Talk:Wikimedia Foundation website
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Traffic statisticsEdit
Alexa statistics have many flaws, but they are one indicator. I see the global Alexa rank for wikimediafoundation.org now floats around 100k, while it used to be a top 10k domain in USA not so many years ago.
A decline does not surprise me given the website has grown more and more distant from the core of the Wikimedia movement's communication to the world, but I admit I did not expect the traffic to drop by order(s) of magnitude. (Some significant traffic has been moved elsewhere, for instance the most important pages for the Wikimedia wikis' registered and unregistered users are now on foundation.wikimedia.org; but some other sources of traffic like blog.wikimedia.org have been folded in the main domain.) I hope Alexa is wrong but I've not seen any data to support such hopes.
What can we do to stop the decline of the website, and possibly even return it to is former (moderate) glory? After such a long neglect, we should all feel a sense of urgency in improving the situation. Presumably it doesn't help to have accessibility issues, broken HTML, scarce i18n support, less languages, slower pages, poor recognisability, broken incoming links and so on, but I wonder if it takes more than fixing technical regressions. Nemo 13:39, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Nemo bis: When combined with data on the Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki there does not appear to be a decline. Additionally, traffic to the site has steadily increased since the 30 July 2019 soft launch (which is when the decrease in traffic from pages on that wiki went into effect). Additionally, the site is performing significantly better than the previous site on many regards such as recruitment, partnership awareness, and donations. We will continue to work to improve the site, as we have with this latest design, as we do with all of our active sites. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 00:50, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
Typo in font stackEdit
Great job on the new website, it is certainly quite an improvement. I was experimenting with bringing a more OOUI-based look to it and found a typo in font stack: Seogoe UI instead of Segoe UI. Currently most Windows users have wrong fonts because of it. (Reporting this here because it is a pretty small thing to write a Phabricator task about.) stjn[ru] 16:44, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Stjn: Great catch and thank you for the feedback and pointing out this bug. I have gone ahead and submitted a patch to resolve this which should deploy live soon. Thank you! --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 00:50, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
Staff historyEdit
You know, one of the things that I really just miss now, is history.. It's all slick, but it has simply become impossible to have any sort of idea for instance about which employee joined and/or left when, department changes etc.. I fear with the staff and contractors page fully in the new website, that information on meta will be even less up to date going forward (HR definetly doesn't seem to be keeping it up to date).. This hurts the transparency of the organization that we are supposed to be... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:05, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- @TheDJ: I agree that we need a better solution for listing the staff which engage with the community. However, we have seen that just because we can use a channel for something, does not necessarily mean we should. Utilizing the organization website for dozens of things was simply not allowing us to do any of them very well. Hopefully we can work to improve department and team document on Meta-Wiki. The audiences asking for this are community leaders and affiliate staff, so housing this information on channels meant for those groups I think makes more sense and hopefully where we can move toward. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 00:57, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- "so housing this information on channels meant for those groups"; I respect that, but it was nice if it was actually happening.. I get it, it's hard enough to keep track of the payroll details, revoking people's shell and building access etc... but this is the part that the community is looking at. The public stuff, the transparency, it is important, maybe because of our history more important than anything else in long term stability and sustainability. I get that the general HR employee doesn't understand that, but it's the responsibility of the organization to educate it's employees. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:46, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- I should note that the HR folks involved very much agree and have indeed been trained on our value of transparency (training on our values is required for all new hires). This is a matter of resources and not desire. I empathize completely with wanting this to be resolved yesterday, and that on the surface solutions may seem simple. However, any task (even simple ones) come at the cost of another task. And as we grow from 150 to 250 to soon 350 - this is not as simple a task as it once was (years ago updates were done monthly - today they are done almost daily) and we long ago passed the size of most organization's online staff listings. But that does not mean we have given up! My personal hope is that you will start to see some progress on this during this fiscal year. That said, I should note that many teams have already begun work on improving their on-wiki documentation and indeed some have been great at it long before there were even discussions around focusing the organization website. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 20:39, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- @GVarnum-WMF: Okay, we need a way to have a transparent and manageable system for keeping track of staff. We already list various staff groups on all sorts of pages here on Meta which need to be kept up-to-date. It seems like the clear solution is to have a central staff page here on Meta which is structured in a way that allows the various other pages to pull the same lists from that page. I've started work on a template and module for this, which can make it possible for navboxes (both the general departments one and those for individual departments), department/team galleries, and simple lists to all update from the central staff listing. If we get all the styling nice, perhaps we could redirect the WMF site's staff page to here and push all staff updating work onto the one page.
