User talk:GVarnum-WMF
Latest comment: 5 months ago by AGK in topic MovedToFoundationGovWiki
MovedToFoundationGovWiki Edit
Hello. Has Special:Diff/24692439 been discussed or announced anywhere? Just asking because it breaks some scripts, but perhaps I shouldn't care. --Krd 07:20, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
I see that the username list was put back, but the actual policy page was moved to the WiFoGoWiki. Are more policy pages going to be moved there? -kyykaarme (talk) 08:49, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
- Hello @Kyykaarme - as you noticed - the noticeboard will need more work before it can be moved (if it is indeed moved). A vast majority of Foundation policies are already on Foundation Governance Wiki. The very few which are not already there will likely be migrated there - but most of the migration work relates to moving translations and feedback to GovWiki (where the main policies have always resided) now that feedback and translations can be handled on that wiki. The duplication and existence of policies on Meta-Wiki stemmed from when GovWiki had more limits in place and so it could not facilitate translations or feedback. Note, this effort only impacts Foundation policies and does not impact local wiki policies or policies which the Foundation is not the primary caretaker of. Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 16:00, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
- Looking at notes - I think the only other page planned at this time for migration that isn't already primarily housed on GovWiki (so an actual move of the main page) is the Data retention guidelines page. Everything else being migrated are basically just the translations and feedback as the main pages have always resided on GovWiki and Meta-Wiki was housing duplicates. Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 16:04, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
- The duplication of policy pages (and especially of the translations) is a problem, but I think this is the wrong solution. Who's going to go to yet another wiki to translate and discuss? Maybe people will find their way there, but I have doubts. kyykaarme (talk) 18:03, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
- Apologies for the delay - it has been a busy week. And thank you for sharing your thoughts. I am definitely open to circulating around other ideas - however - keeping what we have today is causing more and larger problems than the one you have mentioned. Plus, in reality right now we are requiring a far larger audience to click across wikis as the traffic to the Terms of Use for example to Meta-Wiki is 4,231 to Foundation Governance Wiki's 16,122 over the same seven days. For the Cookie statement, it is Meta-Wiki with 31 to Foundation Governance Wiki's 2,662 over that same time. Obviously there are exceptions. But taken as a whole, it suggests there are significant sized audiences not finding these policies via Meta-Wiki, and given the typical Meta-Wiki user - many of them are more comfortable jumping between wikis (as Meta-Wiki is itself rarely one's "home wiki" to begin with) than people finding them via the footer links.
- What is today known as Foundation Governance Wiki has always been the "official" home of the English versions, which have for as long as I am aware always been linked from the footer of every project's pages. Moving all of this to one wiki allows us to facilitate easier navigation to translations, decreases chances of accidental errors between duplicates, makes knowing "where to go" to find Foundation policies easier, makes searching just those policies (and related translations) easier (they are all within one searchable and "contained" namespace), and reduces workload monitoring feedback (which increases speed/chances of responses as our resources for monitoring talk pages are obviously insignificant in comparison to the community's ability to produce content for us on them).
- I empathize with concerns over attracting actual translators, but hopefully the sheer volume of traffic to the official locations and ability for anyone with an account to offer additional translations once there will help. For what it is worth, the "gap" between the "official" location of the policies and the translations has come up from some translators as a demotivating factor for them. It is at this stage very difficult to know exactly what impact any given step will have, but the current best available data and thinking suggests this is the most logical next step in our pursuit of the best outcome. That said, we remain open to other ideas if you have any, but unfortunately not doing anything is even less ideal as it is causing confusion and in some instances inconsistencies between duplications. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 06:58, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
- Hi Gregory. I cannot agree with the statistical argument, that people already visit govwiki if needing copies of a policy. Clearly, most people are accessing the TOU and Cookies Statement from website footers, which link directly there. That is not true of policies not linked in the footer: m:ANPDP is still getting more hits than foundation:Policy:Access to nonpublic personal data policy (1,317 vs 1,077). It's good to see the ANPDP noticeboard has been returned to Meta. The policy page itself needs to return too. Actually, I don't think it needs to return; I understand completely why you desire the policy's original copy to be located on govwiki. The real problem is with the meta page being an empty page, a soft redirect. Resulting from that, the Privacy and global CheckUser policies are now located on Meta, but the ANPD Policy is not, and one has to remember to link some policies on Meta but others on govwiki. What would make life far easier is if the Meta page could simply mirror the govwiki one. (This might need a bespoke technical solution, like a bot to copy over changes.) The ANPDP statistic illustrates this problem too - people are apparently just not finishing the full click-through process. Finally, I'm sorry to say that authority might be an issue here, too: the Meta community is entrusted with keeping a copy of global policies. You are sacking its copies, replacing them with a soft redirect, without having consulted the community (unless I have overlooked something). The remaining plans for migration have not been disclosed, but you have mentioned Everything else being migrated, which I take to be meaning the meta page will be replaced with a soft redirect. Duplication and the transfer of ownership of the "principal" policy would be innocuous. Actual migration really strikes at a fundamental part of what Meta is all about… AGK ■ 12:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
- Hi @AGK - thank you for your thoughts. A few thoughts and clarifications in response. More information on roadmap for Foundation Governance Wiki is located on at foundation:Wikimedia:Roadmap.
