Wikimedia Foundation elections/2024/Questions for candidates/Question 4
Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan recognizes multiple trends negative to the Wikimedia movement: decreasing visibility, audiences moving to a novel competition such as artificial intelligence solutions and Internet influencers, increasing information warfare and erosion of trust, necessary technical investments while the revenue growth was flattening. At the same time, the movement's products and processes change very, very slowly. Which bold steps would you recommend to the Wikimedia Foundation?
Bobby Shabangu (Bobbyshabangu)
No response yet.
Deon Steyn (Oesjaar)
No response yet.
Erik Hanberg (Erikemery)
I believe that relative to big-tech, Wikimedia’s slow pace to change products and processes is actually a hidden strength. Yes, it can be frustrating at times. But I would always choose it over the “go fast and break “ things mentality that seems to guide Big Tech. How often have we seen a company like Meta go all in one idea (metaverse, a phone) and then pivot six months later to the new shiny object? Wikimedia must be more thoughtful about any new initiative.
I would certainly embrace a new bold idea where there was a good bet for paying off. Or testing many smaller ideas with the community and its users and readers. But overall, the strength of Wikimedia is the community, its nonprofit status, and its deep trust with readers and users. Like a glacier, it moves slowly, but when it moves, no one can stop it.
Farah Jack Mustaklem (Fjmustak)
No response yet.
Christel Steigenberger (Kritzolina)
For me the boldest step the Wikimedia Foundation can take is one that is not new. The boldest action the Wikimedia Foundation does again and again is to truly trust its creative, intelligent, amazing community of volunteers. I believe the Board should always apply this trust in all its stratgies and should also try and push all stakeholders towards this trust. The community is the true strength of our movement. Wikipedia and its sister projects exist, because we humans bring it "alive" again and again with our contributions. As long as we have healthy vibrant communities across the world, the Wikimedia Movement will prosper and overcome all difficulties to freely sharing our knowledge.
Lane Rasberry (Bluerasberry)
To address all of these challenges, I recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation greatly increase university research partnerships. The least expensive, highest-value option for continuously getting good recommendations is to make research support, data, and documentation up-to-date and easy for researchers to access.
Currently the Wikimedia Foundation has no particular option for university research partnerships. I know this, because since 2018 I have been Wikimedian in Residence at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia, and I have free-of-cost graduate students who want to do machine learning and artificial intelligence projects on Wikimedia datasets. While we have done some research, I have difficulty introducing Wikimedia content to students repeatedly every term because the Wikimedia ecosystem is simply unprepared for student research. Doing research with Wikimedia should be as easy as doing research with large datasets from other tech platforms. Now is the time to develop our infrastructure to support university research.
To all of these questions - how should we respond to artificial intelligence? how do we grow trust in various countries? what investments should we make in technology? what business plans are sensible? - the answer is to tell the world that we want university research partnerships. Many research questions can be answered with our publicly available open data and without need to disturb any editors. In many cases, researchers would like for us to ask them questions, because they only want to do a project that would be helpful to us and that no one else is already doing privately. Researchers appreciate when we recommend ethical guidelines and ask them to adopt open science practices.
Beyond computer science and data science, we need partnerships with schools of law and public policy to protect our values, with schools of commerce and business to review our budgets and investments, with sociologists to conduct Wikimedia reader and user surveys, and with every kind of school for content development of Wikipedia itself.
Lorenzo Losa (Laurentius)
No response yet.
Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz (Nadzik)
No response yet.
Mohammed Awal Alhassan (Alhassan Mohammed Awal)
No response yet.
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Rosiestep)
No response yet.
Tesleemah Abdulkareem (Tesleemah)
No response yet.
Victoria Doronina (Victoria)
No response yet.