This is an archive of past discussions about User:Jimbo Wales. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Latest comment: 8 years ago126 comments27 people in discussion
Please bear in mind I have no overall opinion on either the decisions or the processes related to this grant and that my observations/concerns may be of little value given my only recent exposure to the issue and processes. Notwithstanding, I have read through just some of the info available and have already noticed some important words that I find problematic:
1:"Using these platforms as testing grounds, the organization will examine questions around content preferences, queries, the quality and relevance of results, and what information people consume and why."
I do not think we/Wikipedia should be examining or need to try to figure out what information people consume and why, either as individual readers or collectively.
2:"Finding an article on Wikipedia is like opening the first page in the book of knowledge. We have an obligation to our communities to make this first experience captivating for every user."
I don't like the idea that we would want to capture(captivating) the attention/experience of our readers in any way. This is exactly what I was taught as being #1 objective in advertising; i.e. to "get the customer's attention"
To further say this is an "obligation to our communities" is an attempted transference and acceptance of this desire/need to "captivate" from whoever is setting this "captivating" goal to all of us and our communities.
3:BY WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION COMMUNICATIONS ON JANUARY 6TH, 2016
"As the amount of digital content continues to grow, helping people search for and discover relevant information so they can make decisions important to their lives is becoming increasingly essential," said John Bracken, Knight Foundation vice president for media innovation. "This project will help uncover more effective, transparent ways to do just that,.."
I vehemently disagree with Bracken's implication of information being primarily limited to making decisions. This is similar , imo, of saying getting education is primarily to get a job. I also notice he worked for the Ford Foundation, which sets off alarm bells for me.
4:"Jan 29, 2016 Release of further details by Tretikov with the statement that the grant paperwork could not be released due to “donor privacy”"
If our Trustees can see it , we should too, in this case, imo.
What are the activities this grant supports? (quoted text from the grant)
Answer key questions:
5:"Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?"
This is cart before the horse; I doubt most members of Wikipedia community want to see it become an "open channel" to other stuff.
6:"Can the Wikimedia Foundation get Wikipedia embedded via carriers and Original Equipment Manufacturers?"
This is another cart before the horse; Hell no is my opinion on this. People should come to us!
7:"Use Key Performance (KPIs) to inform product iteration, and establish key understanding and feature development for the prototypes Conduct tests with potential users Create a public-facing dashboard of key KPIs [24] Measure: User satisfaction (by analyzing rate at which queries surface relevant content) User-perceived load time No results rate Application Programming Interface (API) usage"
I am concerned about all of #7. I think a big part of the fun of Wikipedia is having to think and hunt for info while your mind engages to expand the topics/people you are checking out. I think its just fine if there are no results 30% of the time someone comes here looking for something. We should be encouraging critical thinking by our attendees, not make the platform into a seesaw for babies.
grant agreement is interesting to read. Like the $2,445,873.00 search engine reference on page 9 and the Intellectual Property clause on page 5. The last sentence of the first paragraph section a: of the intellectual property clause is concerning to me. Nocturnalnow (talk) 00:42, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
I don't see anything obviously wrong with this. The WMF keeps the copyrights (with stated intent to allow public distribution) but just to be safe, promises the Knight Foundation that in event of material breach they are guaranteed their own license with right to sublicense. The only thing really wrong with it is that "Foundation" is, of course, confusing, since WMF and Knight Foundation are both Foundations. Frankly, it looks like somebody used a stock form letter and didn't really think about it much ... I've seen apartment leases where at least they would capitalize LESSOR and LESSEE and define them explicitly... but the context here is still obvious, and I think any intentional effort by some lawyer to misread this would be nothing but short-term harassment. But IANAL, etc. Wnt (talk) 10:47, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
I know what you mean. IANAL either but have seen amazing stretches of contract wordings to unintended consequences. e.g., recently some grocery stores or states in the USA wanted to put "country of origin" labeling on retail packages of beef products and Canada stopped it by claiming it was an infringement of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The same thing in reverse has happened with regards to some newer Provincial government regulations which one would think would fall under sovereignty rights. With regard to this agreement with Knight, maybe it comes down to AGF. If we AGF re: "Knight", then there is nothing wrong with the clause or any of the contract; however, if Knight AGF with us, the clause is perhaps not needed at all. But, I suppose, our AGFing is not/should not be conditional upon AGFing by the other side. So, bottom line, I agree with you that the agreement is just fine in the world of written agreements, I just find it very interesting and thought provoking to read. I must say that I would have preferred if it were much shorter. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:25, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
Note: I am looking for a definitive answer based upon some sort of documentation, not just opinions or assumptions.