- I have previously looked into variations of the bot idea you mentioned, but to my understanding, it is not yet possible and could be as far off as a few years. If you are aware of a bot solution available already, please do let me know as it could be useful for several things beyond just this.
- There are already thousands of similar soft redirects on Meta-Wiki - in what ways do you see these soft redirects as different from the already existing soft redirect pages?
- Global policies maintained primarily by the community (such as Stewards policy, Global rollback, etc.), as you stated, have and will continue to reside primarily on Meta-Wiki. Policies maintained by the Foundation (Terms of Use, Privacy, etc.) - with a few timing or workflow related exceptions - have and will continue to reside on (what is today known as) Foundation Governance Wiki (previously known as just "Foundation Wiki"). The efforts underway do not change either of those scopes, and this effort is not impacting the global policies maintained by the community which Meta-Wiki's scope speaks to. It is an effort to address problems specific to duplication of Foundation policies and improve facilitating of comments and translations of Foundation policies. The duplication of Foundation policies on Meta-Wiki were only created when the ability of community accounts to engage on what was then Foundation Wiki were changed and became more restrictive such that translations and comments could no longer be provided by all but a few volunteer accounts. Absent that happening, there would not have been a need for the duplicates to be created. Over the past year, we have removed those limitations for volunteer accounts on what is now Foundation Governance Wiki.
- Given the original reason for duplication no longer exists, and these are indeed duplicates and are not community managed policies within the scope of Meta-Wiki - I am not sure the benefit of "one less click" outweighs the growing risks and problems associated with the existing (and from what I can tell only available right now) duplication method. Are there benefits beyond "not needing to click on a soft redirect" which do not apply to other soft redirects (such as large sections of Meta-Wiki's Help namespace) that apply to these pages you are thinking about? --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 03:03, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for explaining the reasons behind the move, but I still think it's a really bad idea to effectively delete the policy pages and their translations from Meta. Of course there are more clicks when random people click on footnotes, but random people aren't going to be able to translate texts relating to Wikimedia if they have no experience with the projects. The transfer is creating a divide between the policies hosted on Meta and the WMF policies which all are much more important to editors than they are to readers. There doesn't seem to be a history in the imported translation pages, not even a link to the original pages where all the text was taken from. It's impossible to see who translated which part in case you want to communicate with that user about the translation. And just because a translation is 100% finished, that doesn't mean that it's a good translation. As for soft redirects, on enwiki there are 800 links that point just to the URL "m:Universal Code of Conduct", and there are probably tens of thousands of links to the policies across the projects. I don't know about others, but every time I end up on a soft redirect I'm much more likely to click the back button than the redirect. kyykaarme (talk) 11:51, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- @Kyykaarme - the translation system used on Foundation Governance Wiki is the same as the one for Meta-Wiki - with the same controls in place. I am unclear how the relocation of the content impacts the quality of translations given the translators are generally the same. Regarding history of translations, I agree that is something that should be addressed. The current solution for moving translations around is not ideal, and there is currently a Phabricator ticket working to resolve the issue in the future. Again, I remain open to alternative solutions - but do not see leaving things as they are to be a good solution as the "click through" problem does not appear to present higher risk than the confusion caused by duplication, errors between versions, duplicate work for translators, etc. That some pages erroneously linked to the duplicate instead of the primary location, in my mind, speaks to the problem with duplication more than presents a reason not to solve these problems and prevent it from becoming even worse over time. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 14:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- "I am unclear how the relocation of the content impacts the quality of translations given the translators are generally the same." Well, you're the one who said there would be more translators because more people would find the pages through footnotes. I've done translations on Translatewiki, Meta, MediaWiki and Commons, and on every one of those there are at most just a handful of users who do translations into Finnish, for example. The more fractured the translations are, the more difficult it is to do them. My suggestion: delete the translations from the FoundationWiki and link instead to the Meta translations, like it's now done on the Privacy Policy page. Then the only thing that needs to be kept in check is that the English versions are the same, and that shouldn't be an overwhelming task, as they shouldn't be frequently edited anyway. As for discussions, decide if they should be hosted on Meta or FoundWiki (my suggestion would be the former) and put some soft redirects (:P) on the talk pages on the other wiki. kyykaarme (talk) 16:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- Again - I can appreciate the possible risk that translators "will not follow" content to Foundation Governance Wiki. However, that is an unknown, and prior to translations being previously disabled on that wiki - there was an base of translators even with the hurdles in place, which no longer exist (specifically that you do not need an account specifically for that wiki - your Wikimedia SUL account works there now. I would like to see how things play out before we determine how much of an impact that risk has. Additionally, without any of the eventual planned outreach to translators undertaken (they are on hold until everything is fully in place), we are already seeing more activity than expected. Also, that relates to quantity and availability of translations, I am not sure how it relates to quality given the people with access to translate on Foundation Governance Wiki are the same people with access to translate on Meta-Wiki. So the risk of a poor translator engaging is equal from my perspective (and also why we have consistent translation disclaimers in place on Foundation Governance Wiki).
- That all said, the solution you are proposing does not resolve what are known risks and barriers. For example, the links to Meta-Wiki translations must be updated manually - and historically that has not been done consistently as it is ultimately not a great use of limited resources when automated alternatives exist. Additionally, it still leaves confusion (which platform has the right version) and leaves room for discrepancies (which despite efforts - has happened multiple times). Plus, we have already learned that asking for translations of a duplicate vs. primary copy leads to problems with quality and accuracy of translations over time. Finally, one motive/advantage of this consolidation is ease of search of policies specifically (vs. the entirety of a wiki's massive content). Housing the translations separately from the primary version leaves a gap in experience between English and non-English readers of the content. Global templates, global pages, or bots capable of understanding the setup of translation pages would provide other possible solutions - but each of those is potentially years away. Waiting and allowing problems such as linking to duplicate vs actual policy to grow does not seem to be our best possible route overall. But again, I think we should decide based on knowns and data vs. possibilities - so if we do indeed run into problems - we can reassess. I think it is a little premature to say these are known problems though, and as such, I am not sure they outweigh the potential gains of trying this out. Although I genuinely do appreciate the care and attention to detail on this, I empathize with your desires to do this well, and appreciate you brainstorming with me and sounding out my responses. They have helped inform what metrics I should pay close attention to, and understand perspectives I may not have fully considered before. I recognize it may not appear like progress as general approach remains the same, but I do want to convey it has been helpful and had an impact on how this will play out. Thank you! --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 17:22, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- "I am unclear how the relocation of the content impacts the quality of translations given the translators are generally the same." Well, you're the one who said there would be more translators because more people would find the pages through footnotes. I've done translations on Translatewiki, Meta, MediaWiki and Commons, and on every one of those there are at most just a handful of users who do translations into Finnish, for example. The more fractured the translations are, the more difficult it is to do them. My suggestion: delete the translations from the FoundationWiki and link instead to the Meta translations, like it's now done on the Privacy Policy page. Then the only thing that needs to be kept in check is that the English versions are the same, and that shouldn't be an overwhelming task, as they shouldn't be frequently edited anyway. As for discussions, decide if they should be hosted on Meta or FoundWiki (my suggestion would be the former) and put some soft redirects (:P) on the talk pages on the other wiki. kyykaarme (talk) 16:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- @Kyykaarme - the translation system used on Foundation Governance Wiki is the same as the one for Meta-Wiki - with the same controls in place. I am unclear how the relocation of the content impacts the quality of translations given the translators are generally the same. Regarding history of translations, I agree that is something that should be addressed. The current solution for moving translations around is not ideal, and there is currently a Phabricator ticket working to resolve the issue in the future. Again, I remain open to alternative solutions - but do not see leaving things as they are to be a good solution as the "click through" problem