sockfarms of hundreds of thousands of accounts on social media sites, and a quick search reveals that one can inflate the usual spammer metrics for not much money at all. This is highly concerning given how pathetic our CAPTCHA is and how stretched volunteers can be. The only thing stopping them is that editing Wikipedia requires human effort. It's only a matter of time until the 50 Cent brigade, Putinbots, Operation Earnest Voice and other state-sponsored propaganda spewers show up en-masse, if they are not already here.

• The spam and (undisclosed paid) advocacy problems we have now are tiny compared to what they will be in 2030. Orangemoody and OfficialPankajPatidar are nothing compared to what we will be facing. Doing nothing or token efforts are both untenable.

• Aggressive outreach in the third world will lead to an Eternal September and is therefore counterproductive. The WMF's research already shows very poor understanding of what Wikipedia is in the most-populous countries and there are countless examples of said outreach efforts backfiring.

• Outreach efforts should be focused on increasing participation everywhere except the largest projects.

• There needs to be a much greater emphasis on quality, not quantity of content. The English Wikipedia already has enough shit articles as it is; a promotional "article" is worse than nothing as it only encourages the addition of more promotional "articles" at an exponential rate. The WMF needs to support the community in providing appropriate software and configuration changes to reduce the amount of crap that makes it on-wiki.

• The WMF needs to fork out serious cash to refresh MediaWiki before it becomes legacy. Get it to pay for itself by taking on enterprise support contracts and dump the surplus into community tech initiatives, GLAM outreach, anti-abuse tools and terms of use enforcement.

The aims haven't changed at all -- we are here to make available the sum of human knowledge by curating the best free-content (encyclopedia|dictionary|media repository|repository of textbooks and manuals|library|repository of open data|collection of educational resources|collection of quotations|directory of species|news service|travel guide|...) and free software that enables the same we can. They've just got harder.

(This won't be all, I suspect I will have more to say.) MER-C (talk) 12:25, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

An excellent statement. Thank you. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:17, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Many excellent points. Alsee (talk) 16:41, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Excellent points. Aggressive expansion towards the aims cannot be done in a vacuum. For the largest anti-abuse cases, whose number will grow, the volunteer community needs support. Train2104 (talk) 00:49, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Absolutely. Excellent points, on all counts.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:32, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

if we have quality circles, we could coach outreach beforehand, rather than re-actively respond to the outside as "threats". Slowking4 (talk) 16:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia needs to promote knowledge in history in all countries

I believe that promoting free knowledge extends to all countries. We as a community need to start building up its knowledge base so that anywhere no matter who you are can use this. We also need this so more people will help because of the extension into other cultures/regions.

Technical perfection

Wikimedia stands for a purity of technical perfection, where all defects have been eradicated, and thus Phabricator has been retired because it is no longer necessary.

Wider freedom of panorama in the United States

Keywords: Commons, copyright, images, law/policy

In order to share public works online without infringing on creators' copyrights, the United States will need to adopt freedom of panorama on par with the UK and other European nations. If we are serious about our free content mission, we should also contribute to public education towards American copyright laws, which currently restrict photographs of artworks permanently installed in public spaces. (Hence why we currently must use fair use rationales for such images rather than completely free use files.) czar 15:39, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

I'd be a big supporter of a wider freedom of panorama in any country, and would be interested in activism for such goals, though I don't what level I should expect this at in the Netherlands. I think the Wikimedia community could work towards more free copyright laws in general. ~Mable (chat) 10:04, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Singularity

15 years from now, Wikipedia contributors and the Wikimedia Foundation will finally be on the same page, having achieved The Singularity. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wbm1058 (talk)

Hi Wbm1058, thanks for your input! Am I correct to assume that en:Technological singularity, is not the type of singularity you meant to link to? If it actually is the type, could you please elaborate a bit how or why would super-intelligence focus on this particular problem we have? --Base (WMF) (talk) 05:54, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi. You're taking my comment a bit too seriously. I'm frustrated by the ground rules for this discussion: "If you have specific ideas for improving the software, please consider submitting them in Phabricator or the product's specific talkpage." We just went through a round of community polling for the most important community priorities for software, and were promised that the top ten on a list of hundreds of requests would be addressed. So while the Foundation doesn't have enough resources or apparent desire to put more than a dent in the community's wishlist, it does have the resources for this pie-in-the-sky strategy process. Planning for the next 15 years seems a pointless process when on the one hand, you have guys like Ray Kurzweil predicting technological singularity is just 15 years away, you have others predicting the collapse of civilization as we know it, from a lethal combination of excess financial debt, peak oil and global warming. So rather than keep trying to build castles in the air, the WMF should come back down to Earth and put more elbow grease into the wishlist we've already given them. Wbm1058 (talk) 11:48, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Exactly! It's good that you have put this straight. "Solve pending technical issues" is by itself a good enough strategy. --Alexander (talk) 13:45, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

[Insertme like-button here!] Finally the Wikimedia.org will multiply faster than its editors, and it will start to edit the editors. rursus (talk) 09:16, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Integrate Wikisource, Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Libraries

Several Wikisource projects now have a sizeable set of works available, and we now have Wikidata to store and organize data pertaining to the nature of each work. However, many works have either had their data items created by bot, or have not had data items created at all. In addition, well-meaning (but misguided) editors have incorrectly added information to Wikidata based solely on interwiki links, even though each translation of a work should have its own data item to track publication, language, translator, date of translation, etc. Further, there is no automated mechanism in place to allow for interwikis between works on different Wikisources, nor will copies of works appear in the left bar of links at Wikipedia, since individual publications have separate data items from the data item for the work. For example, there is one data item for Don Quixote by Cervantes to which all the Wikipedias link, but each translation, and each edition of Don Quixote has its own separate data item under Wikidata's model. So Wikisource is left out of interwiki connection, and users must know Wikidata structure in order to crawl through it manually to even determine whether a translation of Don Quixote exists in any given language. Further, most Wikidata items for works and editions lack basic library catalog information such as: standard title, LoC call number, ID values for library databases (VIAF, GND, BnF), so that Wikisource content often cannot be found unless the search is make at Wikidata or the particular Wikisource that houses it. IT should be the case that, with full data added, a query can be made remotely and matching data found. Some Wikisource works are now appearing in Library of Congress database searches, and this raises the profile and accessibility of our content far more than we could do alone.

So we need: (1) A mass effort to correctly set up data items for content of the Wikisource projects. (2) Tools to allow automatic interwiki connections between the various data items for editions/translations of a single work for the benefit of both Wikipedia and Wikisource (and Wikibooks). (3) Mass addition of library database information from major world libraries (LoC, GND, BnF) to the data items for works and editions so that Wikisource content will be easily found globally through database searches.

• Integration. Access. Interwikis. Libraries.

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by EncycloPetey (talk)

How about repurposing the structured data software for Commons for Wikisource? MER-C (talk) 12:04, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

I do agree a lot with @EncycloPetey: statement. There is a huge potential (but also a huge complexity) in the relationship between Wikidata and Wikisource and books. Some community members tried to design a workflow for Wikisource and Wikidata, but without great success. We'll probably try again in Wien, this May, at the Wikicite event (discussing about complex issues in real life is always easier than just online). Aubrey (talk) 16:46, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi EncycloPetey, thank you for the thoughts! Am I correct that "Wiktionaries" in "works on different Wiktionaries" is a typo? I would also love to hear your opinion about possible usage of Commons:Structured data for solving the problems as per MER-C. If it makes sense, then perhaps you can also voice your opinion on the project talk page, c:Commons talk:Structured data --Base (WMF) (talk) 06:29, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

It was indeed a typo, and is now corrected. Thanks for spotting that. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:34, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

+1 - we could do a lot more to adopt some of the features of worldcat. need more librarian methods used at wikidata. need more error correction and less thrashing. Slowking4 (talk) 17:04, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Graphs and charts tool

Graphs and charts tool to create amazing graphs and charts. Like an Excel or Numbers for Mac table tool that you can generate charts very easily with. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wikideas1 (talk)

Gas and Diesel taxes

Hi, Wikideas1, thank you for your input! Are you aware about mw:Extension:Graph & mw:Extension:Kartographer and mw:Help:Map Data & mw:Help:Tabular Data? Unless I am mistaken about what you want, they seem to match your description pretty well already :) Perhaps you can learn more about the features the extensions provide and request some enhancements on their talk pages or on Phabricator? --Base (WMF) (talk) 20:20, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm well aware and they are not very good. --Wikideas1 (talk) 01:38, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Base (WMF), thanks for the links :) Wikideas1, I agree with you - they are not very good. Most of that work was actually not part of WMF agenda, but were done as a volunteer effort in my spare time. There is much more that WMF could do to enhance editor experience when creating multimedia (graphs, charts, maps, animations, ...) -- interactive content. Wikipedia is is a wonderful curated content platform, but it is stagnating in part because it is stuck in the simple text + image paradigm. See I Dream of Content. Hopefully it can change. --Yurik (talk) 00:04, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

P.S. I am trying to build an easy to re-use collection of auto-translatable graphing templates for lines, bars, etc. The work just started, but I hope to have more easy-to-reuse graphs there. --Yurik (talk) 00:09, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't understand this. You can use Excel and export it to png. Or you can use Gnuplot to create graphs and charts (svg possible). it is not that difficult to use these tools. Wereldburger758 (talk) 10:19, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

I think what this comes down to mostly, is that most editors see too much of the technology and too little of the solution. The UI that should hide the technology and which should just 'make things work' tends to be lacking (often for very good idealogical reasons btw. We tend not to make it easy on ourselves). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:14, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Further develop "accessibility, quality content, and collaborations"

I have grouped some thoughts around three main goals:

1. Accessible
   1. Improve offline access such that more of the world's population can get dependable access to our content. While much of the world's population has intermittent access to the Internet, it is not the continuous access those in the developed world take for granted, even if money is not an issue.
   2. Accessible language is of great importance. One of the primary reasons many medical students state they use WP rather than other sources is because we are easier to understand. Much of the world either speaks English as a second language or has lesser language skills. When it comes to ease of understanding, we can still do better.
2. Quality content
   1. People expect our content to be both independent and neutral. We need to put in place further measures to address undisclosed paid promotional editing as this is one of the greater threats to the neutrality of our content. It needs to be minimized to maintain our independence and keep us free from advertising.
   2. Working to improve our ability to handle rich content. This was one of the most requested features in the last reader survey. We did have someone working on maps and graphing tools within the Discovery team unfortunately this was put on hold.
3. Collaboration
   1. Develop and expand upon collaborations with other like minded organizations (CDC, ILAE, WHO, Cochrane, etc.) They are typically keen to work with us.
   2. Improve relations and expand upon collaboration between the formal organizations within the Wikimedia Movement and the communities of editors. The community tech team has been doing amazing work in this area and should be further resourced.

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:59, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Improved accessibility is a good goal.

Offline accessibility largely is a hardware issue, and depends on several things that are out of our control, but a few of the things can be facilitated, like providing compact files for download, compilations of related subject matter, apps to recognise when a compilation has been upgraded, and low bandwidth upgrades.

Accessible language is a people problem. There will be conflict between editors who claim that their language usage is correct, efficient, concise and accurate, and other who claim it is too difficult for people who are not subject matter experts or have a limited vocabulary or are poorly educated. Both may well be right. Do we water down the quality to the lowest common denominator and offend the people who produce the best quality content, so that the functionally illiterate can get a basic understanding of a fraction of the topic in the interests of accessibility? Or where do we draw the line? This is a difficult and potentially divisive topic. There will be resistance when someone claims a featured article is inaccessible because it is too difficult to follow for some or other demographic, even when it is true. It is also very difficult to make a complex topic easy to understand in simple language, and may require the article to be much longer. Would topic forking be acceptable to allow a simplified or otherwise more accessible version? Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:11, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

IMO the article should contain text at different language levels. The lead should be in easy to understand language while the body of the text and subarticles (if these exist) can be in more complicated language. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:35, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

In theory that may work. Are there any examples of it working in practice? How would it be enforced/encouraged/caused to happen? I would guess a start would be to write it into the MOS. Currently the recommendation for the lead is a maximum of four paragraphs, and you will struggle to get through a GA review with five. Long paragraphs are often more difficult to comprehend, yet MOS and GA criteria strongly discourage short and single sentence paragraphs, which leads to a proliferation of relatively long and complicated paragraphs. MEDMOS is better in pitching the level at ordinary people, but what test is made for comprehensibility, and at what level? We have no effective method for getting reader feedback. The last attempt was bungled and rejected with extreme prejudice, and now no one will touch it and so there is nothing for the ordinary reader who does not know how to engage on a talk page. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:51, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

There are a number of us within WP:MED that go around and work to simplify articles, especially the lead. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles supports this. We also have w:Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable. My hoping is that raising awareness of the importance will increase the number of people working on this sort of stuff.

Here are 800 or so articles were I have worked to simplify the leads.[1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 23:32, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

WP:MED has a commendable history of attempting to make medical articles understandable, and w:Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable provides good guidance. Sometimes it is followed, sometimes not. However, as far as I know this is all totally subjective, and there is very little feedback on how well we are succeeding. GA review by a non-subject-matter-specialist is probably the first time this matter is addressed in many fields. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:13, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Is this aspect within current technology for automated assessment in any way? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:13, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Marsupiens

User:marsupiens in the case of students as new users there is a reticent view about the veracity of WMP so that wikipedia is considered an unreliable source of information due to the haphazard, one size fits all appearance. Teachers opinions tend to view WP as shallow or a substitute for proper research.

To change that is a matter of acceptance which is hard to expect when the established educators are dubious of WP.

We have to either rename the purely factual sites like wiki-species to have names without a wiki label since wiki implies amateur, or make serious sites like wiki-species a higher plane like wiki-gold standard or something. Ideally where the info is effectively the definition and can be forked but the principal article would not be editable and is set in stone so permanent references can be referenced in footnotes of academic work the same as peer reviewed papers and books can stand as references.

Another idea is to have optional pages and forks of existing pages that have their own lives as descendant pages.

The idea that wiki-pedia has a single article that everyone can add to, is rather limiting for some topics.

Even acts as a restriction when some topics could have several separate pages under the same name, on the same topic, yet with opposite views, or a quite different take on the relevance of issues in the topic.

An example of this is Github, a site where anyone can fork a project's code and change it or add to it, combine it, adapt it and re-use the code etc.

That is possibly a good idea for wiki-pedia so that new pages can compete with the established ones or extend the topic with branches that fill in the gaps.

Alternative pages for a topic could solve the issue of perceived bias in WP and may reduce the monotony of autocratic parameters which dictate the 'sole page syndrome', really a first in first served situation.

Pages often have a note saying recommended to be merged with a similar page.

However the page may actually be more important than it looks and should be the one to absorb self-similar pages, rather than the other way round.

Marsupiens (talk)

Marsupiens, I may be misunderstanding your proposals, but why would this be a good thing? In what way would it improve the dissemination of encyclopaedic knowledge without making the encyclopaedia a repository for opinion, cruft, propaganda, advertising and outright bullshit? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:51, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Marsupiens, Being a teacher myself, I often meet fellow teachers quoting the same problem. Problem is they only trust papaer books and they don't look in not trusted books. Nevertheless, their students do. And you know, in fifteen years part of those students will be teachers themselves and know how to trust the Wikipedia. So, as a famous Dutch writer, Multatuli, wrote: Patience is beautiful, it's a joy to mankind, especial to those who are not in need of practice. You obviously are. T.vanschaik (talk) 23:46, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Marsupiens, thanks for this interesting comment. As for the permanent references, it is possible, and has been for long. Every revision of every page can be cited as a separate. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:42, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

English can't sum the knowledge of all the Humanity

6.000 languages are spoken in the world. We have Wikipedias in nearly 300. Is to say, we aim to have the sum of all human knowledge but we are doing it in less than 5% of human languages, and we are doing it quite well in only 1% of the languages.

