In the past days, a new Wikipedia contributor edited Wikipedia and made a
great contribution, except... This user added zero sources, and the article
in what the edit was made was about a living person. So the verifiability
is a problem and in conflict with the policy Biographies of living persons.
This was just one example of thousands that have to be dealt with every day
in Wikimedia. And every day the community tries to maintain the quality of
Wikipedia and has to deal with this kind of edits.
I asked myself the question: why did this new contributor not add any
sources?
I logged out, went to an article and clicked edit. Made some modifications
(in the Visual Editor), and then clicked Publish changes. In the steps I
took to edit the article, I got nowhere a message that Wikipedia wants to
have sources for the information I added. Nowhere!
I hope that every experienced user by now understands the importance of
adding sources. But we cannot expect from new contributors to already know
this. They need to be informed that adding sources is needed. They do not
go first read the manual of Wikipedia with all the help and project pages,
they just start editing right away. They think, link in many other
platforms, that if they do something wrong, they get a message while
editing/uploading/etc.
For some strange reason, if you edit Wikipedia, you get no notification at
all that you need to add sources, even while this is one of the most
important pillars of Wikipedia. The result is that a lot of work of these
new contributors gets lost, because the information is removed from the
articles because of a lack of sources. If those new users would have got a
message in the Visual Editor during the editing, a lot more contributions
would be able to stay in Wikipedia, less new contributors would get
demotivated, and it would reduce the workload of existing users who do the
maintenance every day.
As with the influx of edits without sources nothing is done, the Dutch
expression "mopping with the tap open" (Dutch: dweilen met de kraan open)
applies here.
Romaine
Hello all,
The call for candidates for the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees selection is now open from May 8, 2024 - May 29, 2024 at 23:59
UTC. The Board of Trustees oversees the Wikimedia Foundation's work, and
each Trustee serves a three-year term [1]. This is a volunteer position.
This year, the Wikimedia community will vote to fill four (4) seats on
the Foundation Board in August 2024. Could you - or someone you know -
be a good fit to join the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees?
Learn more about what it takes to stand for these leadership positions
and how to submit your candidacy on this Meta-wiki page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Candida…>
or encourage someone else to run in this year's election.
*
Community questions for candidates*
All community members, including affiliates, are invited to submit
questions for the Board of Trustees candidates to answer. From the list
of questions, the Elections Committee selects 5 questions for candidates
to answer, which the candidates are expected to answer. The selected
questions may be a combination of what’s been submitted from the
community, if they’re alike or related. Questions can be submitted
between May 8, 2024 - June 12, 2024 at 23:59 UTC. Learn more about how
to submit your questions on this Meta-wiki page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2024/Questio…>.
Regards,
KTC
On behalf of the Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group
[1] - https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Bylaws#(B)_Term.
--
Katie Chan
Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of any organisation the author is associated with or employed by.
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine
Dear all,
I am writing on behalf of the Community Affairs Committee of the Wikimedia
Foundation Board of Trustees [1] to invite you to give feedback on the
draft Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle from today until the end of
the day on June 23, 2024 (anywhere on Earth). This is a long read; thank
you in advance for your attention to its details.
== Terminology: what are “Sibling Projects”? ==
The term “Sister Project” has historically been used to describe all the
publicly available wikis (“Wikimedia Projects”) operated by the Wikimedia
Foundation, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and others
[2]. Some community members have also used the term “Sister Project” in the
context of language versions of the same wiki, such as English Wikipedia,
Bengali Wikipedia, etc., or Vietnamese Wikisource, Catalan Wikisource, etc.
Still, other community members have interpreted “Sister Projects” as
synonymous with “WikiProjects”, such as English:Wikipedia:WikiProject
Military history or Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings.
To address the confusion and to disambiguate the terms, a working term -
“Sibling Projects” - will be used to distinguish separate content projects
(wikis) from language variants of the same content project. Under this
naming scheme, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikidata are “Sibling Projects”.
Thus, the French Wikisource and Polish Wikisource would be “language
versions (French and Polish) of the same Sibling Project (Wikisource)”.
This is a working terminology, and it might change.