does not appear to present higher risk than the confusion caused by duplication, errors between versions, duplicate work for translators, etc. That some pages erroneously linked to the duplicate instead of the primary location, in my mind, speaks to the problem with duplication more than presents a reason not to solve these problems and prevent it from becoming even worse over time. --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 14:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- I had not appreciated that the policies were termed Foundation-maintained, or that policies of that kind were stored on govwiki. Meta is still getting more hits than govwiki, and I think that calls for an exercise in updating errant links, but I understand now why this migration exercise is taking place. Many thanks, AGK ■ 09:18, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for explaining the reasons behind the move, but I still think it's a really bad idea to effectively delete the policy pages and their translations from Meta. Of course there are more clicks when random people click on footnotes, but random people aren't going to be able to translate texts relating to Wikimedia if they have no experience with the projects. The transfer is creating a divide between the policies hosted on Meta and the WMF policies which all are much more important to editors than they are to readers. There doesn't seem to be a history in the imported translation pages, not even a link to the original pages where all the text was taken from. It's impossible to see who translated which part in case you want to communicate with that user about the translation. And just because a translation is 100% finished, that doesn't mean that it's a good translation. As for soft redirects, on enwiki there are 800 links that point just to the URL "m:Universal Code of Conduct", and there are probably tens of thousands of links to the policies across the projects. I don't know about others, but every time I end up on a soft redirect I'm much more likely to click the back button than the redirect. kyykaarme (talk) 11:51, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
- Hi Gregory. I cannot agree with the statistical argument, that people already visit govwiki if needing copies of a policy. Clearly, most people are accessing the TOU and Cookies Statement from website footers, which link directly there. That is not true of policies not linked in the footer: m:ANPDP is still getting more hits than foundation:Policy:Access to nonpublic personal data policy (1,317 vs 1,077). It's good to see the ANPDP noticeboard has been returned to Meta. The policy page itself needs to return too. Actually, I don't think it needs to return; I understand completely why you desire the policy's original copy to be located on govwiki. The real problem is with the meta page being an empty page, a soft redirect. Resulting from that, the Privacy and global CheckUser policies are now located on Meta, but the ANPD Policy is not, and one has to remember to link some policies on Meta but others on govwiki. What would make life far easier is if the Meta page could simply mirror the govwiki one. (This might need a bespoke technical solution, like a bot to copy over changes.) The ANPDP statistic illustrates this problem too - people are apparently just not finishing the full click-through process. Finally, I'm sorry to say that authority might be an issue here, too: the Meta community is entrusted with keeping a copy of global policies. You are sacking its copies, replacing them with a soft redirect, without having consulted the community (unless I have overlooked something). The remaining plans for migration have not been disclosed, but you have mentioned Everything else being migrated, which I take to be meaning the meta page will be replaced with a soft redirect. Duplication and the transfer of ownership of the "principal" policy would be innocuous. Actual migration really strikes at a fundamental part of what Meta is all about… AGK ■ 12:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
- The duplication of policy pages (and especially of the translations) is a problem, but I think this is the wrong solution. Who's going to go to yet another wiki to translate and discuss? Maybe people will find their way there, but I have doubts. kyykaarme (talk) 18:03, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Terms of use Edit
Hello, it seems that moving the ToU page broke something in the translated pages. If you switch language in the header you always get only the English text and all translations are 0%... --Civvì (talk) 11:10, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
- Hello @Civvì - apologies for the delayed response and inconvenience. The issue was caused by "upgrading" the translations to a newer system that would allow for easier navigation by readers and inputing of new translations by translators. Unfortunately, this "upgrade" caused them to be unavailable for a few days. My apologies for that inconvenience, but I believe we have completed all of the upgrades to the major policies. Thank you for your patience and for reaching out to let me know! --Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Foundation) [he/him] (talk) 07:05, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Well played, Greg Edit
🎶 Thank you! 🎶
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MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 16:25, 1 April 2023 (UTC)