By 2030 some of this languages, will disappear. Maybe a half of them by 2050. Every lost language means that we will be losing the knowledge of that language... and this can be hardly replaced. Wikimedia projects are great for making some of this languages more useful and global... but we have to notice this problem as one of the greatest lost of this century. -Theklan (talk) 21:24, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

...and Klingon too. Machine translation can produce comprehensive encyclopedias for all humanoids. Wbm1058 (talk) 15:37, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Klingon is not a natural language, nor Quenya. But natural languages are an important part of the human knowledge and THE ONLY WAY to share this knowledge for millions of humans. So I don't think that is a funny thing comparing the language disparition with your nonsense trekkie comment. Machine translation is not ready nowadays for main languages in the world (try to translate from the russian Wikipedia into, let's say, spanish and you'll see how translation is far for being good), is very bad for medium-small languages and doesnt' simply exist for most of the languages in the world. We have Wikipedia in 295 languages, Google Translate can do something in less than 100 and there are 6.000 languages in the world. I think that this is important, not something to take as funny or a joke. -Theklan (talk) 18:26, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

I think that very often the idea of writing a Wikipedia as a first project with a "minority" language is the wrong approach. We could for example write a dictionary, or collect the written literature available, or again record oral stories and history. The real problem is that projects like Wiktionary and Wikisource are underdeveloped, and very difficult to bootstrap. But often they'd be the best (and quickest) solution, before creating a Wikipedia. (regarding oral stories, we'd just store them into Commons, as we don't have a project yet). My idea is that provind support to these sister projects could also help tackle the issue of anglo-centrism. Aubrey (talk) 07:00, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

It could be the wronk approach for you, but it is the right approach for, let's say, Basque or Catalan students, as they need the content Wikipedia is providing for their learning process. If they can't find the contents in THEIR language, they must find it in ANOTHER language, so they won't A: learn in their language and B: understand completely the subject. There're then two different approaches (I answer here, Pbsouthwood):

• languages that will disappear in the next 15 years and we can't do much about it: we can document their dictionary in Wiktionary and record their spoken words in Wikisource and/or Commons.
• languages that could disappear in this century and we can do something to prevent it: encourage Wikipedia edition, making it an useful language both for real life and for learning, encouraging schools to make articles on this languages instead of using English or other big languages content.

For both approaches we need volunteers and investment. We could give grants to document this languages, WMF could have a whole department of minority languages, helping them with tricky things, outreach or community guidelines. Wikidata is giving (us in the Basque Wikipedia) a great opportunity to have up-to-date articles with automated templates, so we have to worry less about data and more about quality content. But most small languages are not aware of this opportunity or do not have a technical-specialist on how to develop this templates.

Other sister-projects like Wikisource, Wikivoyage or Wikictes are not available in the same way Wikipedia is in many languages. This "incubator" system is not the best way to encourage new editors. Once we have a Wikipedia in one language, all sister projects should be live, because, as far as I see them, all sister-projects should be an unity in the future. Wikinews or Wikivoyage are extensions of geographical/events articles. As an user of Basque Wikipedia (with nearly 280.000 articles) I can't use them in a regular basis and can't encourage students to use them.

Anglo-centrism is another problem in Commons. Anyone can upload images, but you can't have a discussion about, let's say, a copyright issue if you don't know English. And there is ALWAYS a copyright issue somewhere. So we need a new way there. Maybe with the programs WMF is developping to re-order Commons using Wikidata we could achieve a new way to use it... but the community needs to work in different languages.

We are having this same discussion in Basque Wikipedia and maybe we will have an opportunity to talk about it in Berlin. -Theklan (talk) 09:56, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

This is a good point Theklan, and within our scope. Do you have suggestions as to what we could or should do about it, or is this just a mention of the problem? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:00, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

The title "English can't sum the knowledge of all the Humanity" in my opinion tends into an other direction then the discussion above. If knowledge is understood in terms of mathematical, physical, chemical, in general β-sciences translation probably is rather straight forward. To the more advance3d student English can do a lot, the layman however would be pleased with a Wikipedia in the own language. If knowledge is understood too, and it is, as the ways people interact, even the formal use of the same language is no guarantee at all of unambiguity. Using different languages sure will create problems, no problem. But, although not being a fan of the present user of the presidential seal of the United states of America, the Eagle carries a strong call: E Pluribus Unam: United in Multiplicity. Also, at least to me, meaning: the winner does not take it all. We just should live up to that multitude. T.vanschaik (talk) 00:17, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Machine learning will introduce a step change to what we do

How we progress over the next 15 years is determined by our growth ambitions. Using English Wikipedia as an example, doubling the number of articles, at the present quality level, implies growing the number of editors and/or editor productivity by about 4.7% per year. This is ambitious, given our recent past, but conceivable if we invested a lot of effort and resources in moving the needle. Tripling the number of articles requires 7.6%, and quadrupling will require 9.7%, and so on. This is assuming one is content with the glacial pace at which articles progress up the quality scale (4.5 million, or more than 80%, of English articles are Start or Stub class), the inability to translate millions of articles into hundreds (or thousands) of languages and the nascent state of many Wikimedia projects. The problem is too vast for our limited ability to outgrow it organically.

What will accelerate our progress over the next 15 years? In every area of activity where human editors are currently active, machine learning can replace or significantly augment human activity. We've already seen machine learning at work in the area of anomaly detection (vandalism or poor edit quality). The growth in major language Wikipedias and the impetus behind Wikidata has made it possible to rapidly extend this to other areas.

When to apply machine learning:

• Human expertise is absent. There are numerous scenarios in which editors edit or upload and are left to discover through trial and error what norms, rules and laws apply . Machine learning algorithms can act as online editors to help them develop encyclopedic style, avoid copyright pitfalls, find quality citations, or find appropriate media from Commons.
• Humans are unable to explain their expertise. Categorizing, grouping or tagging media, summarizing lengthy articles, creating good ledes, and translating.
• Things change with time. What's important when creating an article like November 2015 Paris attacks? That changes as the article matures. Can we encourage balancing of the article content by directing editors to areas that need attention?
• Solutions need to be adapted to particular cases. We have to do more for editors, by adapting the editing platform to their individual needs and interests. Someone uploading pictures of paintings to Commons should not have to learn about using a dozen different templates, research Creative Commons licenses, and add categories, only to find that many versions of the same picture already exist on Commons, or to have it deleted later.
• Human bias is a problem. Machine learning can be used to counter bias, neutralize language, ensure encyclopedic style and balance articles to better reflect the subject. It will be the only way to provide translation to underrepresented language groups within Wikimedia. Machine learning can be used to find open access sources that support or invalidate claims.

I would argue that machine learning will become essential to creating balanced, well sourced articles over the next 15 years. We have to stop clinging to the fantasy that we will somehow conjure up more fingers on keyboard to solve our problems. The movement will have to turn its focus to developing those machine learning tools that will significantly transform editing Wikipedia and it's sister projects. Raymond Ellis (talk) 11:23, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Keywords: machine learning, artificial intelligence

There is a popular misconception that machine learning will overcome bias and create balance. Human bias exists because ambiguity exists in the real world. Bias has evolved as our mechanism to deal with that ambiguity. The machines aren't going to magically figure out what to do about ambiguity by themselves. The Facebook Vietnam War Photo censorship story is a good example of ambiguity and its handling. And as that case showed, handling ambiguity is going to be a very human and therefore glacial process. That's not a bad thing imho. We can easily train the machines to accept "all men are created equal" but reality is ambiguous. And if we as humans haven't figured out how to constructively handle that in the real world, how do we program the machines to? Wikipedia is an inherently human process and if it stays as such over the next 15 years, it will have a lot of lessons to teach us all in handling ambiguity and bias. That said machine learning will help where ambiguity isn't involved. Pj quil (talk) 14:16, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

I believe we've spent the last 15 years learning those lessons. It's time to move on. Raymond Ellis (talk) 11:46, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Machine learning, for example, could be very very helpful for Wikisource, and hopefully alleviate us from long and boring task like fixing OCRs typos (a sort of 2nd level AI, because OCR per se is AI), or even start formatting pages for us. With that, we could expand our Wikisources in any number of ways (hyperlinking, annotating,analysis, commenting). Machine learning will hopefully be very important for our projects. Aubrey (talk) 16:44, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

The movement is great. We can become greater.

I believe the main concern of Wikipedia for the future should be to engage more young people and create an environment that is conducive of engaging them effectively. Wikipedia right now can feel like a battleground- this needs to change in order to bring on new editors. One problem is the lack of, for want of a better word, tenacity by the foundation to intervene in issues which clearly need intervention. The complex and legalistic nature of policies and guidelines on the project at the moment seem to scare off many young editors and they need to be simplified. However, Wikipedia is a place that for the most part does an exceptional job at expanding access to knowledge. I would like to see increased participation on the project by communities usually out of reach for example in Africa. There is a requirement for the project to take on new and powerful women also. This needs an aggressive campaign strategy, perhaps using advertising as a medium to promote key subjects that are of importance to women in the modern world and how their participation in editing these subjects is vital. Wikipedia is great but we must not be complacent and ever strive in robust and bold ways to continue to be the platform for the world to gain valuable and impartial knowledge. Another key component to future growth will be incentivising experts to contribute towards the project. I also feel that the project has created more "off-shoot" projects than needed which can sometimes add confusion to the interpretation of our goals. We could perhaps focus more on the key elements to our movement without growing into areas without sufficient momentum first. In this way we resolve issues like female contribution etc BEFORE expanding into new areas. →ὦiki-Coffee^{(talk to me!)} _{(contributions)} 14:24, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Optional: Women, young people, participation, policies, environment, minorities

Wikipedia should finance social capital

I believe Wikipedia has the potential to give equity to things that currently don't have any. Social capital can become effective currency and Wikipedia would be a great place to experiment with open source banking, open API's, community projects, impact investments, etc. A hybrid economic model of traditional econometric and econophysic based financial systems offers social capital a real shot at competing or merging with traditional notions of currency. The world needs a WikiBank by 2030 that's preferably built on a new kind of open source social capital hedge fund. I'd be happy to help build it and I think the potential benefits of WikiBank are enormous.

social capital, equity, wikibank, hedge fund

WMFr's position

Sorry for cross-posting, I initially posted it here but it seems it's more appropriate here.
[Edit] French version follows.

The process of discussing the movement’s strategic direction launched by the Foundation is a welcome initiative and we, at Wikimedia France, fully support it.

In the prospect of this reflection, we want to start by addressing important issues and summarising our view of the movement’s architecture.

The community of editors, pillar of the movement, must be at the centre of preoccupations, and this community is very attached to its autonomy and the decentralisation of power. In our view, these two notions are paramount for staying true to the movement’s spirit.

1. The missions conducted by the projects and movement must be carried out as locally as possible to take into account the cultural and judicial specificities of the different actors. For instance, fundraising or interactions with public administrations are not managed uniformly across Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas.

The principle of subsidiarity must be systematically enforced, with local organisations assuming all the missions they are capable of carrying out, and the Foundation taking over the jobs where it is blatantly more efficient than local actors, or world level issues (infrastructure development and maintenance, brand management, etc)

2. Our movement is inherently decentralised and collaborative; on each project, communities set their rules and auto-organise. We want to reaffirm our unreserved attachment to this philosophy and its reality. Indeed, it would be uncalled for to operate the movement as a whole in such an antagonistic fashion to how the projects are run.

Central entities such as the Foundation and the FDC (and maybe others yet to be created) are meant to coordinate the movement at a global level and maintain its unity.

3. We are calling for a clarification of the movement’s organisation, with a re-examination of the respective roles of local organisations, the FDC and the Foundation.

The FDC could gain some autonomy: an open and democratic control of the FDC, including member appointments and internal operations, is a central issue in the upcoming strategic discussion.

The location of the FDC also warrants examination. It doesn’t have to be governed by US law, and a decentralised entity might be very relevant to avoid current issues with fund transfer across national borders.

The Foundation would then apply for FDC grants and be subjected to the same reporting obligations as any other Wikimedia organisation, because organisational introspection is relevant at all institutional levels.

On behalf of Wikimédia France Board of Trustees,

Le chantier de la réflexion stratégique sur l’avenir du mouvement, lancé par la Fondation, est une initiative heureuse que nous, Wikimédia France, soutenons pleinement.

Dans le cadre de cette réflexion, nous souhaitons d’ores et déjà poser les questions qui nous apparaissent importantes, ainsi que notre vision de ce que doit être l’architecture du mouvement.

La communauté des contributeurs, qui doit être au centre de nos préoccupations, est très attachée à l’autonomie et à la décentralisation. Ces dernières sont pour nous capitales pour que le mouvement conserve l’esprit qui est le sien.

1) Les missions autour des projets et du mouvement doivent être assurées au plus près du terrain, afin que les spécificités culturelles et juridiques de chacun soient prises en compte. Les levées de fonds ou les relations avec les pouvoirs publics ne se gèrent pas de la même manière en Europe, en Asie, en Afrique ou aux Amériques.

Le principe de subsidiarité devrait être appliqué systématiquement : les organisations locales prenant en charge toutes les fonctions qu’elles sont en capacité d’assumer, et la Fondation ne prenant le relais que si elle est incontestablement plus efficiente pour remplir une tâche qu’une organisation locale ou pour les actions qui doivent être menées au niveau mondial (développement et maintenance des infrastructures techniques, gestion de la marque...)

2) Notre mouvement est, par essence, décentralisé et collaboratif. Sur les projets, chaque communauté détermine ses normes et s’organise librement. Nous voulons rappeler notre attachement inconditionnel à cette réalité, à cette culture. Il serait étrange que le mouvement fonctionne d’une manière diamétralement opposée à celle en vigueur sur les projets.

Les organisations centrales, la Fondation, le FDC, et pourquoi pas d’autres structures à inventer, doivent assurer une coordination globale, afin d’assurer l’unité du mouvement.

3) Nous souhaitons une clarification de l’organisation du mouvement.

Les rôles respectifs des organisations locales, de la Fondation et du FDC doivent être revues. Le FDC pourrait prendre davantage d’autonomie : la question de la gouvernance démocratique du FDC, dans la désignation des membres et le fonctionnement interne est un point essentiel dans ce débat.

La question de la localisation du FDC doit également être posée. Rien n’impose qu’il relève du droit américain, et une organisation décentralisée peut se révéler beaucoup plus adaptée, pour limiter les problèmes de transferts de fonds qui existent actuellement.

La Fondation aurait ainsi à faire une demande de fonds au FDC, et remplir les obligations de reporting auxquelles sont soumises toutes les autres organisations. Le travail d’introspection organisationnelle est nécessaire à toutes les organisations du mouvement.

Pour le conseil d'administration de Wikimédia France,

Emeric Vallespi (talk) 16:34, 13 March 2017 (UTC).

Hi Emeric, Thanks for this statement. Can I ask what the objective of making the FDC more independent of the WMF would be? You mentioned this would encourage the same level of "organisational introspection" at WMF as currently happens with organisations applying for FDC grants - is that the main objective you have in mind? Many thanks, Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 12:50, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi Chris / @The Land:,

Sorry for my delay to reply, we had significant deadlines in France and I missed your post without notification. I moved the conversation here as it appears more appropriate than in the previous place. Let’s continue here if you don't mind :)

The FDC is currently supported by Foundation’s staff and WMF board of trustees members can even attend as observers.

To us, the FDC should be an autonomous entity from all other organizations and should have its own staff, to ensure objectivity in the funds' dissemination.

Moreover, this autonomy will imply for the Foundation to carry out the same introspective work as the other movement entities and to be accountable for its actions to the whole movement in the same way.

This is not our main objective but just a positive consequence of a decentralized organization, which must be vigilant to maintain a balance and ensure that no entity can impose itself on others.

Checks and balances is something we feel necessary to ensure healthy behaviors between the different entities of the movement as well as between people.

Emeric Vallespi (talk) 13:06, 22 March 2017 (UTC).

Find a way to stay relevant

These may be half-formed thoughts but hopefully they are better than nothing.