Will whatever does the searching just search things that we control (Wikipedia, Wictionary, Wikidata, Wikibooks, etc.) or will it be searching things that other people control (other websites, for example)? --Guy Macon (talk) 14:31, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
I recommend reading the actual grant agreement. There is nothing in the deliverables which includes searching things that other people control. Whether or not a fully realized future result would include, as an example, a tool for editors and readers to quickly find results in open access research, etc., is an interesting question (I think it sounds great) but not one which is at all proposed for this first stage.
There's no language explicitly referring to "things other people control", but it's very strongly implied. The KE is repeatedly described as a tool for finding information "on the internet" -- not "on Wikimedia projects" or the like.
The agreement is not a model of clarity and directness, being weighed down with (probably unavoidable) legalistic language and techno-jargon such as "surfacing" knowledge. But there are some interesting hints. One is a reference to "a federation of open data sources." I look forward to hearing more. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 15:34, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
I agree with you, but focus on the deliverables. The grant document talks about a lot of things which are barely even ideas at this point - the deliverables are relatively precise, but what happens next is (deliberately) kept open-ended.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:28, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
That's good news. First, because Wikipedia becoming a direct competitor to Google or Bing would be the equivalent of walking into a buzzsaw, and second, because fighting the arms race between running a search engine (a job which strives to serve up the results that the users were looking for) and "search engine optimization" (which strives to trick the search engines into serving up results that will make the most money for the site doing the search engine optimizing) is hard. Google is barely able to keep ahead in that arms race. Jimbo, if things ever change and they start talking about searching sites that the WMF doesn't control, please let me know so that I can present some actual data based upon my experience in the trenches of the SEO arms race. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Sure. We don't have, and won't have, the resources at our disposal to even contemplate a Google/Bing style search engine, and all the talk about that is just that - talk based on nothing. I can envision - but this is not current planned and isn't even in a serious brainstorm yet as far as I know, although presumably some of the research funded by the Knight grant should consider this sort of thing - that some important scholarly/academic and open access resources could be crawled and indexed in some useful way relating to Wikipedia entries. Let me give an example, which I came up with in about 30 seconds just now so it isn't even close to an optimal example. We have an entry on Pseudoephedrine. One sentence in it says "Rarely, pseudoephedrine therapy may be associated with mydriasis (dilated pupils), hallucinations, arrhythmias, hypertension, seizures and ischemic colitis..." This is referenced to the (presumably respectable, I'm not informed in this area) Australian Medicines Handbook of 2006. A quick search at doaj finds a more recent source that sounds potentially relevant. This may or may not be relevant to the entry, but it seems pretty straightforward that many things similar to this example would be of great use to editors.
Even this is worthy of skepticism and caution, of course. But one of our oldest values is to BE BOLD and we shouldn't shy away from thinking about such concepts.
