Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 2/Wikimedia District of Columbia
Information
[edit]What group or community is this source coming from?
| name of group | Wikimedia District of Columbia |
| virtual location (page-link) or physical location (city/state/country) | Washington, D.C. |
| Location type (e.g. local wiki, Facebook, in-person discussion, telephone conference) | In-person discussion |
| # of participants in this discussion (a rough count) | 9 |
Summary
[edit]- Theme key
- Healthy, inclusive communities
- The augmented age
- A truly global movement
- The most trusted source of knowledge
- Engaging in the knowledge ecosystem
- Questions key
- What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?
- How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?
- Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?
- What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?
- Who else will be working in this area and how might we partner with them?
| Line | Theme (refer to key) | Question (refer to key) | Summary Statement | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | 1 | A toxic environment kills participation, making all the rest of the themes impossible to achieve. | |
| 2 | A, D | 1, 2 | Removing barriers to people participating increases the breadth and reliability of content we can get. | |
| 3 | A, C, E | 1, 2 | Having a healthy community is an important base for working with global communities and other partners. | |
| 4 | A | 4 | WMF has not been dealing with the toxic aspects of the movement effectively so far. | |
| 5 | A | 4, 5 | Other projects already have overcome some of these problems, and we should learn from them. (For example, WikiHow, some hacker spaces, Women in Red, some Wikimedia chapters) | |
| 6 | A | 4 | We need to define what we mean by "inclusive", so that it does not cover people of groups acting in bad faith. We need to consider who judges this, and who says who shouldn't be welcome. | |
| 7 | A, C | 4 | As this is a global movement, we need to avoid a Western bias as to what is "healthy" and "inclusive". | |
| 8 | A | 4 | We want to avoid the influence of the Silicon Valley "brogrammer" culture bleeding into the Foundation and the community. | |
| 9 | A | 1 | Our openness avoids issues with Internet encyclopedia projects that have only vetted contributions by approved writers, which can lead to narrow POV and censorship. These projects are possibly respected or authoritative, but not open. | |
| 10 | B, A | 2 | User experience and the ease of interacting with the interface is critical to recruiting and retaining newcomers. | |
| 11 | B | 4 | Wikipedia's early success was because the wiki format was easier to contribute to than a Web-1.0 website which needed domain/hosting/HTML setup. But it's harder than Web-2.0 technologies. There are now many other crowdsourced projects or social media platforms people can contribute to if they get frustrated by Wikipedia. | |
| 12 | B | 4 | The statement as written focuses overly specifically on machine learning and translation. This is perhaps overly specific and controversial for a high-level strategy statement. It also omits clear mention of usability. | |
| 13 | B | 4, 5 | Technology development is a core strength of other organizations; the community's strength is in volunteers creating content. We will be able to adopt tools made by others. | |
| 14 | B | 4 | The Foundation technology staff should be accountable to the other parts of the community. | |
| 15 | B, A | 4, 2 | We should ensure that machine translation efforts do not overwhelm native speakers, which makes those communities less healthy. | |
| 16 | C | 1 | Emphasizing a global movement helps us have content that is diverse and broad, representing the world as a whole. | |
| 17 | C | 1 | Global participation is a particular strength of the Wikimedia movement; not all organizations can or want to do this. | |
| 18 | C | 1 | Collaboration between cultures is a major global need. Some global trends are making international collaboration difficult, such as government crackdowns and an emphasis or borders, but Wikipedia is dedicated to overcoming these challenges. | |
| 19 | A, C, E | 4, 2 | We may not want to invite in global/institutional partners until we have a healthy, functional community to begin with. | |
| 20 | C | 1 | There is opportunity to help bring digital "have-nots" into the digital age. | |
| 21 | C | 1 | The Wikimedia movement can help push against copyright limits, unwarranted surveillance, and authoritarian leanings across the globe. | |
| 22 | C | 4 | The theme is worded to emphasize developing countries, but we should not leave behind people in rural areas in developed countries, who often also lack access to quality education and the opportunities that come with it. | |
| 23 | D | 4 | The wording of this theme emphasizes others' perception of us rather than the actual quality of our content. | |
| 24 | D | 1 | Having quality content is perhaps the most obvious of the themes, but it is our core deliverable and all the other themes are in support of this. | |
| 25 | D | 4 | Wikipedia is not a "source" of information strictly defined, since we are indexing rather than creating knowledge. A better working might be "most comprehensive general resource for sharing knowledge". | |
| 26 | D | 4 | The theme seems to emphasize competition, when we should focus on absolute measures of our quality, | |
| 27 | D | 4 | The theme compares us with a very broad range of content providers, including news outlets and academic journal publishers, but we have different goals and strengths than these classes of publishers. | |
| 28 | D | 4 | One of Wikipedia's strengths is its tolerance for being a "good enough" source of knowledge, rather than requiring all content to be authoritative. | |
| 29 | D | 4 | A preoccupation with "legitimacy" in the eyes of others is damaging to the community. | |
| 30 | D, E | 1 | A perception of legitimacy helps us to engage institutional partners. | |
| 31 | D | 1 | Wikipedia's human-curated, crowdsourced approachseems to be a good counterweight to the "fake news" that other online platforms have been prone to. | |
| 32 | E | 1 | Institutional partnerships allow us to reach people who won't come in through taking the initiative to click the edit button in isolation. While contributing to Wikipedia is a solitary activity for most of us, we should also reach out to those who are more socially oriented. | |
| 33 | E, C | 2 | Institutional partnerships is a good way to pursue the global community theme. | |
| 34 | E | 4 | Institutional partnerships run the risk of being perceived as elitist and top-down, if not framed properly. | |
| 35 | B | 2 | Technology development may be too large a problem for it to be fully volunteer-driven. | |
| 36 | E | 4 | Having too much structure could dampen volunteer enthusiasm. | |
| 37 | E, A | 1 | Bringing in institutional partners can help create a healthy community by reinforcing our values. | |
| 38 | E | 1 | The Wikimedia movement can integrate existing digital knowledge projects from many institutional partners. | |
| 39 | E | 1 | An emphasis on institutional partners would expand our community by bringing their staff, patrons, and other affiliated individuals. | |
| 40 | A | 1 | The Wikimedia movement suffers from the "eternal September" problem of having to socialize large numbers of newcomers. | |
| 41 | A | 4, 5 | Some are looking to technological solutions to the community health problem, or to SUSA in the Wikimedia Foundation. These are good but not the only avenues. |
If you need more lines, you can copy them from Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Lines.
Detailed notes (Optional)
[edit]Final vote tally:
| Theme | Rank | Energy | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | H | M | L | |
| A | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| B | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| C | 0 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| D | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| E | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 0 |