• Some people will say that being mobile-friendly is essential for the future. This is true to some extent, but no one will edit Wikipedia if touch screens are all they use. It is not simply a different input device that can be catered to like any other. For some things like editing, it is an objectively worse input device that has caused some people to predict that Wikipedia will end "not with a bang but with a whimper". Spreading the message that games aren't the only thing that full computers are good for will probably help us.
• Adding information is important but that information also needs to be important. A tweet-by-tweet analysis of everything some celebrity says, even if well sourced, is not. Having a neutral point of view shouldn't take away from WMF's mission to actually foster genuine curiosity. Every crowd sourced knowledge site like this is going to have a problem with pop culture contributions; everyone just wanting to edit TV shows and such. There needs to be a way of dealing with this. And more generally, a way to prevent feedback loops of the editor base from taking effect. It is all too easy for early editors having certain interests to accidentally create the impression that Wikipedia is just about those interests.
• Make no mistake that a concerted effort contrary to our movement of transparency is at play too. Wikipedia is not partisan, but it must defend itself from anyone who wants to keep knowledge behind closed doors. The blackouts against SOPA and PIPA were great, but would they happen again now that we've lost Aaron Swartz? And why were laws from other parts of the world localized to those countries? An attack on knowledge is an attack on us all. Seeing a blackout in Canada to protest laws in Germany would further encourage people to be globally engaged. More parts of this political angle could be telling smart phone users why their videos are not playing and encouraging users to combat HTML5 DRM the way the FSF is doing. Don't be afraid of making Wikipedia as political as Wikileaks. If people see us fighting for digital rights instead of just passively promoting them through editing, this controversy is bound to attract some new contributors. Connor Behan (talk) 18:06, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Free access to knowledge is a political position. Wikipedia and most of the WMF projects are inherently partisan for this political ideology. It is inevitable, and the opponents of free knowledge are aware of it. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:51, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

@Connor Behan: thanks for your comment. You're the first person who raised the mobile-desktop issue here. As for your second bullet point, I think you argue that problem needs to be resolved by the movement as a whole or in other centralized way. Why? As far as I know, I may be wrong, this kind of troublesome contributions may be regulated by a policy of verifiability with reliable secondary or tertiary sources. This policy is in force e.g. on English Wikipedia, and just needs to be followed consistently. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

there is an editor at the teahouse who edits using the phone in desktop mode, and swears by it. we do engage in public policy outreach. how should we collaborate with FSF or EFF to promote digital rights? Slowking4 (talk) 16:59, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Become a trustworthy source throughout education

Throughout schools, Wikipedia is not allowed as a source. It should be able to be cited and/or used as a reference. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gabrielmeir53 (talk)

Yes, this is one of the problems faced in Universities of SriLanka--Shriheeran (talk) 00:07, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Could you be more specific? What is your suggestion? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:22, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

One can't decide to be trustworthy. Others decide if you are trustworthy. And the correct to become trustworthy is to behave correctly.

In our case, the Wikimedia community must develop truthful, meaningful, interesting, neutral educational content. But that's just part of our duty.

We must help people who need it, and encourage them to become part of the community.

We must solve problems appropriately. We must be transparent and honest.

--NaBUru38 (talk) 17:24, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Our current policies are intended to produce trustworthy articles. Do you have suggestions that would be more effective within the scope of our mission? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:03, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

To me this sounds very much like Marsupiens. I wrote comments over there. T.vanschaik (talk) 00:31, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

See also my comment/suggestion below on allowing peer review for Wikipedia at "#Wikipedia is not accepted as a reliable "Reference" resource for Secondary Research by the prestigious IARJ." Nicole Sharp (talk) 20:11, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Languages

You better ask the language in beginning of page. Akhilstark267 (talk) 14:08, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

It is supposed to be that you end up on this page only if on Participation page, through where most people are likely to end up here, wasn't a discussion in your language provided and then there also wasn't a translation to your Meta interface language for Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Cycle 1. I think we certainly can add some navigation to at least the latter page's translations talks if they exist, I will try to figure out how to do it in a pretty way, thanks for bringing this up. If this not what you have meant, could you please clarify, so that I can act on what you actually were talking about :) --Base (WMF) (talk) 06:42, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Answers

You can give the answers for questions asked by page visitors, for what they don't know. Akhilstark267 (talk) 14:13, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Many of us try to do this, when the visitor leaves a question that is understandable and relevant to the article. Sometimes we can answer the question by improving the article, sometimes we can direct them to a more relevant article, and sometimes we do not have an answer ourselves. Useful feedback in the form of questions that we can use to improve articles is unfortunately not very common. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:08, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Cultivation

We need to attack the main problem of humanity: food and it distribution, we need to focus on cultivation activities because without that we dont even have knowledge to share, we need to focus in create a world of free access to goods and services.--Javier José Moreno Tovar18 (talk) 21:37, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

@Javier José Moreno Tovar18: could you please specify how we, Wikimedia movement, could address this issue? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Hello, first we need to do is to find a way to send worldwide satellital transmissions in television to spread this message to all the world. --Javier José Moreno Tovar18 (talk) 22:40, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is out of our scope. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:41, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Better future for beginners

Better and more detailed guides for beginners like me. Perhaps a personal mentor, who guides you what to do, when you want to do something. I tell the person, i want to make an infobox and it should be like this... blah blah.

Better guiding or mentoring. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by DrKeta (talk)

On English Wikipedia these things are available. I don't know where you edit as you have not signed your comment. If it is on English Wikipedia, have you come into contact with the mentoring opportunities? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 20:16, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

@DrKeta: there are personal mentors who willingly welcome newbies, there are help pages, tutorials; these concepts are - I think - widely known to the communities on various projects. The movement can't designate any task to any individual volunteer. We can focus on developing software which would help to welcome and mentor, though. But that's quite far from your point, right? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm on the Danish version of Wikipedia. My bad, i forgot the signature. Help pages and tutorials can sometimes be useful, but not alot. It's easier, when you have a real person guiding you. DrKeta (talk) 01:50, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Computer assisted interpretation, analysis, and assessment of the data

Maybe we should develop computer programs that help interpret and analyze the current data, maybe even help hypothesize and fuel further discovery. Wikipedia is a wealth of knowledge, even enabling people to improve their lives but, the way that I can improve my own life is strongly related to my ability to read, interpret, analyze, criticize, and assess the information. My ability to learn is also strongly related to my ability to formulate questions and hypothesize so that I have a new area to understand and apply--fertile soil for the information to grow into meaning. These factors can be aided by another level of wikipedia that would assemble top hits of queries into valuable assessments and also valuable unanswered questions.

The slowest, most robotic, step in the mentioned factors of learning seems to be the simple act of reading all of it. As a single individual, I have a limit to how many articles I can read. This limits my ability to get the most broad and deep range of data to answer my question. Also, sometimes out of an article only some of the information is useful to answer my question. Plus, the time just transferring the information from the words in the article to words in my brain might be better used in the process of discovering further knowledge. So, I suggest we leave the words in wikipedia, stop trying to transfer the entire encyclopedia into our brains, and instead start using the encyclopedia as an extension of our brain. Cramming the information into our mind seems to help, but we end up spending most of our time just regurgitating the information, not analyzing and applying it. We could use wikipedia as an extension by developing ways of getting concise, clear, deep, broad answers to specific questions from it, or even getting the questions themselves from holes or edges of the current data. In other words, developing a higher level of wikipedia on top of the raw encyclopedia. In only one word, why. The "why" level on top of the raw encyclopedia would not be discussion and theory, but an unbiased analysis of the raw encyclopedia level. For example, to answer the question, "What effects have border walls between countries had on different societies?" instead of returning a list of top hits, it returns the aggragate of all the top hits in an organized matter. It would understand the question and find all the data about walls interfering or in some way affecting peoples lives from the encyclopedia. Then list the different effects or do some sort of grouping of the different situations and their results. It would be even better yet, if it consolidated the results into graphs, figures, and diagrams of costs, profits, crime rates, border deaths, and so on. If I were left alone to face that question--something definitely worth it, but nevertheless prone to error, I would be looking forward to a lot of reading, which I might get confused about, miss vital information due to time constraints, or avoid information based on my personal bias, simply searching for evidence to support my personal beliefs.

If I were able to consolidate that part of the research by computer programming, I could save more time to advance the research, avoid human error--as far as the program does, and avoid my biases, which would enable me to learn more, and learn better. To me, that is freedom — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tntrumbo (talk)

I agree with these points. It is possible today to download the whole wiki onto your phone, but still spend a lifetime not finding the answer to what effect border walls have on society :) I guess what you (and probably all of us) are looking for is better ways of dealing with all this info productively. Some sort of merger of the best features of Question & Answer sites like StackOverflow/StackExchange/Quora/Yahoo Answers/Wolfram Alpha/Reddit AMA with the best features of Wikipedia. For example when I ask Google a tennis question like who were the semi finalists of the 2015 US Open? Google will tell me it has analysed 7 million sites in 2 microseconds on 5000 servers to finally return the wikipedia page with that info. Something is wrong with that picture of how we are doing things. Pj quil (talk) 23:39, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Better quality content, esp. across related topics

Many articles that should be highly related contain contradictory information. Those need to be harmonized. And content probably needs to improve by the use of (a) more expert editors and (b) more bots to uncover inaccuracies and biases. It seems to me that there are a host of folks with master's degrees, and PhD candidates, who might be willing to lend their expertise. AND perhaps they could get college credits or discounts or perks by helping be part of Wikipedia. We might need to blend expert-written content, clearly marked, and a separate section with crowd sourced content. That might sound elitist in a way, but in this era of fake news, and over-confident dogmatic viewpoints, more expert facilitation (perhaps assisted by automation and some AI) would be highly desirable.

More experts, collaboration with universities, AI, bots. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 2601:645:8102:bc5:30c0:9406:1dc1:466 (talk)

Initiative to include more retired person with expertise knowledge.They have spare time and not busy in professions, economically more balanced. Some computer hands on and continous mentoring atleast for two months and motivaion needed. Some recognisition in social media like "Editor of The Month".There may be two person combinations,one will be expert in net and computer. --Sumita Roy Dutta (talk) 13:47, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Keeping the balance between correct description and understandability/readability by the layman

Not claiming to be a Homo Universalis by any means, I am interested in a brought range of subjects of which I do not always master the jargon of the inside scholar. To me some lemma's on mathematical subjects need quit a lot of linking before their place in the framework is found, left alone the (mathematical) cause or beauty of it.

At the other hand, as a professional teacher of chemistry, I have to explain chemical concepts to not scientificly trained students. Students, being between 16 and 19 years of age are hardly interested in fine scientific details, but more important will work in chemical laboratories in which knowing how to operate the analytical equipment is their (bosses) first aim. Of course the student needs some knowledge if the chemistry used, but a global view will do.

• The lemma Smoothness stresses my point: although starting out in simple words a rather not simple first example is used.
• The treatment of J-coupling in Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and subsequent discussing J-coupling deeper in an article on its own, to me is a good, but rare exception tot the above noted problem.

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by T.vanschaik (talk)

Showing appreciation for the human resources involved

Summary: We should make sure that readers and editors alike feel valued.

There are two parts to my suggestion. One, we need to encourage editors to contribute high quality content. This is especially true of statistically underrepresented groups, like non-English language contributors, new editors, female contributors, etc.. And two, we need to ensure that consumers of Wikimedia's content feel valued. The single most important thing we can do together is build a community that shows honor and respect for everyone involved with Wikimedia projects.

Part one: Respect for content-contributors
In general, contributing to wikis is a thankless job. Many editors become discouraged and stop contributing high-quality content (or stop contributing at all), for a myriad of reasons. One of our goals moving forward should be to acknowledge and address this problem. Some ideas I have seen proposed:

• Honor contributors in ways that actually work. Wikipedia's Editor of the Week award is one notable attempt, but currently hovers on the edge of becoming defunct. Some contributors like the relative anonymity of Wikimedia, but there are others who wish they could be acknowledged as hardowrking human beings. Consider ways to make it respectable for editors to list "Wikimedia contributor" on their real-world resumés.
• Encourage newcomers to stick around. I don't know if relaxing rules or encouraging established editors to lay off newbies will ever be fully successful, so it may be better to focus on positive strategies. Perhaps a weekly "biography/interview of an editor", providing positive examples of good contributors to inspire new ones. Emphasis should be placed on editors as real-world people (e.g. "Biology PhD working to ensure correct taxonomic names") and stories about success despite adversity ("discouraged by multiple speedy-deletions of my early content but did this instead..."), rather than the strict online-only facts and biographies contributors tend to present on their user pages. Optional, of course, to also honor those who like anonymity.
• Focus on addressing editors' requests and complaints. New technology and compatibility, clearer guidelines and templates, better dispute resolution, etc. Whatever comes up.
• Reach out to the public to find new editors especially in areas that are lacking. Speakers representing Wikimedia at conferences, colleges, etc. Ads on Wikimedia projects to recruit contributors, specifically tailored to the content of articles (ads for WikiProject Novels on pages about literature, for Commons's photo critiques section on photography articles, etc.).

Part two: Respect for content-consumers
The readers and viewers of Wikimedia are the other half of the equation. They need to feel that we are the greatest source of free information the world has ever seen, both so they will keep using Wikimedia and so they may consider contributing themselves. Again, some ideas:

• Work towards adequate representation. Content-consumers need to feel that the things they're interested in are covered on the relevant Wikimedia project. This means working towards equal language representation as well as topical representation - working to eliminate reasonable content gaps. While projects (especially Wikipedia) should remain encyclopediodic by providing broad coverage rather than minute detail, neither should there be obvious omissions of important information.
• Strive for clear, concise language. Make sure that articles about astrophysics are accessible for more than just astrophysicists. Wikimedia consumers should be able to understand the subjects covered by our content. They should not feel that anything we produce was written by someone who looks down upon those with less knowledge of their subject, or those with any sort of cognitive or learning disadvantage.
• Ensure neutrality and respectful language. This is a touchy subject, but Wikimedia should aim to remain nonpartisan and respectful of all groups, since it is designed to serve all groups. Although equal representation of subjects, groups, and opinions is difficult to achieve, this has been one of Wikimedia's greatest assets in the past. It is not one we should give up on anytime soon.
• Ensure accessibility. A big issue here will be readability by mobile devices, which Wikimedia has already made great strides towards addressing. However, other kinds of accessibility are also important, including offline or weak-internet accessibility and the availability of tools to aid sight-impaired users. There should be a general emphasis on making sure anyone who wants to use Wikimedia can.
• Use up-to-date technology. Again, compatibility with mobile devices (including formatting to fit small screens, app creation, and keeping data files small to limit required processing power) will be important here. Virtual reality, 3D-printing, and miniaturized or wearable tech may also become important to consider. Going forward, we should be ready to help content-consumers feel respected in terms of the technology they want to use. We need to accommodate them, not the other way around.

This is not so much an explicit suggestion as it is a synthesis of other's ideas into one massive theme. Respect, honor, pride in what you do best. -- 2ReinreB2 (talk) 19:39, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, good ideas and well articulated.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:35, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

thank you for these comments!!! —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:18, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiMed encyclopedia - a medicine encyclopedia

Wikipedia is in the first place where people around the world visit to know about something in detail. As an editor, I understand the steps and care taken for the reliability of the content that is provided. These days we can see websites and encyclopedia about a Medicines (Tablets, Syrups, Injections and etc...). There are websites which are competing to the wiki on this field. That's why I propose to have a new project in name of WikiMed that includes details of drugs. Chemical components used, Precautions, When should it be taken, Possible side effects and etc.. are some details that could bring up a useful information for visitors.

Example

Crocin advance 500mg tablet.

Composition:

Paracetamol(500 mg)

(information about Paracetamol such as how it works, possible side effects, who shouldn't take it)

Expert advice /Dosage

A detailed information on these points will bring up a quality article and I am sure it attracts more significant visitors to wiki web.

keywords: Medicine encyclopaedia, drugs

Wikipeidan Sulthan90 (talk) 05:01, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

@Sulthan90: I encourage you to propose this project here. Thank you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Thank you for your direction. Propsed the project here WikiMed encyclopedia Kindly give your support Sulthan90 (talk) 05:58, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

How to significantly increase the number of contributors

I have posted this in another thread, but I take the chance of reposting it here. I have nothing against WMF using time and money on strategy, but I don't expect much out of it. I have participated in Wikipedia since 2004 (mostly in Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål, but also some English, Swedish, Commons, Wikidata etc) and I have over the years used quite a lot of time in trying to attract new contributors. Why? Because I believe that only with many more hands we will be able to make a better site. More editors = Better Wikipedia. I used to run courses, but have stopped as realizing after some dozen courses that it does not work.

What works is this: As I arrived myself. In 2004 I stumbled across Wikipedia, I started to edit, and even though my contributions were terrible I was not kicked out, and over the years I believe I improved. What happens today? Either people get their first contribution deleted, they get patrollers on their heels - or both. At least this is what I believe happens on Wikipedia in Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål.

What can be done about it? So far, nothing. I have put up several alternatives, but either people don't care to join discussions, or they have ideas that I don't think grip the main point - how to have an inviting workspace as priority number one so we can keep people that drop by and try to contribute. Is it a big problem for me? No. I am very happy with contributing to Wikipedia and if I had a fortune I would quit my day job and only do this. What can the WMF do about it? Very little, except from keeping servers running. Through the local chapter we get money for Wiki-meetups where we 2-3 times a year meet, hopefully this over time (within some years) help build a more welcoming community and lay the foundation for the small changes that needs to be done to keep the one's that steadily come and try to edit out of curiosity, as I did in 2004.