It's unfortunate that there's been this silly distraction about whether this is some kind of Google competitor, when it clearly isn't.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:28, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
You and the WMF give partial and vague disclosures, and yet you claim that things are actually "clear". You lie to us, obfuscate, and distract, and you call our questions a "silly distraction." You have the balls to cite our values, but you are not being transparent and you are disrespecting the community. Your entire response to all this has been, in your choice words, fucking bullshit. Stop digging already -- Jytdog (talk) 21:49, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Um, what? I have met Jimmy privately, he could reasonably be accused of idealism, but I find it hard to think of anyone who would make a worse job of running a grand conspiracy. With all due respect to Jimmy, I think he would be a pretty bad poker player. Guy (Help!) 00:24, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi Guy I am not espousing any conspiracy theory. The WMF is acting like a silicon-valley startup company, coming up with some Big Plans for a new way to make knowledge available to the public, via this Knowledge Engine. It has made plans and already started working on it. The KE looks like it will dramatically change the software we all depend on and how people access the content we create. They haven't discussed that with us. According to Doc James, that is why he was thrown off the board - because he thought they should. It is not a conspiracy - it is the WMF board thinking they are running a startup company. Jimbo has been very clumsily and transparently lying, obfuscating, insulting etc - anything other than actually telling us what the plans are with the KE. What is unclear to you? Jytdog (talk) 00:39, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
What is clear to me -- and I am a well-known critic of the WMF -- is that you are making accusations without any evidence to back them up. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:48, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi Guy Macon Exactly what accusations do you think I am making that are not supportable? I will be happy to provide difs. I will also ask you two questions - where has the WMF or Jimbo disclosed to the community in meaningful detail - seeking dialogue about it - what the vision for the KE is and what the result of a query looks like, and how that will relate to existing WP content? Where do you see any disclosure of an effort to put out a joint statement by the board and Doc James that allows the community to make sense of Doc James dismissal as opposed to the really pitiful "he said/she said" that we have now? Please provide diffs. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 02:28, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
You have already been told to go to the FAQ page, it tells you where you can talk to the people doing the research. Your speculative claims, about some pre-ordained search plainly have no basis in either logic or evidence, considering the actual state of that project: which at this point is all about gathering information on searches of Wikipedia projects.[1] Also, Read the FAQ. As for your keeping dragging out James, who moved the board to approve the Knight Grant, that is just inane. Alanscottwalker (talk) 03:39, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog, the following claim: Jimbo has been very clumsily and transparently lying, obfuscating... is not supported by even a shred of evidence, and is nothing more than low-quality flamebait and obvious trolling. Please go away so that those of us with serious concerns can have a calm, reasoned discussion about them, free from personal insults. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:31, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi Guy no I am very serious. Not trolling. And I would think you know me by now well enough that I do not do anything unseriously here in WP. Jimbo has indeed been very clumsily and transparently lying, obfuscating.. I will provide examples, even though you didn't give me the respect of actually asking. Please do actually read what follows. it is just two examples.
1) background first. Jimbo has been aware of what the Knight Foundation grant since the getgo, right? We can now look at it, and judge what he has said, based on what that says.
a) Biggest picture, Jimbo has been asked many many times to provide a concrete disclosure of the KE vision. I'll ask you again to show where he has done that.
He has for sure pointed to the very-half assed and vague disclosures that have been made. The half-assed/vague disclosures were already obfuscating and disrespectful (if you value transparency as we supposedly all do); pointing someone who asks for more disclosure to those crappy answers as though that is actually an answer, is doubly obfuscating and disrespectful. Jimbo did that to me, just below. If you don't value transparency I can understand you not agreeing with me here. But I ask you to see what this is like, for people who do value it. (And again, this is putatively a value of WMF).
About actually lying? Jimbo above wrote
It's unfortunate that there's been this silly distraction about whether this is some kind of Google competitor, when it clearly isn't
. Nobody has ever thought that WMF wants to compete with Google broadly - that company does a ton of things. Nobody has ever thought that the KE in particular would compete with everything that a Google search can produce (flight times, local movie times). Nobody thought that the the KE would be a "crawler" and the statements made to he media over the last couple of days are infuriating to me in their bullshitty corporate spinning. (see for example this) But the Knight Foundation grant makes it very clear that the WMF believes that the KE will beat the pants off of Google/Bing and other commercial search engines for certain kinds of queries where it really matters that there are no commercial interests, privacy of searchers is protected, and the way the search results were generated is (ahem) transparent. For those kinds of queries, there is direct competition. Also it is clear that the KE is meant to keep people in the WMF domain, and not leave to go search in google. So there is directly wanting people to come to wikpedia.org to search, and not losing people to google search. Those are competing with Google, and this is "some kind of Google competitor".
