A questionnaire with 3 questions was sent to 47 Wikipedians from Switzerland hat had been editing Wikipedia within the last 30 days with the following questions:
What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?
Which impact should our projects have on society and politics within the next 15 years?
What do we have to do to achieve our goals within the next 15 years?
What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?
Most importantly update Wikipedia articles. Wikidata might help, but one should not rely on Wikidata. Other Wikimedia projects are important, but not as important as Wikipedia.
A stronger collaboration of the Wikipedias in the 4 languages of Switzerland would be desirable. Those are communities that are seperated and hardly know about each other. The contacts between de.wikipedia and als.wikipedia are stronger than the ones towards it.wikipedia and fr.wikipedia.
The WMCH chapter might be a blueprint for other multilingual chapters and should get a better support by the WMF. For the many way of funding community projects WMCH is not ideal, that works better when contacting WMDE. Switzerland might apply to host a WikiCon in 2018. This might be an opportunity for WMF to show support.
Despite of Open Data and the Free Knowledge Movement an increasing number of of data is disappearing in industry. Data, lists and indexes that formerly were available under a free license and that became commercial. For start ups and the sharing community it get increasingly difficult to get acess to information without being forced to cooperate. Wikipedia could be a counterpart to that. For that we should write essential articles instead of concentrating on minor "celebrities". For that we might have to open ourselves to paid editing and cooperation with GLAM partners.
Wikidata could be a great project, but the quality and maintenance of data is not good, lots of data there is obsolete or unsourced and access to the contents of Wikidata is almost impossible if you're not a programmer.
Downsize chapters and only try to raise as many donations as is required to run the projects. Downsize staff in the fields of chapters, liasions, CEOs and employ more programmers. Like this bugs can get fixed and coveted features implemented faster. Insted of people working for the chapters the editors of the projects should be paid.
The quality in Wikimedia projects. Our focus is too much on quantity (new articles and pictures as measurement value). Instead we should improve the quality of existing content, even attract new editors for this task. This could be made with a GLAM project, but again not focussed on increasing the article count.
The strengthening of the community, especially a sense of unity. Local community spaces and joint activity are going that direction. But this has to be controlled and managed somehow.
The user interfaces, graphical user interfaces and architecture will not be usable in 15 years, imho. A lot has to be done in that regard. And the community will have to support it and not thwart all efforts in that direction like they did with Wikidata.
interfaces
Which impact should our projects have on society and politics within the next 15 years?
The projects should guarantee free access to knowledge for everybody, i.e. the private and the industry sector. Startups and small companies can be supported by this. For this we need a clear orientation: the preservation of free knowledge of all kind.
More humbleness and more efficiency through focussing is required. If we don't have this, our organisations will lose their authority leading to a loss of donors and voluntees.
More quality for the projects and less unrealistic strategy work by chapters and the WMF. Wikipedia itself has not been planned strategically, it emerged through voluntary work of many. Chapters and the WMF have to understand that.
Small groups of long time editors and admins have too much power over articles, see the examples de:Daniel Ganser and de:Diskussion:Daniele Ganser. We have to insure a plurality of opinions.
The exchange between chapters of different langauges should be strengthened. One Wikimania a year travelling around the globe is not enough. Local/regional meetings are important as well in the sense of go global but act local.
WMF and the chapters have to be downsized massively, they have too many functionaries and employees. They have a culture of conference tourism and an exuberance of coordination. They're working on board trainings and COI policies, but not on content or tools. They're playing big corporation, forgeting the initial goal.
The community and projects are only supported selctively and follwing the mainstream (gender seems to be the most important issue). Wikimedia Germany is supporting the community effectively with their local Wikipedia offices while here in Switzerland the segragation between chapter, the languages and the few engages edtiors gets bigger. It would be more effictive to have a bigger chapter for one language, basically a fusion of Wikimedia Switzerland-DE, Wikimedia Austria and Wikimedia Germany.
Chapters and WMF have to be downsized and with this there should be a stronger support for contributors. One might consider new rules for accepting paid editors.
Some people won't like this, but we will need even more structures to guarantee further development. We cannot afford to have discussions without results and decision. The community has transfer some of its power to chapters and Foundation. The community has to make a step towards chapters and Foundation instead of accusing them of unfamiliarity with the projects.
structures, transfer of power, chapters, foundation