I would be happy if what I have written above could be of any use. And again, I am not against WMF doing this and contrary to some others I don't think they use too much money on it. But for many years I tried to find out how we could have more people to contribute, and suddenly I realized - no need to go looking for them (running courses etc) as they come all the time. The only thing you and I (and other established Wikipedians) have to do is not scare them away when they come.

How not to scare them away is also very easy and simple, just treat them as contributors were in the years before 2008. Will we stop scaring them away? I don't think so, as at least the community in Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål are not willing to accept giving new users "slack", or not open for engaging in the discussion, so we don't get a basis for the changes.

The result as I see it is that we will have significantly less contributors, which over time means quality of the articles do not improve as fast as it could if we had twice or five times as many contributors as today. So this is a question of strategy. Right now we win the battles, but loose the war - that is we keep deleting bad articles and remove edits not up to our standard (winning battles) and it results in new users giving up on us (loosing the war).

Are there no downsides to implement my proposed changes? Of course it is, minor mistakes will (that is must) be left for days, as not to irritate new users. So we patrollers remove what is obviously crap - but let the other changes rest for some days (in practice we would need to divide patrollers in two groups - the one patrolling from the top of the heap, removing crap, and the ones patrolling from the bottom, fixing the minor mistakes).

If I am right in what works to expand our number of contributers significantly, then what the WMF can do to help the communities is to find data that proves this, possibly by making a big A/B test. They could for example go to Wikipedia in Danish and say "Hi, girls and guys, we give you an offer you can't refuse". If you test this (what I described above) we will literally shower you with money (for running training for admins, users whatever to make them "go back" to before 2008 in treating newcomers). So the A in the testing would be Wikipedia in Danish (who get all the money they can use, and then some) and the B would be Wikipedia in Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål, which will not be part of the program.

Run this for 2-3 years, use some 2-3 million dollars and we would have proven that this is the way, and during the work with the Danish a template for using with other chapters could be developed. Best regards Ulflarsen (talk) 11:11, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

@Ulflarsen: thank you for your input. In short, your proposal is "Don't focus on searching for potential editors. Just don't scare away those who come by themselves."? You wrote "let the other changes rest for some days" - could you specify how we can persuade the communities to do so? For instance, when I see a sentence added, a truthful one, but totally inconsistent with surrounding paragraphs, I undo the change. Our approach to style, readers' expectation for our quality and such have changed since 2008. At least, it's a widespread assumption. We also have limited manpower, and there's a lot of situations like "if I don't react now, I'll forget, and this troublesome change will be visible for too long". So, could you please explain concisely your advice? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): My best proposal/idea about how to persuade the communities would be to have even more facts than we have already. A lage A/B test should help.

I fully agree that our expectations have changed since 2008, so if I would arrive as a new editor today I would quite possibly have left. I arrived in 2004, and now I have over 90 thousand edits and together with another contributor we have been named "Wikipedian of the year", so I suppose my initial humble contributions have improved a bit. From our stats its pretty clear something changed around 2008. I agree in your comments about why newcomer's mistakes are corrected quickly. But. I believe we have to choose. And in my view, we already have so much that is wrong in our content, that its no catastrophe if we let some sub-standard sentences stay a few days, in order to try to keep those newcomers.

That we scare way the newcomers with following them too closely seems pretty clear to me, both from the stats cited above and from my own experience, as a newcomer and from what I see daily in Wikipedia in Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (where I have most of my contributions). Wikipedia in Norwegian today has some 350 active editors, I see many reasons to believe that number could be ten times as much. For the English language Wikipedia that would mean going from 30 to 300 thousand. Contributing to Wikipedia is fun and rewarding, what sane person would not take up a hobby like this? Except for one reason: That we try to push her/him away, when they try their first small contributions. Its up to us if we want to change that. Best regards, Ulflarsen (talk) 06:47, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Photographers

We should have a few people who are prominent people in the Wikipedia community be photographers if needed. We also could have Wikipedia know the location of its users, so if there is a new article that needs a picture or other media then someone can be asked to obtain said media if needed. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Omega Asriel (talk)

@Omega Asriel:, thank for your comment. Such pages have existed for a long time on, I think, many wikis. No doubt your home wiki, English Wikipedia, is one of them. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:42, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiObjects: Wikipedia for Objects - Open Product Data

People will need an open, free, universal and central place to get objects information to:

• Creating neutral and standard lists:

Nowadays if anyone create a list of items like a bill of materials, receipts, etc .. they have to link all items to a comercial or no-neutral web which could change its url in the future or redirect it to adds or whatever. We can do it throught wikidata , like in this example: Components of a 3D Printer (Prusa I3 Hephestos)

• Universal reference database for inventories:

Lot of business fill their inventories again and again with same data ("cardboard box 50x30x15", "step by step nema motor 17", ... ) they should be able to import this data from a open website with their corresponding info like GTIN , weight, size, datasheets, etc... Again We already can do it with wikidata : Arduino/Genuino Uno Rev 3 Datasheet

• Encourage Recycling and Reutilitation:

Imagine if we use wikidata properties (https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:List_of_properties/Generic) like "has part" and "part of" , people will find other uses for objects, or discover were to find.

• Social activism and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR):

Companies have info and metrics about their costumers (habits, location, ...) why not costumers have info about companies products, who manufacture what?, what products have a good Carbon_footprint?, what products have been retired from some problem?, what are Fair Trade?. This also can moved companies do better.

Objects that are open source hardware: All Open source hardware Items in Wikidata

more info: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiObject

P.D.: For more use cases see https://product.okfn.org/use-cases/ from a similiar initiative which looks abandoned and with a different approach.

@Qupro: thank you. I think we shouldn't make this kind of decision as a result of our strategic process. As I can see, you've already set up a subpage on Proposals for new projects, and you're waiting for feedback. Now, look at the point 4: advertise your project. There are 2 channels suggested. I'm sure it'll be appropriate (effective as well, hopefully) if you follow that instruction. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:27, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk: thanks for answering, I had posted at those 2 channels: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-June/thread.html#84587 and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum/Archives/2016-07#WikiObject_project_propousal without too much response, so now I keep working on the project step by step and getting some discussion and "advertisement" undirectly through wikidata proposals (like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Carbon_dioxide_equivalent , https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/3D_Model , https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Global_Trade_Information_Number_(GTIN)). Maybe creating more real examples and use cases some discussion will arrive.

Greater mobile access

The Wikipedia Foundation should put more focus into mobile development for projects that don't have apps. For example, Wikivoyage and Wikionary. Additionally, the Wikipedia app and mobile website should become on par with the desktop web version, adding features such as uploading files, notifications, categories, talk pages, and navboxes. New platforms such as wearables, virtual reality, and 3D printing also pose a huge opportunity for new experiences to explore Wikimedia projects. I am also awaiting the new wikitext editor and believe that an autosave feature should be prioritized to allow editors to start something, and finish it at a later time.

Keywords: apps, mobile

Daylen (talk) 19:15, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Non-English Wikipedias should cooperate

The English Wikipedia is quite open. It has millions of editors and readers and many of them believe that any Wikipedia is similar to the English one. However some non-English Wikipedias refuse to accept critics formulated in another languages (eg, English) and prefer sources in native languages, even if the sources are of poor quality. Some Wikipedias are at least partially nationalistic. The idea of one Wikipedia available in many languages doesn't work. Critics of status-quo may be banned, they create problems. There should exist a central place to discuss such local bans, decided by small groups of possibly biased editors. Some form of cooperation between two or more Wikipedias should exist to rewrite biased pages and correct errors. Correction of an obvious error in a non-English Wikipedia takes months or isn't possible at all if your are a funny foreigner.Xx236 (talk) 08:15, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I have written about similar problems on Meta talk:Babylon, no results. Xx236 (talk) 08:20, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I condone with my experience from the Swedish wikipedia, which I avoid for a combination of inferior quality and bad/sloppy/aggressive editor attitude. rursus (talk) 09:29, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Our experience doesn't seem to important...Xx236 (talk) 13:01, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

As automated translation improves, the Wikipedia user will have the ability to better access information form other language Wikipedias in addition to those we can already understand. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:19, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

More quality, more reviews

We should work more and more upon the authenticity part of media/ data available on wiki by offering maximum reviews on the topic. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Prashant67007 (talk)

@Prashant67007: thanks for your comment. Could you please elaborate on this? For example, what kind of reviews? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Preservation of Language

• We should make this our top priority in the next 15 years. Even extinct languages should be used in the future to make Wikipedia articles. And not just Latin or Ancient Greek, but Ngbee, ǁXegwi, Mandan, and Wichita as well. To preserve the world's languages is to preserve knowledge beyond what man shall ever be able to fathom. Wikipedia would then be the guardian of all this knowledge. By 2030, I hope that Wikipedia will by that time have articles written in every extinct language we know enough of to learn. The very fact of being apart of a team that preserves such wisdom should be all the inspiration one would need. Idielive (talk) 17:02, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
  • Idielive Who will write the articles in extinct languages, and who will read them? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:22, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
    • You would be surprised. We should not be so conceited and chronocentric to think that a thousand years from now there will be no one who will need resources in a language that has been lost for millennia because of inadequate acceptance on Wikimedia. Wikimedia is not just for contemporary users, it also has a sacred responsibility to preserve knowledge for generations to come. Unlike a commercial dictionary or encyclopedia which can go out of business, Wikimedia is in the public domain, so it will exist forever (I am sure someone has Wikipedia on M-discs already.) Nicole Sharp (talk) 02:53, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Kurdish language

Buna kürd dilinide ekleyebilir miyiz? Fuat buğdaycı (talk) 08:22, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@Fuat buğdaycı:, I'm sorry, I don't speak Turkish, so I'll answer in English: what do you mean? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 09:29, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This was a double-meaning: Can we translate this page to Khurdish? and, by extension, there is possibly a sense of cultural erasure. - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 06:26, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

One "English (International)", one "English (British isles)" and one "English (USA)"

Many suggestions are about expanding the local languages, which I think is good. But I also think wikipedia needs to become more international. Very often now when I as a Swede come to read about topics in the english wikipedia, there is a heavy emphasis on the english-speaking countries, particularly the USA. I understand this, many of those who read and write in the english wikipedia are likely americans, and it is most relevant to them. But today english works as the international language as well, and I think it might be a good idea to separate the english wikipedia into at least two (english(international) and english(english speaking countries)). In the swedish wikipedia there will be more emphasis on what is relevant when reading about a topic to people in sweden(and some extent in finland), in the esperanto wiki there will be more emphasis on that relevant to the esperanto movement, so it is natural the english wikipedia come to put more emphasis on things related to englishspeaking countries. This is all good, but I think there is a need for a wikipedia in english (and perhaps other big langauges spoken widely too) that is not centered on any specific countries as well. Several articles could just be copied over, while other would need to be changed somewhat to be more relevant for the audience. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 78.70.95.57 (talk)

Wikipedians write about the things they want to write about, for better or worse. If there are articles missing then anyone can request them. Whether they will be written depends on two main factors: Is there someone who wants to write them, and are there enough reliable sources to write an acceptable article. There does not seem to be any obvious way that splitting English Wikipedia would help with this. There is absolutely no constraint based on geographical factors which stops a valid article on a notable subject from being created on English Wikipedia. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:34, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

layman and expert sections?

I have increasingly found articles too difficult, long, specific and with difficult academic language, every so often when I just want to read about topics I come across for fun, not being a scholar in that subject. I know there is the simple english version, but it is not only about the language. Of course there should be indepth information on topics, but I would like some kind of indication of what is more basic information, more easily accessible for the layman, and what is indepth sections. Perhaps there could be some colour code, or having a more clear divide between the simpler summary, and the more advanced sections. It feel to me like the parts I am interested in reading in an article quite often get drowned in very specific and expert-level information. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 78.70.95.57 (talk)

I think this is a valid problem. The guidelines recommend that we write accessibly, but in reality, we write how we like and how we can. Sometimes this is acceessible, sometimes not. A feedback system that tags articles with incomprehensible language could be helpful, but our article feedback history on English Wikipedia is littered with disasters, partly due to the developers not actually producing anything the editors found useful. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:44, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia should be approved by experts

I believe that wikipedia articles should be proven by someone who is an expert at something like firearms, or someone who has experienced it, like the Holocaust. Articles shouldn't be randomly written and should have completely correct facts.

I think that, wikipedia needs people that are experts at things to work in their offices and approve things from other people. I also believe that video game pages should be approved by the makers and producers, and as well should be approved by the music makers if the soundtrack of the video game is on the page.

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Krazybruh87 (talk)

Thank you, @Krazybruh87:. As a rule, articles can't be randomly written, and the fact that someone experiences something encyclopedic doesn't make her/him a better researcher. For we can only write what was published in reliable sources: that's the point that differs Wikipedia, an experiment that succeeded, from traditional encyclopedias. Since your home wiki is English Wikipedia, I suggest you to have a look at en:WP:VER, and en:WP:OR. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree with the essence of Krazybruh87, given that the current workings of Wikipedia are kept. An expert stamp should be put upon articles that are factually correct, whenever an expert is available and the fact check has been completed. As for "encyclopedic", "readable", "well structured" etc., those are separate topics, that in principle don't interfer with fact checking. rursus (talk) 09:40, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi Rursus, Where are these experts going to come from? Are you suggesting that WMF should hire or employ experts to check articles, or that somehow the usual editors can be used for this purpose? If the latter, how do you propose selecting the experts from the non-experts, as so many of us edit anonymously or under a pseudonym? Are you aware of the Good Article and Featured Article processes on English Wikipedia? Are you referring to all Wikipedias, English Wikipedia, or some other Wikipedia? it makes a difference.· · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:53, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood 1+2+3. They are going to come from Wikipedia. WMF can ascertain their academic credentials by a secret process. 4. The Good Article and Featured Article processes seems to be irrelevant, they are only verifying the sources and a comprehensive article, not whether a factually correct integral entity. I propose moving away from the volunteer process of ad-hoc society informal laws where everyone have an equal say, to a process where a single academic may challenge the consensus. rursus (talk) 07:26, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Rursus, I assume you are aware that academic credentials do not necessarily imply neutrality, and that it may be difficult to find an expert on some subjects who is already a Wikipedian. I agree that GA has many flaws, and FA is no guarantee, but peer review by an "approved" expert may also present a set of problems. That said, I agree that the idea has potential. Some WikiProject Medicine articles have been externally reviewed by recognised experts. Apparently with good results - I am not competent to judge that field. I would prefer to see a panel of experts, but one is better than none, as long as the appointed expert follows the NPOV and other relevant guidelines.

• Are you suggesting paid or unpaid review?
• There are some subjects where academic credentials may not be relevant. To take an example that is familiar to me - the field of underwater diving - what criteria could we apply to identify appropriate expertise?
• There may be legal implications to WMF approving/certifying content. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:03, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
Although this response is a little late, it may be more successful to use models like dual-publishing and collaboration with experts. These publications reward experts for their efforts in ways that can help their CVs. Examples:

• The Cochrane organisation collaborates with WikiProject Medicine to integrate findings from medical meta-analyses into rlevant articles.
• A Wikipedian in residence at Cancer Research UK helped to update several cancer articles.
• The British Medical Journal is helping to organise academic peer review of the Parkinsons article
• The Gene Journal encourages authors writing academic reviews to also update the corresponding Wikipedia page (list)
• PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Genetics dual-publish academic reviews that are reformatted to update Wikipedia pages (list)
• The WikiJournal of Medicine put the Hippocampus and Cerebellum articles through expert peer review, published them as academic papers, and reintegrated the improved versions into Wikipedia (list)

Some other Wikipedians and I wrote a [www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(16)30254-6/fulltext short article] in the Lancet GH where we propose expanding these sorts of efforts. Hopefully in the future, there is sufficient interest to maintain and expand a set of academic WikiJournals in addition to the flagship medical one. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 05:11, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Understand impact better; use technology to support community

Not exactly a small subject, but here are a few quick thoughts! ;)

What do we want to achieve? Well, of course, what we want is to give more people more access to the sum of human knowledge.

What does that mean in practice? Recently I wrote an essay about the meaning of “impact” in the Wikimedia movement, which is meant as an input to this process. I’d encourage everyone thinking about strategy to read it, because I think there is a lot of scope to improve how we understand our own impact, and if we don't then we will have problems making strategic decisions. But in short: Volume, quality, reach, and diversity of content on the Wikimedia projects are all important. Yet they take us in slightly different directions depending on what we prioritise. Personally, I feel that currently volume is overemphasised at the expense of quality and diversity. I’d welcome more focus on things that will make Wikipedia(s) better not just adding more pages and pageviews.