And yes both of those are transparently clumsy - ham-handed, actually, especially now that we can see the grant application. Zero effort to actually talk. If anybody is trolling here it is Jimbo. Now if he came out and said, "Fuck transparency I have no obligation to tell you or the community anything" and said nothing more, I could kind of respect that and it would put the discussion on at least an honest footing. But insulting people who ask, saying it is "silly" to note that the KE is indeed intended to be better than commercial search engines for some things (that is the whole way they sold the grant application to the Knight Foundation for pete's sake!) , etc... all this is just really clumsy tactics to avoid answering the questions and make him look like an oaf. Jytdog (talk) 03:20, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
By your own standard you accuse yourself of lying: You have written twice on this page before now that it is "exactly like google" and "like google". Now you admit it is not much like google, at all. I'm glad we finally cleared-up that it is not much like google. But, it seems your actual problem is not lying but assuming bad faith, which may lead other people to think you are trolling. This is how Knight and the Wikipedia Foundation understand the Grant:
. . . to explore ways to make the search and discovery of high-quality, trustworthy information on Wikipedia more accessible and open with $250,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Funding will support an investigation of search and browsing on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects :::. . . Wikipedia includes more than 35 million articles in hundreds of languages. Its standards for neutral, fact-based and relevant information have made it a reliable resource for nearly half a billion people every month. With more than 7,000 articles created every day and 250 edits made per minute, Wikipedia is constantly growing and improving. Its open, nonprofit model, allows anyone to participate and contribute. The new Knight-funded project will help make it easier to discover information on this vast resource of community-created content.[2]..
And your odd complaint now is that that competes with Google (for some unknown reason you apparently don't believe them when they say they "love" other search engine traffic), whereas the obvious and expressly stated intent in the FAC and by Knight is to improve the Wikipedia search function to benefit users searching for information on Wikipedia projects, so they get the information they want when using the Wikipedia.org search function. No one is lying to you, you just are making bad faith assumptions. As for the aimed for search function being transparent that is plainly true. As stated in the FAC: "Is all your work open source? Yes. All of our code is contained in public repositories, and falls under the same licensing as MediaWiki."
Jimbo has already stated on this page, where your confusion may have come from: the search project is in the research phase, you are fully invited to go speak with the research team -- so go do it, if you want a hand in a conversation in shaping where they go. Don't stay here where you are accusing someone who is not doing the work, instead of going and having the conversation with the people working on the project. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:17, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog, I have carefully read your response to my request for evidence, and have found no actual evidence in it. What I found were reasons why you hold a particular opinion. The reasons aren't bad, but when you present them as if they are established facts instead of personal opinion, the lack of actual evidence backing up your personal opinion becomes relevant. ::::Hint: "X said A and Y said B" is not evidence that A is a liar. Maybe B is a liar. Maybe one of them got some wrong information or misinterpreted the information they got. And maybe A is talking about the actual deliverables specified in the contract while B is talking about a poorly-defined wishlist of things that some non-technical person thinks they might want to do in the future, undefined-as-yet stages. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:02, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi Guy Macon, thanks for your kind reply. (really!) I started out saying that the WMF and its board (ofon which Jimbo is the Chairmanhas a permanent Founders seat as you know) has been very unforthcoming about the vision, despite repeated requests. And that is the number one cause of the upset-ness, including mine. I hope you might agree with that. Do you? On the rest.... Yes I hear you that different people from within WMF have been saying different things. And yes I gladly admit the possibility of human error. But here is the thing - the WMF is a nonprofit corporation, an entity. (and one that in my view is acting increasingly like a for-profit, but that is another matter) Corporations of any kind don't have the luxury of relying on he said/she said, and if that does happen, the corporation needs to clarify it - especially one that says it values transparency and the editing community (a big chunk of which wants transparency - that was the key plank upon which Doc James was elected). Right? But that clarification, in the form of a story that makes sense, has not been forthcoming (there are just in the past few days some hints that it is starting to come). But for Jimmy to grab some bit of what someone says and deny that, and to call what people say "silly" or "paranoid" is not dealing with the problem that the organization of which he is the Chairfounder has not actually said what is happening with any clarity. An organization creates a problem by not talking, and people react to that as one can expect, and the chairmanfounder insults them and distracts yet further in response? That is transparently clumsy. If you keep your eye on the ball (the lack of disclosure) the clumsiness is really obvious. I do hope that makes sense. Thank you again. I don't have a dif for the lack of disclosure by the organization that makes sense of all the bits flying around (impossible, of course). There are tons of diffs all over this page and its archives of Jimmy doing anything but disclosing - of him insulting people, reacting negatively to some small bit of what people say, etc etc etc. Jytdog (talk) 22:57, 18 February 2016 (UTC) (corrections made Jytdog (talk) 02:16, 19 February 2016 (UTC))
@Jimbo: I have read this whole talk page and various other statements and off-wiki articles about the "Knowledge Engine," and I still have no idea what it is or what the vision is. You have been great at responding about what the KE is not, but it would be really helpful if you could give a quick non-vague description of what the Board intends the KE to do and to what end? Or even a statement about what the board hopes to accomplish with and through the KE? Thanks. Minor4th18:34, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Isn't that answered already. Repeating:
". . . We are improving the existing [[<tvar|wt-search>wikitech:Search</>|CirrusSearch]] infrastructure with better relevance, [[<tvar|q2-goals>Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q2_Goals#Search</>|multi language]], [[<tvar|q3-goals>Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q3_Goals#Search</>|multi projects]] search and incorporating new [<tvar|maps>https://maps.wikimedia.org</> data sources] for our projects. We want a relevant and consistent experience for users across searches for both <tvar|wp-home>wikipedia.org</> and our project sites. Looking farther forward, we will explore including other sources of open knowledge. We remain fully committed to the movement's vision and values.
Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?
The Wikimedia movement's vision is to make the sum of all human knowledge freely available to everyone. Wikipedia is our largest and most well-known project, but there are many other projects like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata that move us towards realising our vision. These projects have millions of users every month! So, yes, if we can make a search system that's good enough and meets the needs of our users, people absolutely would use it.
If you're adding new data sources, isn't that a search engine?
Yes, the data could be used to potentially evolve and improve the quality of our existing search experience. Our first new data source is OpenStreetMap data for Maps which our [[<tvar|wv-maps>wikivoyage:Wikivoyage:Travellers%27_pub#Announcing_the_launch_of_Maps</>|Wikivoyage community]] is already starting to experiment with. There are other data sets that we could potentially surface (census, national gallery, etc) but that will be up to our communities to decide. Some of these could certainly show up in search results and we have Phabricator tasks around improving GeoData content [[<tvar|phab-ticket>phab:T112026</>|T112026]]. The goal is to expand the amount of knowledge and expand the context beyond just textual search. We want to begin by showcasing content from other wiki projects including appropriate languages based on query input.
What licenses will those new data sources be under?
This will need more discussion as we want to be able to conform to the standards and policies of the Wikimedia projects they would need to serve. Our first exploration was with [[<tvar|phab-ticket>phab:T105090</>|OSM]] licensing and legal and we'll want to learn from that in any further work.
Does that mean we are looking to shift search traffic away from third parties?