== Context ==
Historically, when Wikimedia Siblings started to be added to Wikipedia,
there was a surge of new projects, sometimes with and sometimes without
strategic or clear goals. At that time, the Wikimedia Foundation Board was
approving new Sibling projects (for example, Wikivoyage [3], Abstract
Wikipedia [4]). There is a separate committee (Language Committee) that
makes decisions on whether a new language version (subdomain) of existing
Wikimedia projects can be opened [5]. Still, there was nothing for other
“kinds of Wikimedia projects”. Since 2021, the responsibility to “address
new (...) site applications, including creating a formalized procedure,
from application to approval/disapproval” is the mandate of the Community
Affairs Committee (CAC), a Wikimedia Foundation Board Committee [6].
In the last 10 years, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has become cautious
about opening new Sibling Projects because of a lack of clear strategy
around approval, maintenance, and closure, a lack of understanding of their
impact, and questions around their sustainability in light of the
Foundation's mostly flat budget [7]. In addition, the technical work
necessary to maintain different Sibling Projects has often stretched the
Wikimedia Foundation’s capacity.
A little over a year ago, CAC created a Task Force [8] to help the
Wikimedia Foundation develop a direction on if, how, what, and when to
invest in the opening of new Sibling Projects, in order “to make sure that
any newly approved project is set up for success, and has the resources it
needs to function well” [9]. The Foundation needs to understand better what
services it would need to commit to this process while taking into account
the organization's limited capacity and budget. This task has to be
addressed in cooperation with the Product & Technology Department of the
Wikimedia Foundation, led by the Chief Product & Technology Officer, Selena
Deckelmann.
=== Assessment ===
To make space for the inflow of innovative ideas while maintaining and
continuing support for the existing Sibling Projects, it is important to
establish a clear process for the Sibling Projects’ lifecycle.
The application evaluation process preceding “opening a new Sibling
Project” will require considerable time as well as financial and human
resources, which needs quantification. An assessment of the needed
investment in the technology could be significant depending on the scope of
the proposed project (for example, Wikifunctions [10] needs very different
resources than a new project that uses standard mediawiki installations),
especially in cases of possible maintenance of the project in perpetuity.
Evaluating a new application to validate the concept, its impact on the
existing Wikimedia technical ecosystem, the human and financial resourcing
implications, and future maintenance costs will be time-consuming and might
need considerably more staff.
At the same time, an evaluation of the existing Sibling Projects needs to
occur as not all are meeting their potential with promoting the Movement's
mission. We need to develop an evaluation process for a Sibling Project's
success and sustainability. We also need clearly defined approaches for
splitting, merging, sunsetting, and/or possibly adopting Sibling Projects
by different organisations.
== How to provide feedback ==
Your feedback is warmly welcome. The feedback can be given from today until
the end of the day on June 23, 2024 (anywhere on Earth). We hope that a
fairly long feedback period will allow for rich discussions without feeling
rushed. There are several ways that you can provide feedback:
-
Review the page here, on Meta [11] and leave comments on the talk page.
-
Join open calls (May 23 at 02:00 to 03:00 UTC and May 30 at 16:00 to
17:00 UTC) [12]
-
Request a conversation as a part of Talking:2024
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…>
by using the Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Talking:
2024#Let’s Talk|Let’s Talk
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…'s_talk>
feature to sign up for a time to speak with me and other trustees about
this topic.
Kind regards,
Victoria Doronina, Task Force Lead
On behalf of the Community Affairs Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation
Board of Trustees
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_sister_projects
[3]
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2013/01/15/wikimedia-foundation-launches-wikivoy…
[4] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Abstract_Wikipedia
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee
[6]
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Affairs_Committee_Charter
[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/…
[8]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…
[9]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proposals_for_new_projects#From_the_Bo…
[10] https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:About
[11]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…
[12]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs…
--
Kind regards, Victoria
Victoria Doronina
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/dr-victoria-doronina/>
Trustee
Sister Projects Taskforce Lead
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Imagine a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge. Please help us make it a reality.
Dear wikimedians,
Nearly one year ago, the Graphs extension was disabled from all wikis, because there was a security issue that should be solved (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940). A wide team from the WMF worked on a solution for some weeks, but after Northern Hemisphere spring ended, summer came, then the monsoon season, and now it is again summer in the Southern Hemisphere... and Graphs are still disabled. All the solutions proposed have been dismissed, but every two months there's a proposal to make a new roadmap to solve the issue. We have plenty of roadmaps, but no vehicle to reach our destination.