What do we want to build? Here I’d like to address one current challenge and one direction for the future.

Here’s the current challenge: For a movement that should be all about community and technology (in that order, in my view ;) ), we are not very good at using technology to support community. Of course, it’s good that we have Visual Editor now, and thanking tools and so on – but there is still a really long way to go in this area. For instance, the whole experience of using Quora or Tripadvisor is set up to prompt people to contribute to those sites, from on-site prompts to emails telling you how many people have viewed your content. How many more people would be contributing their knowledge to Wikipedia if we had as good an experience for those who do?

Here’s the future direction: Over the next 13 years, things will become easier to automate, as machine learning tools of different sorts become more commonplace. If we can take advantage of this, we have the potential to make a really positive difference. We already have in ORES a technical tool that can evaluate article quality. What other tools could we build (or find or borrow) to measure the impact of what we’re doing better? What could we do to semi-automate the process of finding sources, or find evidence-based methods of assessing the reliability of sources? How about for translation; many articles are heavily based on other-language Wikipedia versions of the same thing, what can be done to speed up this process?

Hope this is useful! Regards, Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 15:58, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Impact, measurement, technology, community, automation, user experience

I love it. System-generated file names

2017 Cycle 1 I love it - I think is a great tool moving forward for our futures to see a mirror-reflection of our past up to the current millennia

Optional: One thing that officers need to learn how the system-generated file-names are managed in order to prevent duplication, erroneous alerts or missleading users via notifications when identical file names are encounter — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Art Saucedo (talk)

@Art Saucedo: do you mean file upload on Wikimedia Commons? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

I like this idea too (computer-assigned names for file uploads), but I think that in the long run it will likely create more problems than it will solve. Nicole Sharp (talk) 02:19, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

It is not clear what you are referring to. Could you clarify? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:17, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Problems in India while using wiki

The people and the government of India can't afford own wifi
So they use mobile networks which are usually2G
Other problem is language,
Language used is usually english with french and greek touch. Coolaqueel (talk) 17:17, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

@Coolaqueel: thanks for your comment. Do you think our Movement can do anything about that? There's a number of people who point out that, in general, we should act more globally; I'd be glad if you specified what you're proposing. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:17, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

In theoretical thoughts: firstly, governments can open several small areas with universities-gathering and economic developments, such as around　New Delhi or　Bombay [Mumbai]. The effects can be tested whether information contributing to local academic researches and constructions. Secondly, this openness can be spread in a large scope of areas for commons' life demands - such as to know how other countries cook tropic vegetables and fruits and what roots are discussed about Buddhism, naturalism etc. If it can contribute to more commons' life. Then, it can be re-opened time after time. Jason M. C., Han (talk) 02:44, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

It does come up over and over that India has the largest native-English population, and currently forecast to maintain its pre-eminent position, yet the dialect is very under-represented in English project contents. There may be SG effects to eliminate or at least minimise Indian English on WP. Do we really wish, in the next 15 years, to prevent this population from seeing itself in our projects? - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 06:35, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

The English version used in an article on Wikipedia, and possibly also on Wikivoyage, largely depends on the choice of the person who started the article, and also on the subject matter. If the topic is on something about Australia, then Australian English is appropriate, a British topic would usually use British English, and an Indian topic would use Indian English. There are probably cases where an American editor started an article about an Indian topic which uses American English, but this is open to discussion and could be changed. Getting a topic on general importance that was created by an American editor changed to Indian English is unlikely to happen. When there is no tag specifying language version, editors will generally copyedit to the grammar and usage they are familiar with. This may well result in Indian English idiom being changed to British or American equivalents, but it is not always done with any specific agenda other than improving the content.

Is there a standard for Indian English that can be applied? If there is not, how do we distinguish between Indian English and poor quality English?

What do you mean by SG effects? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 07:53, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

My thoughts about the relationship between the Foundation and Wikipedia

I think that we Wikipedians invest too much time and energy on Wikipedia, especially English Wikipedia. Therefore, I wonder how the Foundation would thrive without being too dependent on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has sister projects, but I don't know how they would help the Foundation prosper.

Wikinews, a news project, is suffering from inadequate management, especially when English Wikinews receives numerous pending articles in the Newsroom. One or two articles become published, while the rest were deleted. I don't know how many Wikinews pages will be closed, but I expect plenty in the future. Wikiversity, a project of free courses, may have some promise but needs more participants. Some other projects may do fine but not as thriving as Wikipedia. Wikimedia Commons, a multilingual free-media project, is very interdependent with all other projects; without those projects, Commons may lack purpose.

WikiJournal and NonFreeWiki are receiving stellar support. Some other proposals for new projects, like Wikigames (2) and Wikidirectory, need more participants. The board should have meetings discussing those proposed projects. More investments and participation are needed to make the projects possible.

If the above proposals won't help the Foundation be less dependent on Wikipedia, how else do we resolve major issues with Wikipedia and the Foundation? --George Ho (talk) 05:14, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Keywords: Interdependence, dependence, sister projects, proposed projects

Yep, sister projects have also made great contributions in recycling sustaining knowledge and information introduced by Wikipedia. Meanwhile, they have also created great part of new knowledge. In the future, I hope sister projects would make more usages of Wikipedia knowledge; Meanwhile, Wikipedia should take some voices from sister projects Jason M. C., Han (talk) 02:33, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Jason, and my apologies for belated reply. More and more Wikipedians have either retired from Wikipedia or left Wikipedia and then became inactive for months. I don't think trying to bringing the retirees back would cure or resolve major issues with Wikipedia. I would hope that they spend more time on the sister projects rather than make the Foundation stagnate and flounder, affecting its projects. However, maybe we need a project to help retirees be enthusiastic with the Foundation again rather than make them Wikipedians again. Instead, we can help ex-Wikipedians get back on their feet and contribute to sister projects before becoming Wikipedians again. --George Ho (talk) 06:17, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, indeed, from knowledge's reasonability and growth-tree, first-hand knowledge and information from life, local customs, culture, practices and environments surrounding can also be highlighted as wiki-members' contributions. In this case, retirees are quite suitable to make more researches, creations, conclusions from their life, but Wikipedia cannot totally accept them, as being without too many references. However, their voices are also important for knowledge-recycling and development. We can divide a line between sister projects and Wikipedia, and between first hand sources (such as Wiki commons' life visualizations, sounds-recordings) and second-hands knowledge from reading and reviewing of others'. Then, let them make more usages, exchanges and transformations. All their purposes are for blooming civilization and the identifications of those right facts and truths maybe haven't been recorded only on books. Jason M. C., Han (talk) 12:37, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Replace this with a sentence that summarizes your opinion

Ans 1- Knowledge gathering
Ans 2 - Impact every one knowledge with valid and frequent and updated knowledge
Ans 3 - Collect more information and updated existing information
Ans 4 - To help every single person on the planet to get free knowledge
Ans 5 - With more volunteer involvement we can reach to next level
Ans 6 - Knowledge Dictionary

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jeetendramandal (talk)

Briefly and acceptablyJason M. C., Han (talk) 02:29, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

X-rated content

i believe wiki should be a little of the old an new and should put up stricter guide lines up for the pages like things kids should never see. some of the new stuff would be related to kids and current things(trends). we also want people to use this as a information source so, we may want to put up stronger support lines on who gets to change things and who doesn't

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by the gobler (talk)

@The glober: would you like to specify what do you mean by put up stronger support lines on who gets to change things and who doesn't? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

We need to ensure uncensored access for everyone. There is no way to cater to every single culture in the world for what each one deems appropriate or not appropriate for children. It is the responsibility of parents and educators to teach children what is appropriate or not appropriate within their own cultural perspectives. Nicole Sharp (talk) 02:24, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia is Vulnerable to the Promotion of Propaganda

I have often found that Wikipedia is vulnerable to the promotion of propaganda when I research a sensitive topic. My most recent case of this involved a search for information on Reiki which, according to Wikipedia, is "a form of alternative medicine developed by a Japanese Buddhist [that] has been adapted into varying cultural traditions across the world." I went to the entry on Reiki to learn about it. I wanted to know about its founder's background, its theories, the basis of its practices, and any research supporting it as well as criticizing it. All I found was the equivalent of a four-page article designed to denigrate this worldwide practice. I am not a supporter of Reiki. I don't know very much about it at all. And, I still don't. Whoever wrote, or last edited, this article had an agenda. It was not an informative article on the subject. It was a piece of propaganda. Unfortunately, I have found this too often on Wikipedia. This time, I decided to point out the problem. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cara2010 (talk) 03:26, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

To a large extent, propaganda is in the eye of the beholder. How would you distinguish between propaganda for Reiki, propaganda against Reiki and facts about Reiki? The accepted method on English Wikipedia is the use of reliable sources, which can be inspected to find the information provided on Wikipedia. In the case of medical information, there is a stricter requirement imposed by the WikiProject on Medicine, which requires that the information should be from a review article published in a peer-reviewed publication. Very little positive alternative medicine information has been published in peer reviewed journals and other sources considered reliable by WP:Medicine, largely because if they were, they would become mainstream, more or less by definition. Our fact checking systems for scientifically related information rely on the scientific method of testing claims by experiment, under controlled and repeatable conditions. Most alternative medicine claims do not stand up to that level of scrutiny. When there is a choice between providing verifiable information and unverifiable claims, we prefer the verifiable stuff, and must label the unverifiable claims as such. This is our defense against all kinds of false information, including propaganda. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:14, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

May I ask why one would expect western-style medicine researchers to publish positive findings regarding non-western-style medical practices? Selection bias much? (This asked as someone who is involved in academic health research, but not without an open mind.) - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 06:57, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Medical researchers will publish findings of their research. If they do not research something, they will should not provide findings on it. Verifiability of content requires us to use what is available. If the alternative medicine fields are not researched and published adequately, this is a problem that should be addressed by those fields if they wish to achieve scientific credibility. It is not that difficult to do. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:24, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

You are almost correct: researchers publish findings of their research. However, there can be a few issues with bias, which, logically, means some of what is published is junk. Doing science is hard, it is difficult to achieve scientific credibility, and almost none of it is reliably retested by multiple objective researchers. There is little research money available to do that, and it does not support one's academic career.

If all the science you trust is available only via pubmed, you are not practicing medicine, you are trusting a black box whose inner workings you do not even understand. - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 16:24, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Promote better understanding of international copyright law among non-experts

As a user of Commons, I've had a difficult time understanding what international copyright terms are and how they relate to one another. I still don't even really know if Wikimedia bases its free content policies on the copyright status of a work's country of original or its status in the US (or whichever is more free?). I don't know what the freedom of panorama status is in any given country, and I have no idea where I should go to find this kind of information. If I want to upload pictures I've taken in Japan, for instance, I am not sure which I have full rights of and which I don't. In general, I think promoting this kind of understanding among the general public would result in more free works to become available to our project of information-distribution. This, of course, could also apply to Wikisource. If I have a 1920 text by some European author, couldn't I just go through a checklist to see if the work in now in public domain? Could we promote these kinds of checklists to be more on the forefront of our project? ~Mable (chat) 10:14, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

the problem is the law is so complicated, it cannot be reduced to a checklist. we have the orphan works problem, and anonymous author problem. we could adopt a stand of practice that includes risk assessment. we could simplify the process flow for item assessment. it would require a consensus among the community how to handle items in each fact pattern.

we could do a lot more to educate about copyright, we could work with librarians to develop a body of knowledge. Slowking4 (talk) 16:49, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Terra secularization, rationalization and brotherhood

I have sent on 3rd April an alert letter to the Royal (hopefully soon Republican) Team of Her Majesty The Queen of the Britons, and a copy through Twitter (https://www.facebook.com/ioananoemy.toma/posts/797570140390925). Please, join me to say to them and to all Global Leaders: 1. Stop to the religious error! 2. Secularize and rationalize society. Terra Family needs rational, systemic protection. 3. Let us share brotherly Terrian responsibilities!

1. helpterrafamily #integrativeterrafamilyprotection #allterrafamilyforrecovery #makepeacenotwar

Consider also this message of Ben Ferencz, the last Nuremberg prosecutor in life: https://www.facebook.com/bbcworldservice/videos/1530936146925506/?pnref=story

" ...there are three major factors [of leaders' dehumanization] : religion, nationality and economic security."

It is therefore necessary to declare religious error, national fanatism and economic speculation as threats to Terrian peoples and stop them. Goodness must prevail.

I hope these ideas can contribute to the progress of the global society, and, in particular, of the Wikipedia society. Humans together must be Terra protector gods (that is Terra superiors).

#helpterrafamily #integrativeterrafamilyprotection #allterrafamilyforrecovery --Iohana4 (talk) 10:46, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Sorry @Iohana4:, I think this is out of our scope. Please take our mission, vision, and values into account. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Low participation of Congolese communities

Congolese and other French African communities are really not involved in the mouvement. I wish that the Wikimedia mouvement find ways to stimulate these communities to join the adventure. Since the Internet still poses a problem, Wikimedia must above all promote Kiwix to enable these communities to have access to WIkipedia and its sister projects --BamLifa (talk) 17:12, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

This is a difficult problem, and is within the scope of the movement to try to make the projects more accessible to offline users. Kiwix may be one way, and as far as I know, people are working on it. Good ideas for how to do this are always welcome. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:25, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

The Addition of Non-Controversial Sub-Wikis for Censored Countries

In several countries, such as China, France, Iran, and Italy, Wikipedia and its branches have been banned or censored due to controversial topics and ideas that go against their government's teachings. This has caused all documents to be removed from their internet connection, causing pages that may not have anything to do with censored topics to be inaccessible. Due to this, Wikimedia should work on releasing individual sub-websites for each of the censored countries. These websites will still have knowledge, but only non-controversial topics that would normally be censored by their individual government.

Optional: Keywords that describe your opinion

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by LegoDonutPlayz (talk) 19:04, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored by Wikipedians. We do not pander to politicians by providing whitewashed versions. We leave that to the countries who wish to demonstrate their unwillingness to allow freedom of information to show their colours to the world and to their own people by blocking Wikipedia themselves. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:32, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not accepted as a reliable "Reference" resource for Secondary Research by the prestigious IARJ

I am an Editor/ Peer-Reviewer for several reputed International Academic Research Journals -- one of these is published for the Cambridge University (U.K.). I am a product of some of the best Educational Institutes in Asia and have specialised in four co-related disciplines. Moreso, I have had vast experience in various public & private sector Organisations, as also independently as a Professional.

I am also a Senior Journalist. My Articles & Papers are read by intellectuals the World over, including Judges, Academicians & Politicians; and the suggestions made therein have been implemented at National & State levels.

With due respect, I find a lack of clarity and continuity in various norms laid down by Wikipedia. Moreso, it also appears that at least some of those to whom the responsibility for implementing those norms has been delegated, lack a proper understanding of those norms. In the result, Wikipedia is not being accepted as a reliable "Reference" material (resource) for Secondary Research by the prestigious International Academic Research Journals.

Optional: research, sources, reliability

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gitakrishna (talk) 10:13, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Gitakrishna: thank you for your comment. I feel a bit confused, for indeed it is of a considerable degree of generality. Could you please elaborate? What specific norms do you mean? In what concrete circumstances have you perceived this lack of clarity and continuity? Do you find the lack a direct cause of the current approach by IARJ? Who are those to whom...? What is proper understanding? What exactly is to be improved? Please, have look at this section. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

This is a continued problem, I agree. Many universities in the USA also do not allow using Wikipedia as a resource. Perhaps if there was a way to set up a professional peer review for select articles on important topics (science, history, etc.), and have those articles indicated that they have been peer-reviewed as of a certain date (so that a researcher knows that any changes after that date have not been peer-reviewed). Nicole Sharp (talk) 02:31, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

• Never has been, never should be used a citation for serious academic work. See w:Tertiary_source NE Ent (talk) 18:56, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree that WP shouldn't be used as a reference (Rasberry BMJ 2014. As for expert peer review of Wikipedia articles, see the comments in the lower section for some successful examples if how this has been implemented. These reviewed pages do have a citeable version, even though it is not the current Wikipedia page (example). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 06:06, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

What do we want to build or achieve together answer from a small Wiki!