No. We love all the [<tvar|ext-traffic>http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/</> third party traffic] that we get and hope that it increases over time. What we are trying to focus on is providing a search experience that doesn't look like this:
Search on Google, Bing, etc
Follow Wikipedia Link
Read
Leave and search Google, Bing, etc again because you are specifically looking for a Wikipedia article but couldn't find it using CirrusSearch. . . . ."[3]Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:22, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
So glad you brought this up. You apparently cannot see what "Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?" even means. What they are proposing is that people enter queries at wikipedia.org, and then the KE will query Wikidata and whatever linked datasources they have, and will construct a WP-article like answer, that it will present as the result, on the fly. Like this. Completely bypassing existing WP articles. That is what "an open channel beyond an encyclopedia" means, apparently. To me this means that WMF is walking away from the Wikipedia-that-exists and remaking it as something completely different. Without talking to us. And yes, they think people will find this a better alternative to doing a google or bing search where you get some list of answers that is driven by undisclosed commercial concerns, and further based on them tracking you and showing you only what they think you want/need to see. Jytdog (talk) 19:43, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Now that is interesting, since you earlier said you did not understand what was being said at the FAQ, and now you are certain you know. It is too bad, you can't find your way to the people who you can discuss this with who are working on it although you have been repeatedly directed to the page to do so, instead of shadowboxing with the things in your head, and calling people liars. And shouting in bold does not actually show reasoning. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:55, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
You are welcome, now, if you are truly interested in a conversation about it, follow the link to talk to the people who are doing the research. Alanscottwalker (talk) 00:32, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
At some point, Jimbo, you and WMF are going to have open the "privacy" box and the "integrity" box at the same time and deal with the tension between them. As long as we continue to place an absolute value on privacy there is no way we can prevent people from abusing WP and Wikidata. Promises like "complete separation" are not keep-able as long as "anyone can edit" and anyone can be anonymous. I am not recommending we reduce the value we place on anonymity - not at all - but we all have to be realistic about what can be accomplished about preserving the integrity of WP and Wikidata in such a context. Right now we just keep a lookout for advocacy editing, including COI editing, and we react to after it happens, and only when we find it. That relies on the vigilance of the community, and careful review and work which takes a ton of time. Volunteer time. Acting in a way that devalues the community (see the Hijacking section below) creates really bad blood with the very community that WMF will have to rely on if there is going to be any hope that Wikidata will have integrity. If that is, Wikidata will remain something that "anyone can edit." Jytdog (talk) 21:26, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
As you may know, I think our current practices relating to "outing" reach too far. There have been cases where we know someone is behaving unethically at Wikipedia and people are afraid to do anything about it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:32, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
The WMF sued the NSA over privacy, and you wrote an op-ed in the NY Times about the absolute value of privacy in WP. OUTING is strictly enforced because of that absolute value. Please fully open both the "integrity" box and the "privacy" box at the same time. It is really unhelpful for you to not deal with the tension between them. It frustrates me (at least) to read what you wrote in that op-ed - which was blazingly clear on the absolute value of privacy and said nothing about any value that competes with it, and then to see you write hand-wavy things like what you write above. Many people have thought and thought about ways to somehow reduce the level of privacy protection in certain cases, but no one has come up with a way to decide whose privacy should be subject to some lower standard of protection, nor when, in any way that satisfies those in the community who are committed to privacy, nor that really deals with the reasons why privacy is so treasured. Jytdog (talk) 23:33, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Who are "we" in this context? The Board? WMF? The Community? Members of the Arbitration Mailing List?
I am a WP:COIN regular like Jytdog, and am as concerned as he is about WP integrity. I'd like to hear more from Jimbo Wales about what our practices should be regarding outing especially in the context of editors with a conflict of interest. It seems there's a huge liability on those in the community who make an attempt to clean things up here, without "air cover" from influential people or enunciated policy. Jytdog has coined an apt metaphor of a privacy box/integrity box tension, and I completely agree that it is compelling to address this issue.
