Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Medium-term plan 2019

View original discussion of the Medium-term plan.

Publication

Having taken the time to read and compare the draft and the published version of the strategy document, I think that many of the changes made (particularly the reduced use of arbitrary percentages and the reduced use of jargon) are quite sensible, and it is clear that most of the feedback has been carefully considered. One thing that stuck out to me would be the omission of women in some of the metrics for the thriving movement section where they were included in the draft; it is not clear whether women are being considered a "diverse gender identity", or have been excluded from the metrics for practical or other reasons. Overall, this is a clear improvement over the draft, although it's hard for me to tell whether all of the issues which should be addressed are included in the document.

I am disappointed, however, that there appears to have been insufficient effort put into copy-editing the plan. There are notable inconsistencies in formatting, including a loose list item at the end of the global advocacy section and noticeable and unexplained differences in formatting between and within sections (e.g. list items, bold formatting, dashes), and there are still a few grammatical errors (e.g. "the the" in the thriving movement section). There are also several visible double spaces, which appear to be the result of non-breaking spaces being introduced into the text. I have not edited the document to fix these, since the expectation is that community members should not edit official or draft WMF documents. Though this is not really a big issue, I would have expected a higher standard for an official publication which has been drafted and edited for more than three months. Jc86035 (talk) 10:06, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Quick note that I've fixed the formatting errors/inconsistencies and the grammatical errors that I could see. I'll ask others about your specific question. Thanks for the positive and critical feedback. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:12, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Jc86035. Thanks for your feedback. With regard to your question about women and metrics, we decided to use language that is broader and more inclusive of all gender identities. You are right that women are part of the larger group of “people with diverse gender identity”, and programs and strategies that aim to close the gender gap on Wikimedia projects are of critical importance to this plan. Our hope is that those programs and strategies also benefit individuals who may not identify as women but feel they have been excluded or otherwise marginalized. --DMccurdy (WMF) (talk) 23:40, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

women are part of the larger group of “people with diverse gender identity” As are men and all other people, presumably? Otherwise, this is a horrible way of looking at people. There are men, who are not defined by their gender because they are individuals with different characteristics, and then there are women, gender-binary people and people with other gender identities, and these are gendered beings first and foremost. Surely that is not what is meant? Because if it is, that should be stated explicitly to save some of us from wasting our time on a project that patronises individuals by not considering them as individuals. (Also: in many - most - cases you have no idea of the gender identity of the person behind the keyboard. Is that a problem for anybodsy, and if so, why?) --Bonadea (talk) 17:29, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

@DMccurdy (WMF): I guess I would agree with Bonadea that the statement does not necessarily impart its intended meaning (especially given that women constitute the majority of the population in many countries). If the goal is to be more representative of the world population in terms of gender, then I would probably reword the sentences which include "diverse […] gender identity". Jc86035 (talk) 17:27, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Language

While translating the text it became obvious to me that the sentences are too long. This may exclude people not familiar with strategy slang and for whom English is not the mother tongue. Example:

The Wikimedia 2030 movement strategic direction, ratified by the Wikimedia global community in 2017,↔ calls for the Wikimedia movement, projects, and institutions to become the “essential infrastructure of free knowledge,” where “anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.” This direction moves Wikimedia further toward fulfilling the broader Wikimedia vision, ↔ a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

To support the expanded effort and fulfill the vision laid out by Wikimedia 2030, ↔ the Wikimedia Foundation and staff are preparing for significant institutional and programmatic shifts over the coming decade. The first step is the creation of this “Medium Term Plan” ↔ to describe a medium-term perspective on major institutional and technical goals under the responsibility and mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.

--Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 23:01, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Sebastian_Wallroth. We made an effort to relay the information in a way that is understandable and translatable. However, there is always room for improvement and we appreciate you drawing our attention to this. Please feel free to break up the sentences as needed in your translation in order to clearly convey the meaning. Thank you for your translation work and for helping to make content accessible to more Wikimedians. --DMccurdy (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi User:DMccurdy (WMF), as a translator I tend to stay as close as popssible to the original. Please give more attention to an easy language since WMF strategic texts address mostly non-native English language readers. --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 06:40, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

collective Foundation

What means "collective Foundation" in "with the intention that every metric is owned by the collective Foundation"? --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 23:56, 13 July 2019 (UTC) (translator)

@Sebastian Wallroth: The term “collective Foundation” is used to indicate that all teams are responsible for meeting the metrics set in the Medium Term Plan. Rather than assigning different metrics to different departments, we will work cooperatively to accomplish all of the Plan goals. --DMccurdy (WMF) (talk) 23:44, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

secure, and safe

What is the difference of "secure, and safe" in "Our Platform Evolution will make it easier to keep our sites updated, secure, and safe? --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 00:13, 14 July 2019 (UTC) (translator)

@Sebastian Wallroth: "Secure" is broadly referring to software security. "Safe" is referring to social safety, i.e. anti-harassment. --DMccurdy (WMF) (talk) 23:44, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Content

You don't say a word about the quality of the content you want.--Wehwalt (talk) 23:23, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Oral Knowledge - again

By 2025, there will be significant increases in the presence of underrepresented forms of knowledge (such as oral knowledge) on the Wikimedia projects.

Some at the Foundation keep pushing the "oral knowledge" thing, and the community keeps shooting it down. It is NOT going to happen on Wikipedia, and I strongly advise you not to attempt it anywhere. It's essentially impossible for the community to constructively handle that kind of content. The community isn't magic. we need a cohesive set of policies and guidelines to filter out the garbage. (An unfiltered body of knowledge isn't knowledge, it's worthless mush.)

Any random idiot on the internet can make a recording of themself (or anyone else) saying anything. For example here's an oral history: "Hitler was a time traveler, and he was George Washington's father". (Lets assume I uploaded that as a recording, perhaps in some foreign language.)

I can see no remotely plausible policy framework that would allow an anyone-can-edit community to curate a reliable and useful body of knowledge out of such recordings. On what basis, other than the subjective-opinion of random anonymous internet users, are you going to separate valuable recordings from junk recordings? Wikipedia leaves that job to Reliable Sources. If professional academics write about oral histories, we summarize what the academics say. Random yahoos on the internet no qualification and no reliability to evaluate or interpret alleged oral-history recordings. Alsee (talk) 08:45, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

It's hard to comment such "proposals" from WMF because it's impossible to tell whether the author of the sentence even knows that "Wikimedia projects" does not equal Wikipedia (you never know these days). There's no prohibition for "oral knowledge" in general on the Wikimedia projects; all past attempts have systematically failed only because their proponents had some unhealthy fixation with the English Wikipedia.

Imagine a university course on how to perform ethnographic field work and collect oral knowledge: the teachers and students of such a course are clearly welcome to develop their course materials on Wikiversity. Further, imagine some established research project which is collecting oral knowledge and needs an effective public repository for it: they could probably develop it in the form of a book on Wikibooks. There are many possibilities, although it's hard to imagine any such project would reach a very significant audience.

We wasted a decade discussing how to do this stuff on Wikipedia; if WMF now has the ability to look beyond Wikipedia and suddenly help people achieve something in 5 years I'm happy to hear so, but it sounds unlikely. If something good happens in this field, it will probably be despite WMF and not thanks to WMF. Nemo 14:42, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

2023

wmf:Resolution:Approving the Wikimedia Foundation 2019-2023 medium-term plan contains "2023" in the title. Is that a typo? The subpages mention various years in the future (including 2023, 2024 and 2025), but there's no indication anywhere of the supposed timescale this plan refers to. Nemo 10:59, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Global templates?

The descriptions of activities are mostly blurry and provide only limited possibility to know the concrete activities.

My question: Are global templates part of the Annual Plan?

The descriptions in the part 3. Tooling for contributors sounds like precisely that. Global templates will make tools much more accessible for technical contributors (mostly because of solving templates / modules dependencies), much more useful for content creators (significantly much more available and capable templates), thus removing big hurdles for contributors.

Thanks for your answer! --KuboF Hromoslav (talk) 15:07, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Hey there KuboF Hromoslav, this question is being addressed on the main talk page for the Wikimedia Foundation's 2021-2022 annual plan. That's the best place for questions that are specific to this year. Hope this helps! --KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 27 July 2021 (UTC)