I am an active Wikipedia editor since 2005. I am active in Wikimedia movement too. If you interested you could see my activity in the Hungarian Wikimedia sites (The last 3-4 year practical I have organized about 50% all activity of the Hungarian chapter) See the Meta.

I find out that this strategy conversation are organized very unfortunately. Practically there are involved only the old bureaucrat (admins, etc.) The folk are leaving out.

I observe the Hungarian Wikipedia & Wikimedia movement for 12 years. In the Hungarian Wikipedia are about 10-15 admins determine the whole movement. They have absolute power in Hungarian Wikipedia and according the rules they have the admin lordship unrestricted. The most of them have been elected more as 8 year. The last admin election was in 2015. They are also the board members of Hungarian Wikimedia. After this introduction let see my answer on yours question.

What will guide our work together over the next 15 years?
If we want to keep live the Wikipedia, we should qualify the movement for rejuvenation. We need regular change in adminship, a real possibility to have new active people. New motivated editors, new motivated activist, new ideas. Our work should guide the openness and the understanding the new ideas.

What impact or change do we want to have on the world over the next 15 years?
The Wikipedia unavoidable. This is a fact. The most important keep this status and if it possible improve the creditability.

What is the single most important thing we can do together over the next 15 years?
Keep the Wikipedia movement dynamism. Make new rules to avoid the unrestricted admin lordship. Have rules guaranteeing the possibility of rejuvenation.

What will unite and inspire us as a movement for the next 15 years?
Hard question. The time when the movement was in itself inspiring are long passed. The only chance to unite and inspire the new wikipedians are more openness and less hierarchical bureaucratic system.

What will accelerate our progress over the next 15 years?
Be honest, nothing! It will be a very, very nice upshot when the Wikipedia could held the today’s activity.

What will we be known for in the next 15 years?
That the absolute power and unrestricted and the undisplaceable adminship kill the volunteer activity. --Texaner (talk) 18:17, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Texaner: hi, thank you. I'm really sorry for how things are with the organization and involvement in the strategy process on your wiki. We were trying to reach out directly to your community. There were mass messages posted on your village pump, individual questions by e-mail and on IRC, even posts and private messages on Facebook. I posted once again on village pump a simple, short info and found a person who agreed to translate it (see here). Maybe, if we (meaning, Base and I) had knew the most popular channels of communication on your wiki, and the most likely people to help, we could have acted more quickly and efficiently. But we didn't. For now, Base is doing the outreach, and I'm facilitating here. If you'd like to help, please contact anyone of us anyhow. There are many weeks of the process ahead! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

the admin privilege problem is a matter for community health. we need strategies and tactics to coach / lead admin away from adversive "leadership". Slowking4 (talk) 16:43, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Do You think it is worth make strategy for a unhealthy community??? The only strategy, that is worth, have a healthy community! Everything should be planed only after that we have it! --Texaner (talk) 16:28, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Texaner: have a healthy community is an ultimate goal, and focus on community curation is a strategic goal. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

• • As I have written above, many non-English projects are closed for outsiders. Hungarian language is hardcore, but some Indoeuropean languages are partially understandable but closed to foreigners.Xx236 (talk) 13:07, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

We want to be the one source that you can find literally anything you want that is trustable.

The internet is amazing. You can find anything. However, the internet is not reliable, and websites can be hacked, can be closed, or can take a lot of time to find. Wikimedia should be a Google that brings up specific information on topics. For example, if I wanted to look up a species' scientific name, I would find thousands of results from all sorts of sites. However, I do not know what is trustable, and each site offers something different. Finding out all I need to know could take hours, if something like a species name is searched for. Wikimedia could be a source that contains all the information about a subject there is to know.

By: PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 23:58, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Suitable channel should be all-inclusively set for suitable persons and make them life-adventure here freely over the next 15 years

1. Logics Reasonability in globalized society with humanity, universal exploration for another immigrant settlement in the long-distance 'landscapes', spiritual alive everyday with light-velocity and by streams-travelling through all-covered Internet upon every corner of earth (even airspaces), and the responsibilities for every kid and young teenager's openness to knowledge and information no matter where only if can access to internet and wiki, will guide us together.
2. More openness, more humanity, more opportunity, more construction, more understandability, more befriended peers, more beautiful eyes, more peaceful life, more creativities, more freedoms.
3. Let elements of self-media and diverse self-travelling channels work to re-coordinate, re-modify, re-communicate, neo-express, neo-discover, neo-create knowledge and information from commons' daily life and academic experiences.
4. Members of Fatal community will be together save peoples' life (surviving) in some undeveloped & dangerous areas and create more opportunities for all-inclusive young generations' openness to modernist and post-modernist civilization. Afterwards, there will be no nightmares, but good dreams and bravery for their realizations.
5. Today, I read a piece of parable again taught by Jesus - lost sheep (In one hundred sheep, only one lost, but there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one 'lost sheep' who repents, than over ninety-nine... ) In my mind, to save every good dream for peace from all 100 sheep together(even so small under the huge universal background no matter who) and feel joyfulness about its done would accelerate our progress.
6. We will be known as our members (writers, readers, teachers, learners, sharers and acceptors) will range in every local corner upon our earth. we will be known for our contributions of the identification of every single and small tentacle of knowledge and civilization in commons' suitable channels - they can freely say their voices about..., meanwhile, there also will be some peers who make usages and spreading of them in different channels. We will be known, as our bridges are going to communicating virtual constructions with the reality and help them made out senses.

Openness, All-inclusive, Understandability ,Self-Media, Fatal community, Life Parable, Bridges between virtual world and real world

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jason M. C., Han (talk)

@Jason M. C., Han: could you please specify how we should achieve that? I'm especially wondering how to summarize the second point. The strategic process is to cover 15 years, not eternity :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Dear SGrabarczuk (WMF), that's a quite good question. Firstly, I am sorry to give so generalized answers about 15 years in future. But, I thought: indeed, if seeing them as ideologies for guiding future and bearing them in mind, they aren't far from our life on globalization and can help us solve some international problems. 

Take an example, in my mind, currently, the best and possible way to solve Syria problem (Wikipedia introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria) - yep, we can have a try - would be: 1. Stop wars; 2. Build optical fiber net-works and other necessary internet devices (even some wireless wifii or smartphone network covering there) into that area; 3 Let Wikipedia and other sister projects involving fields of education, medicine, knowledge of illness ＆ plague-protection, knowledge of Chemical weapons - protection, Cultures' conflicts and solutions, Religions' natural roots of peace, damages of wars and how to avoid, how to re-build destroyed homeland etc. come into that area - please trust that we have already gotten enough knowledge - - firstly, it can be in governments' working places, some public areas, some universities and hospitals; then, we can build several charitable wiki-communities and projects for commons online, and then, in reality; in the future, if peaceful situations come, and if being permitted, we can further build some Wiki-hospitals and Wiki-schools for children and young teenagers, and send some wiki-members to volunteer, teach or work there. I thought: only if there will be internet, some true hearts for next generations, our permissions, and some preparations of hardware and software online, through negotiations and communications, in 15 years, it would be very possible to realize some of this proposal... After 15 years, imagining, in that time, the second point - '# More openness, more humanity, more opportunity, more construction, more understandability, more befriended peers, more beautiful eyes, more peaceful life, more creativities, more freedoms.' will be naturally reflected from what we will have done.Jason M. C., Han (talk) 13:48, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia stands for enlightenment, creativity, and the ultimate goal of knowledge for all.

Wikimedia will be known as the eminent aggregation of community-driven content, and the greatest product of the Internet. We will be known as the success story of digital communication, an example of the limitless potential of strangers working together towards a common goal.

Nice if we can do it. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:50, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Improve transparency in salaries and spending. Case subject: Sue Gardner

The first part of my subject is:

Improve transparency in salaries and spending.

I would like to apologize if this is irrelevant, as this perhaps is already done so. But if that's the case, it would be appreciated if it could be pointed out where this can be retrieved? I know there are some financial reports here at WMF, and there is the seemingly even more succinct WMF Annual website, but I am not sure whether they really accurately list the money given out, with detailed information on the reason and person or institution involved.

The second part of my subject is:

Question radically whether or not you want to keep an economically in-equal model.

Perhaps WMP should set a one-standard minimum wage, which would also work as a maximum wage. Unless of course you want to keep increasing economic inequality.

Finally, some questions as food for thought:

Case subject: the super-human Sue Gardner.

To end with a question which connects both parts of my subject. An article by Andrew Orlowski of 20 December 2012 in "The Register", claims that the CEO of WMF, Sue Gardner, was taking at least $196,000 annually. How can we verify if this is true? Is this really the heart of what WMF is about? What did she need that money for, and why did we as WMF need to give that money to her for? Why would she merit a higher sum per hour than other of our members who equally use their concentration to study and try to improve the project. I really can't understand how she would somehow be a super-human. And if she truly was a super-human, was she so uninterested in helping out a bit at WMF that everybody else at WMF was having cold sweats, thinking she could stop any moment? (Verheyen Vincent (talk) 21:43, 6 April 2017 (UTC))

@Verheyen Vincent: I shortened the heading for purely design reasons. I hope this won't have an influence on the reception of your feedback. As for the first and third part, I don't know any answer. But I can ask other WMF employees where to look at, if you want. As for the second: by Wikipedia you mean Wikimedia Foundation, or WMF and all affiliates, or maybe something else? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Thank you. I was too fast before and have now corrected the second question. (Verheyen Vincent (talk) 01:37, 8 April 2017 (UTC))

more financial transparency would be good, including salaries of C suite. i have no problem with the small amounts paid to the ED. but by not disclosing in the annual report, the fiscal / calendar year mismatch of the form 990, contributed to much unneeded drama.

addressing the "unpaid intern" ethical problem should be addressed using the grant process. Slowking4 (talk) 16:38, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

How does "unpaid intern" differ from "volunteer"? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:32, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

it differs in the case law. unpaid labor as a "learning experience" has been common in some industries. [2]; [3] it is a can of worms. the community would do well to avoid relying on the gift economy, to the extent it appears exploitative. Slowking4 (talk) 22:50, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia staff should join online communities's ethic and culture

From this example, I fell a cultural and ethical consistency lake between Wikimedia Fundation staff and editors. Maybe time is coming to help wikimedia staff to join online communities's ethic and culture . Lionel Scheepmans ^{✉ Contact} _{French native speaker, sorry for my dysorthography} 16:20, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Keywords

Culture, ethic, consistency, wikimedia staff and editors.

@Lionel Scheepmans: could you name directly what is to be improved? There's an rhetoric-related rule that one shouldn't formulate general judgments based on onefold situations. In other words, do you know more situations similar to the linked one? I assume that at least some of the similarities would be the answer to my question. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Sure SGrabarczuk (WMF). In fact, the problem is the same for all project grant submissions. I don't understand why two turns of submission for project grant is maintained when rapid grant are reviewed on a weekly basis by WMF staff with opportunities for revising proposal few time. If the target is to help prospective grantees to achieve projects on the best way possible, a continue review with weekly feedback could be really much comfortable for every body - No rush time for wikimedia staff and committee, a continue review by the communities like every where on online wikimedia project, and no stress of dead line for de grantee.

By the way, wikimedia volunteer newbie grantees could be framed by the grant system with a good feeling because no grant will be refused but just reported until the total approbation of all stakeholder (staff, committee, community). That more or less what's happen in Wikimedia online culture and that's can inspire all project grant system. The construction of wikipedia is a incredible success story. We can be inspired by its ethic and culture all over our movement including Wikimedia staff organisation and MetaWiki activities.

Is that clear with this new formulation ?Lionel Scheepmans ^{✉ Contact} _{French native speaker, sorry for my dysorthography} 12:07, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Lionel Scheepmans: OK. Strategically, I think, your proposal is (more or less) Conform granting systems to the community-developed workflows. If you'd like to elaborate on this, you can write in French. I can read it. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

SGrabarczuk (WMF), Better than I express myself in English to be understandable by a maximum of metawiki user. I can translate de post in French on fr.wikipedia when every thing will be clear. So, the term workflows sounds great and match perfectly in this context. Do we change the title of the section ? In a largest scale, on line Wikimeedia culture and ethic could also inspire off line wikimedia movement activities and stakeholders (transparency, non hierarchical statue on policy decision, ...). But these, topics have to be probably treated separately, or be use has syntactical assumption grouping various topics together. Lionel Scheepmans ^{✉ Contact} _{French native speaker, sorry for my dysorthography} 10:03, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

When you are unsure of the accuracy of a translation I suggest providing the idea described in your home language and your best effort at a translation. Then people who can understand both can recommend improved translations, and the original remains as a reference. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:36, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

User Experience

Along the lines of technological improvements and a more welcoming environment is the need for improved visual design and user experience tools that can be shared across all wiki projects. Commons works well for shared images, but we also need shared templates and easy ways to improve content layout and appearance. Wikipedia is now 15 years old, and the overall user interface and user experience shows it. It's text-based content in what is now primarily a graphic / multimedia world. To be effective even five years from now will require much more in the way of multimedia support and improved user experience than currently exists. And whatever is developed needs to be easily applied across projects, not just for the Wikipedias. -- Dave Braunschweig (talk) 01:04, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Agreed - I also think more live chat support would be better (IRC already exists, but more people on it, or something part of the site like chat on stack exchange) --Nerd1a4i (talk)

A new type of education using the knowledge base Wikimedia already has

Plan

Looking at the summary, the main population explosion will occur in Africa - where there is tons of education progress to be made, in a very short time. Besides this, the current education system in other countries has some problems - it is not as tailored to every individual as we might like. Watching this video ("Digital Aristotle"), what if Wikimedia tried to create that sort of system using Wikipedia's already existent content and future content?

Process

1. Editors would need to work more on translating content into other languages for other wikis so non-english speaking countries could benefit
2. Create a "wikitech" site that any programmers can contribute too. They can write programs requested by the community or just ones they are interested in. (Phabricator may act as this as it is improved.)
3. Create a "wikivideo" site, or maybe partner with YouTube so Wikipedia can scrape it for videos to add to the "Digital Aristotle".
4. Start a project on wikitech that can scrape the internet for information to add to wikimedia in general - for example, it might add free books it finds to the appropriate wiki site, etc.
5. Once the preceding pieces are completed, we could put it all together - creating a program that customizes to learners in any language that uses information from wikimedia and related sites and any others that might agree and tests in a way that customizes to the student.

What do you all think? (In case anyone's curious, I'd want to help program this in any way I could myself.) --Nerd1a4i —Preceding undated comment added 13:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC).

Keywords: education

@Nerd1a4i: thank you for your comment. There's a similar proposal submitted on English Wikipedia (4th paragraph in fine). SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 10:02, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I like the general idea of eventually putting our content into an educational format/process, although certainly this would be a very complex venture. Making wiki content teachable is something I can see happening. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 17:24, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Editor surveys

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but it would be useful to have regular (annual?) editor surveys across the WMF projects to check if editor retention and gender gap goals, and the like, are actually being met. The last one was several years ago. Jc86035 (talk) 16:42, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I think this is relevant :) thank you. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 10:06, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

World peace

Over the next 15 years I think we should work to achieve world peace by adding many things to Wikipedia that will plant good and kind ideas in people's minds. Use calming ideas on wikipedia or other software to make future generations otomistic, then there will be generations of optimists, then ending in world peace.

Peace, world prosperity, awesome stuff, optomists.

'-somewhere people protest

βd͡z — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Benj1245 (talk)

Unfortunately many militarists use the Wikipedia to spread their POVs.Xx236 (talk) 13:08, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

The War on Wikipedia/Wikimedia.

