Wikispore/May 2020

May 17 @ 6PM New York / 10PM UTC / 12AM Berlin

Agenda

Introductions
shared notes - https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikispore

review agenda - what do people want to discuss?
seriously - speak up, propose topics to discuss
NewSpores?!.
1. Civil Society Spore https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/wiki/Civil_Society_Spore/
2. Queer Spore https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/wiki/Queer_Spore
Sister projects
1. COVID-19
2. Wikilambda
Wikisprout
1. OAuth
2. Interwiki
Documentation
1. FAQ
2. Spore lifecycle
  1. hope to hear of minimum and maximum length, but also speed and velocity expectations --Zblace (talk) 16:10, 17 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
3. Monthly collaborations
When shall we three meet again? Wudele poll

Actual attendees

Richard (Pharos)
Justin (koavf): Wikimedian from the United States
Paula - User "PKM" on Wikipedia and Wikidata and also Wikimedia Commons. I mostly work in textiles, fashion, and portraiture. I am interested in Wikispore but I do not understand it. I wish that there were several pieces in all the spores. I am asking a lot of questions and mean to be friendly and learn, it is not antogonistic!
Lane Rasberry: working on en.wp and d, based in an academic institution in the States.
Denny - I proposed recently to start a new wikimedia project called WikiLambda. I have come to understand that Wikispore seeks to be an incubator for new Wikimedia projects.
Lucas - I am a software developer at Wikidata in Wikimedia Deutschland. I am working on Wikidata Bridge and also interested in the WikiLambda idea.
zBlace - I am Croatian and from Bosnia / Herzogovenia. I have worked on the past year and a half on experimental proposals in Belgium and Germany on queer and feminist concepts about Wikipedia. I am new to Wikimedia projects but part of a Multimedia Institute who was working with Creative Commons materials. I do a bit of design and user experience projects. I am enthusiastic for Wikispore for its organic freeform creation process.
Gergő Tisza (Tgr) - I am a Wikimedian from Hungary. I work on Mediawiki for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Yaron Koren - I work with MediaWiki outside the Wikimedia projects. I am an author, podcaster, consultant, and developer.
Jeremyb