Also, regarding Jimbo's comment in the section above, whether or not KE actually is, or was intended to be, a Google/Bing competitor, it is being flatly reported as one. Example: Newsweek, February 16, 2016: "Wikipedia Takes on Google With New 'Transparent' Search Engine"
Obviously search results are hugely important to Wikipedia, whether individuals are actually driven to the site, or just view data from it which has been mined and reformatted by a wrapper (search engine). I've commented on the downsides of popularity in a user essay that was probably more controversial than I realized when I wrote it. Essentially IMO we've made ourselves a lucrative honeypot for injection of a lot of commercial content. Further discussion on what the whole search engine nexus means to us is really overdue. – Brianhe (talk) 09:47, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
The communications team is reaching out to media for corrections as quickly as they can. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened, nor will it be the last. The media is fed a story that sounds juicy and exciting and they don't stop to pause. They make up headlines that are sexy but false. It's disappointing and exhausting, but it's the modern world of bad journalism. We are not building a search engine to complete with Google. The very idea is ludicrous and impossible on the face of it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:57, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
It is not ludicrous based on the disclosures that have been made - it's very reasonable, especially based on the first page of the project description in the grant where it is made clear how much better the KE would be than existing search engines (that sound just like Google). This is what happens when you ignore the value of transparency and then make only begrudgingly halfway movements towards it. Nobody else thinks that WMF is for-profit software company and acting like one harms WMF and the movement. Please stop making unsupported claims about what is "false" and distracting from the issue, and insulting people, and just disclose the program's vision already, and better yet, talk about it with us. Spin is not going to help here. Jytdog (talk) 16:34, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Of course, it is ludicrous - question: 'Are you building Google?' Answer: 'No, here is what we are working on see the FAC.' Which if anyone with any common sense, ability to think logically, or even modicum of good faith would realize, 'oh yeah-that would be ludicrous.' So, either the re-question is in bad faith, or it just will not take 'no' for an answer, no matter what. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:22, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
The kinds of search tools that the WMF promised the Knight Foundation that the KE would be better than, are exactly like google. Why is the WMF comparing what it is doing to other search engines? Of course the WMF is not building "another google" - it is building something that the WMF beleives the public will use instead of google because it will be more transparent and putatively less commercial. The denial here is blowing smoke in the community's face, and you are helping that. Apparently you cant see through the smoke. Many many people can. Jytdog (talk) 19:37, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Apparently you still have not read the FAC nor understand what the difference is between ideas and acts. Whatever smoke you see, it must be good stuff. Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:18, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
The WMF has a vision of where they want the Discovery/project to go and have already started working toward it. That vision is obviously related to search and they compare what they want to do with what Google and Bing do. Instead of fully disclosing that and discussing it with us in any meaningful way, they made their decisions on their own and are blowing all kinds of smoke about them. This is all incontrovertible. Jytdog (talk) 21:47, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
In the grant application itself pages 10-13 are especially crucial. The KE sounds like it is some kind of "knowledge generating engine" based off Wikidata - maybe something that will construct articles based on Wikidata, with no need for editors to edit actual article content. (You search for X and the KE constructs an article for you off of Wikidata - like the Google Knowledge Graph on steroids) If so that is interesting, if that is something WMF wants to do, but for the WMF to say that it is by Wikipedia and especially that they intend to "Develop prototypes for evolving Wikipedia.org, which will become the home of the Knowledge Engine" (5th bullet on page 12 of the pdf) without even talking with the community about it, much less getting any sense of consent from us, is outrageous. I posted earlier here about the actual relationship between the WMF board and the community. You are seeing the nature of the relationship right there in that bullet point. The WMF is making plans and going to work on this far-reaching project without even talking to us about it. We, the community, are nothing to them. Users to be exploited, like Bomis or any other organization that relies on user-generated content and maintenance.