This is one topic that is worth discussing. The War on Wikipedia or Wikimedia is a major source of harm against Wikipedia that is damaging its credibility. The War on Wikipedia has been very successful apparently and has been mostly implemented in education and schools at all levels. Teachers and educators are condemning Wikipedia doing detrimental damage. I believe it is necessary to have a discussion on a topic such as that. I would consider a very major problem specifically in Public Relations. --Cass 20:54 March 11 2017 UTC

@Cassini127: could you specify which war on Wiki[p/m]edia is the War? Do you mean all unpleasant behaviors both online and offline, or a concrete problem? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 10:14, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): I don't think that Cassini127 meant "all unpleasant behaviors". That would be a rather big cop-out. No, I believe they were speaking of the very concrete damage that a crowd-sourced information database does to the actual progress of knowledge. You can read about this more at the Wikipediocracy blog -- pick practically any post, and you'll see what I'm talking about. The Wikimedia Foundation is deliberately blinding itself to anything its critics have to say, by focusing only on what "the community" has to say -- while all the while, in the background, "the community" is being forcibly purged of anyone who dissents too vocally. You're in an echo chamber at the WMF, and you either don't even realize it, or you choose not to want to realize it. - Thekohser (talk) 14:28, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Do you two have some historical personal dispute going on here? I thought that SGrabarczuk (WMF)'s request to Cassini127 for clarification was entirely reasonable and appropriate. I would also like to know what was meant. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:44, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

No, this is the first interaction between us. I see that Thekohser gave his answer, and I'm still waiting for Cassini. I know that the War may mean many things, as Wikimedia is varied as the Great Barrier Reef. For instance, my community knows nothing about the technical Code of Conduct, but there are Polish Wikipedians who were opposing the Superprotect. It can also mean sth related to experienced Wikipedians vs. newbies, etc, etc, etc. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 09:22, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

New Wikimedia project: Genealogy

What about a Wikimedia genealogy project?

We should establish the first new Wikimedia project since Wikidata: Wikimedia genealogy project. -Another Believer (talk) 01:55, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@Another Believer: I'm sorry, but in my opinion, this isn't a strategic idea or a strategic goal. The only thing we can do in the scope of these consultations is to state that there are a few project proposals (see this and that sections). SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): I was solicited to be bold and share ideas about what we can achieve as a community over the next 15 years. I don't see how proposing a new Wikimedia project is beyond the scope of this objective, but I respect that you're serving in your role as Strategy Coordinator and trying to establish parameters for a focused discussion. That's fine, and I appreciate you for taking on this task. However, I would disagree with your assessment that a new Wikimedia project is not strategic. Establishing a new project brings new editors (and users) into the Wikimedia community. New editors who can contribute to open knowledge and culture, who enjoy history and research, and who could possibly contribute to other Wikimedia projects. As I write this note, I see above this section heading a page notice with the following examples as summary sentences: "Wikimedia stands for a purity of knowledge and facts, untainted by commercial interests or political agendas, and promotes a knowledge culture of balanced information and cited sources" and "We should explore new kinds of knowledge spaces, embracing innovation in order to survive and thrive in 2030". These are both applicable to a Wikimedia genealogy project. -Another Believer (talk) 00:40, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

@Another Believer: thank you for your understanding. There's a lot of proposals for new projects, some of them are detailed and polished up, the other are just drafts and brainstorms. I think that strategically, we can decide to be more bold in terms of new projects, however, the decision which one is to be brought out, is - IMHO - rather tactics-like. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:57, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

So a new project may be within the scope of the strategy, but too specific to be a strategic issue? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:54, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood:, there could be a strategic issue between the lines (probably is), I absolutely don't want to prejudge that, it's not my job. My task is only to facilitate this particular discussion and summarize it. I personally think that idea is too specific to be a strategic goal. It looks like a step, not something that could take 15 years. In any case, I'm here just to facilitate, not to decide, that's all. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 11:48, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

in support, i would say that the NARA has a major genealogy effort, so it is an established collaboration and entry point between archives and the public.Slowking4 (talk) 14:00, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

I have to practically applaud how cunning and manipulative the WMF staff member hired contractor was here, shutting down innovative thinking in one fell swoop, all spoken with a smile (that just barely covers a dripping glaze of superiority). Well done, really. Well done. - Thekohser (talk) 14:31, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

That comment was unfair and inappropriate, and I say that as a signed up supporter of the genealogy project. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:28, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Sorry that my comment rubbed you the wrong way, Peter. I call 'em like I see 'em, and that sometimes gets me into WP:AGF trouble, I guess. Another Believer seems to have generally agreed with me, though.

No worries, I will also call it as I see it, and I think you are wrong on this one. I agree with SGrabarczuk that the proposal for a genealogy project is too specific for a strategy discussion, while supporting the concept as being compatible with a desirable strategy. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 18:48, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

@Thekohser: You said it, not me, lol. -Another Believer (talk) 15:38, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm not a staff member. I'm a temporarily hired ordinary Wikipedian. I think you assumed bad faith just because of 3 letters my signature. Look, my name doesn't even appear on wmf:Staff and contractors. If I make a mistake, write me so. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 11:48, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I think you made a mistake. - Thekohser (talk) 16:31, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Make Wikipedia the destination

As a top site with incredibly valuable information, we have an amazing opportunity to make the reading experience truly exceptional. People should love visiting Wikipedia so much that they are motivated to seek us out specifically, rather than consume our content on other sites. As our content appears more and more on sites across the internet, let's make the experience on our own site so rich, informative, easy, beautiful and fun that people will come specially to us. What an incredible opportunity and challenge! MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 15:24, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Figuring out what our impact should or could be

The current essence of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis already caused much positive change for the world beyond. For instance, one change is far easier access to encyclopedic information. That is obvious. Another one is the mere proof of our wild success of the collaboration of crowds, and this has undoubtedly sowed many seeds for current and future projects. Yet another is that we are gradually chipping away at previously hoarded or hard-to-find information. And I could go on. There also may be negative impacts, but I think the positive has by far outstripped those.

So, then, let's wonder what further positive changes we as a rather massive movement can achieve. Let's brainstorm this. Let me start with a few wild ideas:

• Wikipedia depends on reliable sources. What can we do to make sources more reliable? Less biased? Less dependent on the corporate point of view (as right now, much of our RS are indeed tainted by commercial interests)? More whole? Can't we figure out a way to demand information of a higher quality and more of it? As a Wikipedia editor, I regularly find myself stumped when filling in topics, being aware from personal knowledge that there's more to a subject, but unable to find reliable sources because the media isn't seemingly regularly interested in producing the coverage I would base my content on. And when they do, it sometimes feels like they are presenting one side of the story (for instance, in labor disputes where the company's position is given far greater weight). How can we effectively drive the media through systematic fair demands of it? I realize this is a bit lofty, but we are here to dream.
• Wikipedia is making the sum total of human knowledge more readily available, but what are we doing to have this information make a real difference in people's ongoing lives? I am sometimes criticized that my work isn't putting food on anyone's table, so to speak. It's also not building anything we can touch and physically use. What kind of economic or self-fulfillment impact can we make on people's lives through our collective work? Can our movement be a beginning of making populations more self-reliant? (note: I don't mean this in a politically conservative way but from a self-fulfillment and personal productivity/happiness perspective.) Can we be more than about information, but also about engendering accomplishments in the physical world?
• Wikipedia doesn't allow original research, but maybe there should be a wiki (or similar venture) that encourages and provides the space for such. And connects it all in unforeseen ways. Think of it... democratized, open R&D.
• Wikimedia could go further to assist new language learners. Having the same or similar content in multiple languages seems to provide the beginning of a platform for the teaching of languages.

This is just a few of my thoughts. Feel free to add yours or respond to mine. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 17:13, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@Stevietheman: thanks for this interesting brainstorming. (Although, personally, I find the next 15 years not so dreamlike :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

• I like the idea of having another Wiki where original, but standardized researches can be made and posted, as well as, having an effective way to cite information from such researches on Wikipedia. This can be very helpful, specifically in countries, where it can be very hard to get citations for certain kinds of content.--Jamie Tubers (talk) 12:34, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Owl of Athena

In fact I will base my opinion on this “Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. ” — G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), "Preface"

It is time for Wikipedia to change the way it gathers information and data in such a way that when we ask a question any question we got immediately an answer in fact any information is written said or is taking place somewhere just in time it will be inserted automatically and categorized in its right place let us say "Wikedia : a social wikimedia" that gather information and classify it accurately just in time.

For that we have to push to free internet and smart devices everywhere this will give more pipes for good data and spread Knowledge

Optional: Keywords that describe your opinion

@IssamBarhoumi: sorry, I don't quite get your point. We react quickly on the most important/influential news (wiki means quick). Moreover, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, thus we can't and don't collect totally any information. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

dear : @SGrabarczuk: Yes you do but I mean by the comparaison with the Owl that Wikipedia as a sytem can do it by itself automatically especially in verifying accuracy --IssamBarhoumi (talk) 11:19, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

@IssamBarhoumi:. I don't get your point either, and your reply is even more incomprehensible. Maybe you could clarify, and make your suggestions accessible to the rest of us, and thereby increase the chances of them being useful. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 12:41, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Community Health is critical and in critical condition

Improve Community Health by back to basics and culture change.

• Mutual respect as a founding principle of online collaboration (If someone says it's disrespectful, try again, with willingness to work out a respectful way to communicate)
• Personally identifiable information is handled by paid employees, with binding non-disclosure agreements, not by volunteers. Gradually and systematically restructure community governance mechanisms so that PII is handled by paid staff only.
• Grant students, teachers, professors, and working people the rights and tools to block non-professional types of communication/onsite interaction, which impede their participation in encyclopedic work
• Contract with an English-language employee assistance service, to provide followup counseling services by telephone or Skype to editors, beyond what WMF support staff can do in an immediate situation.
• If we want to remain a ubiquitous service, we need to respond to public input, and provide appropriate means for redress of grievances, the same as any other public utility, same as the phone company, same as a public sector organization.
• Promote respectful, constructive public online participation which is welcoming to all sorts of people, and partner with other organizations promoting this goal

Improve Cultural and educational outreach and practices by surveys and process change.

• Look at ways to leverage and incorporate existing taxonomies, rather than re-inventing the wheel
• Consider facilitating verification and fact checking to be primary goals when seeking out new source content, and when upgrading existing articles
• Continue work to improve upload and metadata tools, so that less cleanup is needed to make content donations accessible
• Provide a secure, anonymized service for editors who are willing to speak with other editors-- yes, actually talk out loud with a living human being and listen for a response.
• Build some tools that help visually identify the gaps - "dark spots on the map"
• Surveys among the world's expanding population of displaced persons as to their information needs
• Surveys, fundraising, and partnerships, so that interested individuals currently idle due to being displaced (or unemployed) are connected with the resources they need to become a productive, high-quality encyclopedia editor / contributor
• "Public Wikipedian service tables" at events in large cities, to assist members of the public who have concerns about their Wikipedia biography, or other editorial concerns

Allocate Resources to support and grow the community.

• Volunteer-based gift campaign to provide support to prolific site maintainers, such as gift cards for books, subscriptions, and groceries. (No prolific, high-quality contributor should go hungry or unappreciated.)
• Expand scholarship support to events and gatherings for committed contributors, especially to contributors who would like to meet each other in person.
• Continue to incorporate a variety of forms of "geographic and cultural balance" in the categories for community grant making
• Promote "Wiki-Expeditions" and "Wiki-Field-Trips" by experienced editors, to the regions where coverage is sparse, with grants available to help cover expenses

community health; safety; outreach; grants Slowking4 (talk) 13:52, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

@Slowking4: thanks for your feedback. I see that you sorted the points into 3 groups. I don't get the main ideas of the groups, though (if there are such). Could you please help me and write a few sentences of summary? For instance, what does point #3 have to do with point #4, #5, and #6? And what do they have to do with the community health? Could you also explain what does #5 mean and how could we achieve #6? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

yes - this is a grab-bag from the most important. the healthy community would be moving out executing these tasks i will regroup - #5 (taxonomies) means for example, try not to reinvent "disambiguation" and then ten years later incorporate authority control, but rather survey what other people are doing, and incorporate best practices from the begining. Slowking4 (talk) 20:27, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

@Slowking4: I'm not into English wiki-slang too much. To me, taxonomy means mainly biological classification, and scientific non-wiki stuff :) In short, what you're proposing is improve community health, develop best practices, and take care for the resources? I think we need something between this bunch of quite specific ideas, and my massively abstract sentence. Like a sentence for each group, a meta-paragraph. Look at this section. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

yes, but for a librarian, taxonomy is about books and authors and categories. ok - will add topic senteces. Slowking4 (talk) 21:06, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

That's a librarian slang? I didn't know that, I'm not a librarian. Anyway, thank you for the clarification. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:27, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

wikimedia is not the only place that hijacks vocabulary for a specialized use - more here [4] ; [5] . Slowking4 (talk) 02:16, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

creative works

I've suggested it on Meta in the past, but I think that the next big arena that Wikimedia should crack open is a creative wiki. A free open-source project that doesn't just archive materials, but creates new ones. A wiki where artists, poets, musicians, authors, screenwriters, etc. can collaborate together on creating works of art, stories, music, novels, plays, films, etc. We have some of this on Commons already for visual arts, music, and video, but it would be really great to expand this into the literary arts as well (fiction, poetry, screenplays, etc.). Nicole Sharp (talk) 03:05, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Russian Wikivoyage community strategy statement

The community of Russian Wikivoyage created the statement. We translated it to English and posted here: Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Russian Wikivoyage--Ymblanter (talk) 15:30, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Mobile Applications

The Foundation should be focused on the mobile applications on tablets ,smartphones and connected objects ,the foundation must take the advantage on the high technological performances of this devices, (megahertz, megapixels ,megabits , G5, differents sensors like GPS, compass ,thermometer and more)

all applications developped or suported by the Fundation must be have a big visibility and able to collecting and facilitate to contributors the ways to introduce the information by the most simple way.

A bad application Does not attract contributors even if the content is interesting and even if wikipedia has a very dominant position. Currently the Wiktionary application is of very poor quality among the other android applications.

--Mohammed Bachounda (talk) 16:41, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Optional: Mobile Applications

Wikipedia for kids, for youngs

All paper encyclopedia have a versions for youngs, i have seen a similar project on wikibook or included in other wikiedia project but we must have an independant project in multilanguages and exclusively for different age group we can include that easly on wikidata and we can apear that for example by cliking different buttons on the principal wikipedia interface, all different application use that, for example Apple store or Google playstore.

I'm sure that can facilitate acceptance for young readers and help and encourage the school to adopt wikipedia in their programmes of education ,i imagine an preference or a gadget that help to separate a segment ot each articles to entierly/ partial rewrite the page for different groupe of ages.

We can merge simple english with english wikipedia because it's the same langage, we can consider simple english like wikipedia english for students between 10-18

it's impossible to negate that now or for the futur.

I know this projects but my wish is to see that directly merged with any wikipedia project, by just clicking un buton the page will change instantly to adapted content to junior in concordance with the degree of cknowlege or degree of language or difference of age.

Actually if we talk about wikipedia english, we have just a single content for all, not easy to read some big articles for the childrens it's very complicated.

The goal is not to create new other projects, but is to integrate a new methode to include in the same article a differents levels of reading. --Mohammed Bachounda (talk) 16:56, 15 April 2017 (UTC) Optional: Wikipedia in differents levels

Dear Mohammed, thank you for your contribution; we also have a page here on Meta about the topic. Ziko (talk) 10:59, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Ziko for this clarifications ,i know this projects but my wish is to see that directly merged with any wikipedia project, by just clicking un buton the page will change instantly to adapted content to junior in concordance with the degree of cknowlege or degree of language or difference of age.

actually if we talk about wikipedia english, we have just a single content for all, not easy to read some big articles for the childrens it's very complicated.

the goal is not to create new other projects, but is to integrate a new methode to include in the same article a differents levels of reading.

--Mohammed Bachounda (talk) 15:04, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

There was a similar initiative in German Wikipedia, in 2010, called "Kinderleicht". It worked with subpages to the "real" Wikipedia articles. The subpages were articles especially written for children. The German Wikipedians voted to abolish the initiative and to archive the subpages elsewhere. There is a link on a Klexikon page to our report to WMDE from 2015, with some information of the Kinderleicht-initiative. Kind regards Ziko (talk) 15:08, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

The Wikimedia projects need to provide reliable, accessible information on life-altering issues.

The impact of a social movement is measured by the effect it has on human lives. Currently, we mostly focus on metrics that correlate weakly with real impact at best: page views, edits, number of users. All knowledge is not created equal; health information can save lives, scientific information can help a community make the right decisions, while many other topics are used for infotainment only. (Still a good thing! but less important.) We haven't shown enough curiosity as a movement to the ways we change lifes (or fail to), on how Wikipedia makes the world of 2030 better (or worse). If we want to have lasting social impact, that needs to change.

We need a better understanding of how our content can help readers (both as individuals and societies) with life-altering decisions; we need to understand whether those readers can access and understand the content, and can have a say in how knowledge about them is created; and we need methods to measure all that so our understanding can scale with the size and diversity of the movement. We need to refocus on projects, practices and tools that can increase this impact, and shift our attention away from use of Wikimedia projects as infotainment. We need to break away from IT industry methodologies that have emerged in a context of maximizing revenue by getting more eyeballs on ads; and from social dynamics that are based on treating Wikipedia as an RPG or a war game.