notes

review agenda - what do people want to discuss?
Wikilambda
1. this is a big idea
2. Denny, can you explain?
  1. When we established Wikidata, we wanted to kickstart the community with an early proposal about it.
  2. We were interested in discussing what would happen when Wikidata goes live, and we start integregating it elsewhere
  3. We thought to sort this on Meta because there is a large community there
  4. We thought to start a "spore" and move the Wikilambda proposal to Meta
  5. We were thinking that from Meta, after the community gets established, then we move it to its own wiki
3. Should we continue doing this on meta or should we do it on wikispore?
  1. SJ has shared the opinion that posting content to Wikispore could be best, because that would help Wikilambda and Wikispore bootstrap each other
  2. a particular way to work with Wikilambda could be engaging in sorting any large body of content
  3. (conversation)
  4. --- lots of things to discuss, documentation, models, general community conversation, what is this proposal anyway?
4. perhaps this could be an experiment in "social skunkworks"
5. Lane - what are useful things people can do about this proposal at the moment?
  1. Denny - support on Meta is useful, since this goes to WMF board of trustees; questions, things that might not work, things about that; from Wikispore specifically: start the community (would otherwise have happened on Meta, but that being an established place has advantages and disadvantages – Meta is more visible to existing community, but benefit of that was questionable in the case of Wikidata)
  2. (support requested here) - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda#Supporting_signatures_and_statements
  3. Paula - I wish that we had a semi-official and semi-unofficial place to kick things around and ask dumb questions. That would be better than a telegram group
Denny - is there anything in Spore which makes sure that spore will be available later and that we do not lose this history? With Meta I do not have that fear. Meta will be around forever. With Spore what assurance do we have that it will be archived forever?
1. Richard - Jeremy, you were going to assist with archiving? Gergő, do you?
2. Gergő, we have not gotten around to it. Maybe ask the Internet Archive people about it, they’re archiving experts
3. Yaron: should we have a "no delete" policy? we can archive but we should keep content, right?
4. Richard - we need to create some backups.
5. Yaron - was the question about deliberate or accidental deletion?
6. Richard: accidental, for now.
Denny - how easy is it to change the name of a Wikimedia namespace later?
1. Richard: it is easy, we can do it
2. Go with “Wikilambda” name for now (final decision needs to be made before project is property launched anyways, to get the domain name)
NewSpores?!.
1. COVID-19
  1. could be expanded into general crisis project? Richard registered wikicrisis.org(?) just in case
2. Z: I was looking at spores since last weekend and wanted to find somewhich seem like case studies. I was interested in Civil society because unlike governmental or corporate sectors they have less resources and are less self-referential. Also there was someone before me asking to migrate the civil society database from Ukraine. This is probably an issue which integrates the country and the langauges. ###This kind of information tends to be fragile so I think it makes sense to gather information in a different way.
  1. Z: I suggested queer spore for the same reasons. For people who are not from a mainstream culture it is not easy to document your culture and have it validated by academia. Also, anonymity is important here, but people still need a place to self-document without compromising their anonymity.
  2. Z: If I engaged in this I would want 3 other people contributing. I am thinking of NGOs with about 10 people who cannot meet criteria of visibility by mainstream standards but which are super important for certain groups of people.
  3. Paula: This reminds me of what people say in the art spore about small artworks and galleries. This makes me wonder how to determine what is too small for Wikipedia but big enough for Wikispore, and how we migrate content from Wikispore to Wikipedia when it meets notability criteria. I am also thinking of NGOs in various countries which wish to document their activities.
3. Yaron - I think we should go with that Wikifarm approach to have a different Mediawiki installation for each spore, especially if there were non-English Wikis mixed in. The process for deciding who should get a spore would be so much less if we were trying to set up new wikis versus setting up a new namespace in one ever growing wiki.
  1. Civil Society Spore https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/wiki/Civil_Society_Spore/
  2. Queer Spore https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/wiki/Queer_Spore
4. Gergo - we are still experimenting but think we can do this out of the box.
5. Z - one more spore idea: a place to experiment with the user interface, how things look; experiments about the form rather than the #miscellaneous
6. content
7. Technical things
8. Latest improvement: OAuth integration (Hackathon outcome, set up by Gergő)
9. Still missing: Wikidata⇔Wikispore integration, would be good to have
10. Recent discussion: an interwiki prefix for Wikispore on Wikipedia and other wikis (like c:/commons: for Commons, d: for Wikidata etc.)
Lane - compare Wikispore, Wikia, Wikibase instances?
1. Richard - not a big fan of the Wikia model; some things there would fit better within Wikimedia, especially non-fan stuff; commercial rubric is holding those back – non-profit wikis could be more credible, more usable, more developed, linked to from Wikipedia. So some of the Wikia things could potentially move to Wikispore.
2. Lane - and what about Wikibases? For example, a museum uploading their data to a Wikibase instance?
3. Richard - not very strong on Wikibase, but there are already many artworks on Wikidata that don’t fit on Wikipedia; it should still be possible to write articles about them, federated with Wikidata. Example: nearby mural, already been there for a long time; why shouldn’t it have a Wikidata item, why shouldn’t it be documented?
4. Denny - technically, having more than one Wikibase within the same wiki would be difficult (i. e. if multiple spores want to create separate sets of items)
5. Yaron - more relevant than Wikia (now Fandom) might be Miraheze, which is a non-profit.
6. Richard - would like to have a “one big wiki” thing similar to the IWW in the Labour movement (“one big union”), Wikimedia could be that
Z - would like to see some cross between social media and wiki; Richard - wants to see some free / non-profit social media as well (though that’s not Wikispore’s purpose); meet.wmcloud.org is one step in that direction
Outcomes of this call
1. Set up Wikilambda namespace
2. Get archiving in place
3. (?) foster community (? missed this one)
4. Spore lifecycle
  1. hope to hear of minimum and maximum length, but also speed and velocity expectations --Zblace (talk) 16:10, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
  2. Possibly useful for Spore or Lamba: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Small_wiki_toolkits
  3. http://interferencearchive.org/
Monthly collaborations
1. When shall we three meet again? Wudele poll