- You mention that the HR folks agree on the value of transparency. I don't suppose there's any chance we could get some data from them? I imagine that they have plenty of records. It would be quite useful if we could get, for example, a historical list/timeline of WMF staff, and maybe also a list of all WMF job descriptions. It doesn't need to be nicely formatted or anything, the data alone would be quite useful. --Yair rand (talk) 04:22, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Yair rand: Thank you for the great work on that template. Regarding HR, I would not conflate the issue of information on existing roles with information on data about hundreds of individuals from the past fifteen years maintained across several different systems over the years. :) It is not an area I can speak to, but I can already imagine a number of complexities that request would bring and they are indeed two very different topics. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 16:56, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
- @GVarnum-WMF: Is the data really spread across several different systems? I was under the impression that Talent & Culture had unified all its HR data into the (unfortunately closed-source) Namely setup years ago. In any case, do you happen to know who would be the best person to contact in order to request the data on those areas? --Yair rand (talk) 16:53, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- @Yair rand: Again, not the best person to speak to HR questions, but my understanding is that system unification was for existing employees. However, my main point is that data on existing employees and data on past employees are two very different topics and my past comments on documentation on current employees should not be conflated as comment about information on past employees. Since it is a request to the organization, I would suggest using the Answers system. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 19:58, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- @GVarnum-WMF: Is the data really spread across several different systems? I was under the impression that Talent & Culture had unified all its HR data into the (unfortunately closed-source) Namely setup years ago. In any case, do you happen to know who would be the best person to contact in order to request the data on those areas? --Yair rand (talk) 16:53, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
- @Yair rand: Thank you for the great work on that template. Regarding HR, I would not conflate the issue of information on existing roles with information on data about hundreds of individuals from the past fifteen years maintained across several different systems over the years. :) It is not an area I can speak to, but I can already imagine a number of complexities that request would bring and they are indeed two very different topics. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 16:56, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
- I should note that the HR folks involved very much agree and have indeed been trained on our value of transparency (training on our values is required for all new hires). This is a matter of resources and not desire. I empathize completely with wanting this to be resolved yesterday, and that on the surface solutions may seem simple. However, any task (even simple ones) come at the cost of another task. And as we grow from 150 to 250 to soon 350 - this is not as simple a task as it once was (years ago updates were done monthly - today they are done almost daily) and we long ago passed the size of most organization's online staff listings. But that does not mean we have given up! My personal hope is that you will start to see some progress on this during this fiscal year. That said, I should note that many teams have already begun work on improving their on-wiki documentation and indeed some have been great at it long before there were even discussions around focusing the organization website. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 20:39, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- "so housing this information on channels meant for those groups"; I respect that, but it was nice if it was actually happening.. I get it, it's hard enough to keep track of the payroll details, revoking people's shell and building access etc... but this is the part that the community is looking at. The public stuff, the transparency, it is important, maybe because of our history more important than anything else in long term stability and sustainability. I get that the general HR employee doesn't understand that, but it's the responsibility of the organization to educate it's employees. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:46, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- +1 to that, TheDJ! I also miss the possibility to follow each change long after it happened. But we're kinda nerdy you and I, resources are limited, and needs are not. I understand the change, but yeah, also would like Comms and HR to know there are sad unicorns on Earth who used to like that particular solution. Last but not least, why are we that transparent, anyway? Tar Lócesilion (queta) 14:06, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
- I am periodically (about every 6 months) feeding whole WMF website to archive.org since end of last year. Last crawl has happened this month, but the history between the archival is lost. — regards, Revi 07:26, 22 July 2019 (UTC)