Wikipedia and the halo of projects around it have a huge protential to make people and societies more healthy, prosperous and just all around the world. We are wasting that potential if we do not focus our attention on how the decisions we make and the projects we choose to work on affect those goals specifically. --Tgr (talk) 22:06, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Keywords: social impact

We need to create a welcoming community that encourages constructive contributors to stay here long-term

I think that Wikipedia is all too often driving away the very editors it needs to continue existing, much less expand its editor base. We need to change this so that editors who want to contribute constructively are not driven away by a web of labyrinthine and punitive rules. There are multiple dimensions to this, ranging from COI editing to new editors who step on too many toes in controversial subjects, but all these editors need to be shown how to edit here constructively, either by explaining the existing rules to them or changing the existing rules to be easier to explain. This is necessary to create the best possible balance between "anyone can edit" and the traditional, experts-only-decide-content encyclopedia model. Everymorning (talk) 23:53, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Use and usability

The big issue for us as one Wikimedia community is that on a meta level we only talk about principles but we hardly talk about the usability of what we have for others and the use of what we have for others and for ourselves. We have tools like the one by Pasleim that know about facts in a Wikipedia. The purpose of this tool is to update Wikidata but by extension, the same information should exist in any project with information or content on the same subject. This does not happen because our communities are split up and effectively there is hardly any practical communication between communities.

There is also an assumption that the literature and its associated assumptions about Wikipedia are valid for all our projects. According to the 2016 keynote speaker of the Dutch Wikimedia congress, a professor with many students studying Wikipedia, this is not true: "As a rule research is not published when it is not about or strongly connected to the English Wikipedia". The consequence is that the 2016 approach of one size fits all is problematic. The dynamics in communities are starkly different and the consequences of a single approach to everything are destructive and lead to a lot of stress.

There is one thing that binds us all "sharing in the sum of all knowledge" and we all use, for better and worse, MediaWiki.

When we are to be relevant in 2030, we have to consider how we can best share in the sum of all knowledge, internally and externally. We are not Nupedia and what made Wikipedia Wikipedia is still valid; perfection is the enemy of what is good. We are many people all with our own interest and when we want to increase the size of our community, we have to engage them and improve their ability to focus.

Use case: Libraries

Our communities have a long history of connecting to libraries; the German and English Wikipedia included links to relevant sources. Most of this information has been moved to Wikidata. The German Wikipedia did set up a process to reconcile differences with the German Library System. VIAF now links to Wikidata and as a consequence there is a more global approach for us to connect to libraries worldwide in any language.

• Our readers and editors could benefit more when we enable them to indicate their location so that we can link to library software that shows the availability of books in the local library and links into local library functionality using the link through VIAF.
• Our readers could benefit more when we show authors with available books in the "Open Library". These publications are available for reading.
• Open Library could benefit from our data when we set up a way for them to have data that is of interest to them like names of authors in any language, date of birth and death etc.

Use case: BLP information and sources

Our current BLP practice is a two edged sword. Its aim is to prevent harm and at the same time the practice of deleting articles citing the policy drives people away. The current practice is also a child of its time; it does not consider the possibility to find missing essential information in articles or statements in other projects. It does not consider that sources may exist in other projects. Sources elsewhere are a logistical problem and they remove the argument for deleting local content.

• When people indicate their interest in a particular topic, we can ask them to help curate issues in their area of interest. When this interest can be expressed by a Wikidata query, we can link this with our data on problematic content.
• Links in a project are associated with Wikidata items, when a link is documented in a statement we are much closer to identifying a source. When Wikidata has a specific date, like a date of death, that date needs to be present in the article.

Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:05, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM: I 100% support the idea of usability. Even more than 100%. That, as well as the first use case, is clear to me. But could you explain the last bullet point? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:34, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Every wikilink links to another article and it is an item in its own right. When the relation between the two articles is documented in Wikidata as a relation of two items bound by a property, and the Wikipedia article has a source to that relation, we have in fact a source for the Wikidata statement. Dates are a bit different, there are particular dates like the date of death / birth that need to exist in the article in order to give proper information about the person involved. Particularly a date of death is important. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:16, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

NB I have been blogging about use cases for Wikidata.

Digital Philanthropy

The point I mean to highlight and emphasize as aspirational, is the idea that those who have benefited greatly from specific troves of digital content make a volitional choice to free said content and relicense it for inclusion in the free culture projects. Imagine the whole of Getty Images became free content because its ownership decided to contribute the content to the world. In my view, the resistance against copyright expansion is to vigorously mark the line between commercial exploitation and protection and free content, and encourage creators who have benefitted commercially to wind up, as it were, and jump the gun by adding their content to the Commons. There is no requirement that creators wait out the duration of the copyright clock - they can simply donate their creations in an act of altruism. In the two decades of digital culture, we have seen the constant effort to claim copyright maximalism because "content is king" and the economic model of success online assumes ownership of that content. Thus, one countervailing force against commercial content aggregation is to contribute content of commercial value to the public domain, or to be licensed freely, by those who own and control that content, simply for the good and enjoyment of all.

I think one of the lessons of the copyright wars is that copyright is imperfect, but it will not be eliminated from our cultural landscape. It would be a great thing, however, for as much GLAM as possible to be contributed, as many archives as possible to be contributed; as many creators as possible encouraged to liberate their materials on their death, etc. True philanthropic contributions of valuable digital content. --BradPatrick (talk) 14:33, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Possible minimum relevance criterion for new pages

How about using Google search results as a criterion for adding a new page to Wikipedia. It might work like this: 1) Choose a phrase that insures most of the search results are relevant. 2) Google search the phrase enclosed in quotes. 3) To be considered relevant, the result must be at least 1/10000th the result for the word "California", currently 1,740,000,000; minimum result for inclusion would currently be 174,000. For example, the phrase "Cape Horn" yields 426,000, so it would be considered relevant. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by David R MacKay (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2017‎

Are you suggesting that the data on actual Google searches by members of the public should be analysed to create a database of missing articles? Is this information available? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:52, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

I don’t know whether data on actual Google searches is available, but the idea of using this data to identify missing articles is certainly interesting.--David R MacKay (talk) 19:26, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

If this is a proposal for a threshold of notability, then I think it could be submitted on individual wikis as a proposal for a guideline. It doesn't appear to be applicable as a wide strategic change, though. Please note that this method is unfavourable for important geeky knowledge. For example, test trójstopniowy (Berne three-step test in Polish) yields only 20,200. What about Global South languages and their knowledge? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:57, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

The intention would be to determine which topics should be accorded a page of their own, and which should be redirected to a broader-topic page. This could be a guideline for editors, to determine if a new page submitted by the public should retain its page status. As a case in point, the Berne three-step test might better reside as a subtopic on the Intellectual Property page. I expect similar appropriate accommodation could be found for other geeky knowledge. I’m not sure I understand your point about Global South languages, but “Global South” scores high enough in a Google search to merit a page of its own.

I wonder if an Artificial Neural Network could identify which existing pages should be redirected, which redirected searches merit a page and which subtopics in existing articles merit their own page, particularly when the current article is long. Relevant editors could then be invited to make the changes.--David R MacKay (talk) 19:26, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Treatment of controversial topics

I love Wikipedia for the wealth of expert information it makes freely available to all, and would like to see it become more respectful in its treatment of subjects based on new age and other controversial topics. To this end, I propose that controversial topics be divided in two, with the main article being reasonably positive and the other reasonably negative. In principle, presenting a Neutral Point of View on topics with a significant subjective component, would be fine. In practice, aggressive editing often discredits any new-age-tinted worldviews.

Some therapeutic techniques, for example, attempt to explain their effectiveness in terms of changes in unmeasurable subtle energy, and the technique itself is discredited, notwithstanding its well-documented positive effect on subjects. Why not let proponents of questionable popular concepts take their best shot in the main article to present their understanding of the subject, while respecting existing article guidelines? At the top of the article can be a notice that the subject is controversial, and a link to the rebuttal article, which should also respect guidelines.

Editors might indicate their general position regarding new age concepts: acceptance, rejection, neutral or uninterested; once defined they cannot change their own position. Then only those that accept or are neutral can edit the main article; only those that reject or are neutral can edit the rebuttal article. Controversies are then limited to whether a person can truthfully say they are neutral.

A not-too-difficult way to implement this:

When someone is editing the Main article, and has selected text in the article, a ‘Move to Critique’ button is activated.

When they click on that button, if a critique of the Main article does not already exist, it is created, using the same title with the suffix “ – Critique”.

If the text they have selected is not a complete sentence, then the words they have selected disappear from the Main article, but the full sentence appears in the Critique.

A marker is created in the Main article (visible when reading, but not when editing), indicating where text was removed. This marker could look like an eye, to indicate there is a different point of view at this point. Clicking on the marker in Read mode, takes the viewer to the corresponding point in the Critique article.

For internal control, these markers are assigned a sequential number, according to their position in the Main article, and these are adjusted as required with subsequent moves.

If is subsequent move is adjacent to a previous move, the two are combined as a single block in the Critique article. If this results in repeated phrases, these are automatically eliminated.

The Critique article can be edited (except its title) like any other article, and also has markers to return to the corresponding point in the original article.

If a destination point in the original article, or the Critique, is lost due to extensive editing, the default destination is the beginning of the article.

When text is moved from the main article to the Critique, that is not adjacent to an existing marker, it is inserted into the Critique article just above the following paragraph containing the next-numbered moved text.

In read mode, a non-editable message and link to the Critique are displayed at the top of the Main article; the Critique has a similar link back at the top. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by David R MacKay (talk) 22:03, 15 April 2017‎

David R MacKay, How do you propose to identify "well-documented" sources? What criteria are you suggesting? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:51, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

"Well-documented", as it refers to positive effect on subjects of a therapeutic technique, could imply a requirement for, say, 3 independent Randomized Controlled Trials that show at least medium Effect size. --David R MacKay (talk) 20:56, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Video, video, video — bring video to every Wikipedia article

It’s the most popular medium on the web and the source of much of the world’s information, yet video remains an incredibly complex and daunting challenge for anyone who might seek to produce, share, and use media freely and openly. Wikimedia could help fix that. And embracing video would make Wikimedia more vibrant through 2030 and beyond.

By video, I don't just mean "upload and embed." Thanks to heroic efforts from the multimedia team, there has been good progress; a Ward Cunningham study all the way back in 2013 found that roughly 4,000 out of 4 million articles in English Wikipedia had associated videos, likely much higher now. And Wikimedia now has much healthier relationships to the GLAM sector, which can drive high-quality multimedia contributions. But we shouldn't settle for just filling up the Wikimedia Commons in an ad hoc way, nor the sporadic growth of videos on Wikipedia entries.

We should really be aiming much higher: how about getting video on every Wikipedia article over a certain popularity threshold?

To do that, we'd have to make it as easy to collaborate on a movie sequence as it is to collaborate on an article.

I wrote some thoughts on the history of these efforts, and where we could go from here: http://www.benmoskowitz.com/?p=1083 In short, Wikimedia could draw lessons from Mozilla's work in HTML5 based sequencing to quickly test simple web-based tools. We need a community-led R&D effort here that will result in new modes of contribution that are fit for a new generation of young, multimedia inclined editors, as well as professional producers (esp. GLAMs) who are mandated to give to the Commons.

This is critically important to the future of Wikimedia. Why?

Wikimedia first started thinking about video in 2008. Without getting too deep into the hardcore open video issues, it should be enough to say that the internet is very different in 2017. Let's set aside issues about freedom on the platform layer for a moment.

Online video accounts for three-quarters of all internet traffic. In middle-income and high-income countries, internet users watch videos online every day. Half of all users in these countries watch at least an hour of Facebook / YouTube per week. Video is engaging. Studies show people spend on average 2.6x more time on sites with video than without. The big picture is that the internet is becoming more of a video-centric medium.

In Facebook’s Q2 2016 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Ten years ago, most of what we shared and consumed online was text. Now it’s photos, and soon most of it will be video. We see a world that is video first with video at the heart of all of our apps and service.”

I know that talk about dramatic changes to Wikipedia can make people uncomfortable. But you don't need to be a fan of Mark Zuckerberg to see that making Wikimedia more video-friendly is an important part of staying relevant for the vast majority of internet users between now and 2030. The highly textual nature of Wikipedia is definitely a virtue, and that ensures the global accessibility that is at the heart of the mission. That said, further opening up to video (ingestion, collaboration, infusion, et etc) would help future-proof the Wikimedia movement. It would help bring in new kinds of contributor communities. And, there's a case to be made that video will increase the financial sustainability of Wikimedia properties, by creating more reasons to click through from Google search results and getting people to spend more time on Wikipedia.

I know video is tough. Doing video the "open" way is a major challenge for those who edit and administer media sharing platforms – Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, various pockets on the web – that together form the online commons, as well as for educators and public media professionals whose mandates call for free licensing, open sharing, and public access. But we have to do it.

And also, let me appeal to the geek in all of us. By 2030, I'd expect Wikimedia to be a lot more like the Star Trek computer. The least we should aspire to for every Wikipedia article to have a high-quality multimedia entry associated when I call out to my AI companion with a query :) — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Totallynuts (talk)

One of the problems with video is that it is not yet easy to edit to improve content. This may change.

Video consumes time and bandwidth in a way that text and static images do not. This is unlikely to change. Time will probably always be an issue, though bandwidth may become less of a problem eventually. Right now, for much of the world it is still a huge problem.

It is hard to search video for the relevant information. This may also change.

That said, there are some things that video excels at. We should integrate those where it works. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:59, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

A network of real people and real institutions

By 2030 I envision a global network of knowledgable individuals working in knowledge institutions who cooperate and collaborate to create, share and curate information on Wikipedia. All major institutions in the GLAM sector and the Education sector will have shared their knowledge base. All students graduating in 2030 will have learned to write in a peer reviewed environment by contributing a (part of an article) to Wikipedia. Welcoming newcomers to the community and onboarding them will be the primary responsibility of functionaries. Every contributor to Wikipedia will have learned how to maintain community health. By 2030 there will be an entity (affiliate or chapter) in every country, supported by professionals from the major GLAM and Educational institutions in that country. The global network will allow for a radical decentralized organization of the Wikimedia movement. We might have consolidated on a single brand: Wikipedia, which brand will not only stand for an encyclopedia, but a very actual repository of information as well, and stand for a vast and accessible multimedia stock, and a vast collection of structured data, including all open data provided by all governments and opedn data from all governmental subsidized institutions. Wikipedia will have at least a hundred thousand articles in every national and official language of any country. Communication between individuals in the Wikipedia network will have moved from Facebook to a new system of talk pages on Wikipedia. The AfD system will have been overthrown. Article issues will be discussed on the article talk page, not somewhere else. A software solution will provide for an automatic tracking tool of articles with issues. Wikipedia will be part of a the broader open content movement. By 2030 visual editor will have been turned on by default for new editors on the Dutch Wikipedia. The multiple slug issue will have been resolved. Between now and 2030 the Wikimedia movement will have spent a billion dollars equitably and wisely. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 17:05, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

@Ad Huikeshoven: thank you for this vision. What a nice dream :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

We should explore new kinds of knowledge spaces, embracing innovation in order to survive and thrive in 2030.

Develop your opinion here based on the main question or the alternative questions.

Optional: meta-wiki- wiki bots, big-data analysis, open information sharing, Wiki Gnome, pattern matching, Artificial Intelligence. Deep Learning

Cry “Havoc” and let slip the dogs of war.

— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I

Media dla Wikimedian

W proponowanym dokumencie zapisane są bardzo ważne zadania. Nie wyobrażam sobie, że można je zrealizować bez skoordynowanej, ścisłej współpracy wolontariuszy. Spotkania i konferencje to zdecydowanie za mało. Sprawna komunikacja we współpracy jest według mnie bardzo istotna. Zanim powstało słowo pisane ludzie porozumiewali się słowem mówionym. Ustnym przekazem. Może warto pomyśleć o podkastingu do wewnętrznej komunikacji projektów Wikimedia? Przez kilka lat tworzyłem podkast "Nowiny Wikiradia". W krótkim czasie stał się medium, dzięki któremu przekazywaliśmy bardzo szybko wiadomości ze świata wikimediów dużej procentowo liczbie zainteresowanych wikimedian. Może warto pomyśleć nad własnym, wikimediowym środkiem masowego przekazu do skutecznej komunikacji?

Podkasting, podcasting, media