Seven years ago, we were discussing our Strategy for 2030. We used thousands of volunteer hours, thousands of staff hours and millions of dollars to build a really well-balanced strategy. There we concluded that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". We also made some recommendations to improve the User Experience (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Improve_U…) and claimed that we wanted to Innovate in Free Knowledge (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Innovate_…). Well, the situation is now worse than it was seven years ago, let me give some examples:
* Graph extension is used in thousands of pages, some of them highly relevant, as COVID or Climate Change information. There are thousands of graphs broken now, and the only partial solution give is loading these graphs as images, instead of promoting an interactive solution.
*
Meanwhile, a place like Our World in Data has been publishing data and interactive content with a compatible license for years. (Remember, "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge"). Trying to add this data and graphs to Wikimedia projects has been done by WikiMed, and it is technically possible, but still blocked to deploy (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T303853).
* Wolfram Alpha is like a light year ahead us on giving interactive solutions to knowledge questions, even the silliest ones (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=how+many+oranges+fit+in+the+Earth%3F). We have good technical articles about a lot of things, but sometimes "becoming the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge" needs to provide solutions to exact problems, like the answer to an equation, and how to solve it. That's also "free knowledge".
*
Brilliant (https://brilliant.org/) is brilliant if you want to learn lots of things, like geometry or programming. Way better than Wikipedia. But... you need to pay for it. How could we even try if we can't add anything interactive to our platforms?
* We can build interactive timelines using Wikidata, but we can't embed them at Wikipedia. Weird, because I can do it in any external page. Hopefully, Histropedia will do it better. http://histropedia.com/<http://histropedia.com/>
* We could have something very special: inline links in video and audio subtitles. We used to have them, but the new video infrastructure doesn't allow it. Imagine a world where you can watch a video and link a link in the subtitles just to know more about that.
* ...
The list can go on an on ("which phase the moon is today?"), but I think that the idea is clear. We could have interactive content, but we are going in the opposite direction, and every year we are further from our goal, because other platforms are doing it better, way better. And this seems like some wild ideas, but then I read the 2023-2024 annual plan section called "Wiki Experiences" (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/…) and it looks like we should be going there. But we aren't.
I'm sorry if this e-mail feels bitter. My experience in the last years is that we are now further of what we need that we were before, even if many chapters and volunteers are trying to overturn it.
Thank to everyone who have been trying.
Galder
Dear all
I wanted to share with you some short animations that Wikimedia UK has
recently launched to better communicate our work.
There are four different animations. The first is a general introduction
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2CIllUMt_8> to the chapter, which is
about 90 seconds long. The other three are about half that length, with
each tackling one of our strategic themes of knowledge equity
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA1TdXweNjs&list=PL66MRMNlLyR7rmF0ylT0fIWxE…>,
information literacy <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7GJGLCw0J0> and
climate <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWS7hfetZk>.
The target audience for these are people outside of the Wikimedia movement,
but I thought some of you may like to watch them :) They were funded from
historic Gift Aid claims (a form of UK tax relief on charitable donations)
that we received late last year.
Best wishes
Lucy
--
Lucy Crompton-Reid
Chief Executive
Good day everyone.
I’m Nikolai Bulykin, the co-founder and organizer of North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User group. You may have heard about us in connection with the previous CEE Meeting in Tbilisi. For those who haven’t - we’re thematic user group focused on the topics of history, culture, nature and geography of North-West Russia that can be simply described as «Saint Petersburg and its near and far surroundings». The affiliate was created in 2019 and we’ve managed pretty descent level of activity, at least it’s more than we’ve expected at the beginning. Also, as far as I know, we’re remaining the last active Russian-language Wikimedia affiliate in Russia while others are closed (Wikimedia RU) or just dropped their activities almost to zero. There is a bit of Tatar activity in sight, tho.
We started this affiliate on the idea to unite all the editors who works on the similar topics and organize them, because we believe that 15 organized Wikimedians can do more than 90 un-organized ones. Being honest, the idea of this group was there long before my debut in the community and, maybe, even before my first edit. As an affiliate, we managed to get assistance from the Foundation that gave us plenty of experience and insights. We were happy to share them, but then COVID happened and all international relations in Wikimedia have shrinked to 50-70-person Zoom calls that didn’t give us such opportunity. Sad but ok, that was the circumstances and we still managed to maintain high level of activity both offline and on-wiki.
When the COVID have ended we had a new treat — you all know what Russian government did (and still do) and that have closed the barely opened gates of financial aid for us. Some of us had to flee the country and others passed the opportunity to visit CEEM in North Macedonia because of travel safety concerns and suddenly appeared visas. And that also were the circumstances.
In 2023 we were hit by bad news — we were not eligible for a scholarship to send delegates to CEEM in Tbilisi. The reason provided by Mehman Ibragimov was that we’re not a language or a country community and we didn’t participate in CEE Spring (although we’ve added our articles lists to the contest). But with the help of some other Russian Wikimedians, mostly Anastasiya Lvova (who later joined us) we’ve presented the poster that described ourselves and our work. We thought it would be easier in the next year and while we consider 2023 situation as wrongful, we learnt our lesson on the «new rules».
So in 2024, after the closing of Wikimedia RU Anastasiya have convinced us to lead CEE Spring in Russian Wikipedia. But to our surprise, we weren’t even listed in 2024 CEEM affiliates and communities list. After a bit more than a week we received an answer that we’re not considered as a CEE Affiliate.
Representatives of the Foundation claim that local communities know better, so why does the CEE community knows that we are part of it, while the people making decisions about scholarships for CEE events don't know this and make references in their replies about reasons not to invite us on a page that anyone can edit, seemingly with little regulation?
If equity is among the values of the Foundation, its plans, and Wikimedia community as a whole, why are special rules introduced for us regarding preference for the language community, even though we meet all the criteria (reports, activity)? And should we still do this «representative work» if we're still considered as outsiders?
Links:
Our page — https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/North-West_Russia_Wiki-Historians_User_Grou…
Our annual reports — https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/North-West_Russia_Wiki-Historians_User_Grou…
Our activity page — https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/North-West_Russia_Wiki-Historians_User_Grou…
Our poster at CEEM-2023 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NWR-Hist-Poster_2023_curves.pdf
--
Nikolai Bulykin (User:Красный).
Written by myself, discussed by Organizing committee of North-West Russia Wiki-Historians: Ekaterina Borisova (User:Екатерина Борисова), Paul Kaganer (User:Kaganer), Anastasiya Lvova (User:Lvova).
Hi all,
Today Wikimedia Ukraine, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia
and free knowledge in Ukraine, turns 15.
We are really grateful to everyone in the Wikimedia movement who've
supported us and participated in our projects over the years – whether by
lending a hand at the onset of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, by
writing about Ukraine on Wikipedia within Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy
Month or CEE Spring, by sharing your experience with us and learning from
ours, and in countless other ways.
To mark the anniversary, we prepared a brief Diff post listing ten of
Wikimedia Ukraine's achievements over the past years & four perspectives
about what WMUA means to our volunteers:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/05/31/celebrating-15-years-of-wikimedia-ukr…
We would love to hear your stories about Wikimedia Ukraine and its projects
if you have them. Share your memories on social media with the hashtag
#WMUA15 and tag us in your posts – https://x.com/wikimedia_ua;
https://www.facebook.com/Wikimedia.Ukraina/;
https://www.instagram.com/wikimedia_ukraine/.
Hope to see everyone at Wikimania 2030 in Kyiv ;)
Best Regards
Anton Protsiuk
Programs Coordinator at Wikimedia Ukraine
Hello all,
The next language community meeting is scheduled in a few weeks - May 31st
at 16:00 UTC. If you're interested, you can sign up on this wiki page: <
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Language_engineering/…
>.
This is a participant-driven meeting, where we share language-specific
updates related to various projects, collectively discuss technical issues
related to language wikis, and work together to find possible solutions.
For example, in the last meeting, the topics included the machine
translation service (MinT) and the languages and models it currently
supports, localization efforts from the Kiwix team, and technical
challenges with numerical sorting in files used on Bengali Wikisource.
Do you have any ideas for topics to share technical updates related to your
project? Any problems that you would like to bring for discussion during
the meeting? Do you need interpretation support from English to another
language? Please reach out to me at ssethi(a)wikimedia.org and add
agenda items to the document here: <
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/language-community-meeting-may-2024>.
We look forward to your participation!
Cheers,
Jon, Mary, Oscar, Amir and Srishti
*Srishti Sethi*
Senior Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>