People have complained bitterly about Flow and other software projects foisted on us. Those are nothing compared with this. Jytdog (talk) 21:11, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
as i understand it. "wikipedia.org" is just an shorthand - an umbrella - for all the actual, specific language-based wp projects, including en.wikipedia. And their saying that, is just saying that it will apply to all the WP projects. If it means something different to you (and maybe to everybody else and i have my head up my butt) please tell me. Jytdog (talk) 22:40, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
(e/c) Well, www.wikipedia.org has always as long as I have known it been a search page, with a search box that sometimes functioned and with links to multiple projects. As the home of a search function, it makes sense. --Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:56, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Alanscottwalker I see what you mean. If WMF is going to launch a Search service, that would be the central place to do it. Thanks! I The question, I guess, is what a search result will look like with the Knowledge Engine. Based on this note left on my Talk page, apparently the prototype search results look like this or more refined, this. Not WP articles. Jytdog (talk) 03:02, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog Sorry, I still don't understand what you are excited about. The FAQ is relatively clear on what is attempting to be accomplished: a more successful search function across projects and potentially other open source projects, housed at wikipedia.org. What is there to object to? We all licensed our work from the very first day for this and other purposes - the only thing against "the movement" would be to go back on that now. Yes, there are people who hate (or hate parts of) Wikipedia because it is organized this way - but, they will always do so -- they just don't like crowd sourced, freely licensed writing and information projects (and of course it has its many drawbacks, but it is what it has always been). There is no going back to controlling what you gave away - and if anything betrays the movement, it is this after the fact fight that some seem to be possessed of for control of what is already given. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:33, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Alanscottwalker I don't know what the last two sentences there are about - they have nothing to do with what I am raising here and I am sorry for not communicating more clearly. Here are the issues - the WMF board appears to be getting ready to spend tens of millions of dollars and several years to develop the KE. It looks like the KE's search results will be computer-generated "articles" built on the fly from Wikidata, in any language - not results pointing to WP articles; "WP's own" search engine will not direct people to WP articles that we have all worked on. It ~appears~ that they intend to make the editing community obsolete by replacing us with Wikidata + algorithms, and in their world we will become curators of Wikidata. There is some speculation there sure, but in the absence of real disclosure and discussion with the editing community, there are plenty of gaps to fill in. The key thing in that last sentence is the lack of authentic discussion with the editing community about this vision (I am not talking about the obscure fragments we have been given or gleaned or vague hand-wavy references. I am talking about - "Hey folks, here is the vision of the Knowledge Engine - here is where we want to take the movement. (detailed description here). What do you think?" ). Yet they seem to be intending to change the very nature of everything we do here. On top of all that, there are long-standing unmet needs in the WP software (like our horrible internal search engine and many other things) that remain archaic and hamper our work. We elected Doc James to the WMF board and one of the key planks in his platform was more transparency about WMF software development, and efforts to get more resources put into providing software we actually want. He was dismissed, and he says it was primarily over transparency about the KE. Jimbo and WMF board have responded to the community's concerns about all this with silence, half-answers in corporate-speak, misdirection, and insult. Overall, Jimbo and the WMF board seem to be mistaking themselves for people running a for-profit silicon valley software company. But unlike a real for-profit, they are accountable to no one. There are no shareholders, no members. Nobody. Definitely not to us. I'll note that maybe the KE is a good thing, maybe it could further the WMF's mission of getting information out to the world. All the bad stuff here, is about transparency and the relationship with the editing community. If you read the Values statement of the WMF, their pattern of behavior is a clear betrayal of the last two values there. This is not about ownership or control of content; it is about the relationship between the board and the movement and about where the software that makes our work possible is going. Jytdog (talk) 16:13, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
There is absolutely no plan that I have ever heard from anyone that articles should be built on the fly from Wikidata. There is no plan that I have ever heard or even seen hinted at by any document that WP's own search engine will not direct people to WP articles. There has been lots of disclosure, and perhaps some confusion is being caused by a misunderstanding: the disclosures have been vague because the idea is still vague. There is no overarching master plan. There is a $250,000 grant to begin to explore ideas, with a very limited set of deliverables for phase one.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:54, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales Thanks for answering (really) But you haven't heard Denny talk about stuff like this? ""I want us to think about ways how to achieve a billion articles. We need tools and workflows that go well beyond Wikidata and Content Translation to really achieve that goal. Ways to allow to create and maintain a knowledge base which abstracts from natural language, and ways to generate articles in any of our supported languages on the fly. This generators have to be as community-editable and creatable as the content itself, as anything else won't scale for our means." (real question, not rhetorical) You cannot see how "an open channel beyond an encyclopedia" sounds just like this? (again, real question.) And your saying that there is no master vision at all for something that the board is spending 10% of the tech budget on doesn't help - it just makes the board ~sound~ incompetent. I don't believe it is.
I really wish you would stop with this spinning. We can handle nuance. We can even handle changes in focus. What is really hard to bear is the obfuscation - the not answering at all, the harshly saying "no" this and "no" that, instead of saying what is actually going on. And there has not been "lots" of disclosure - there has been drips and drabs that mostly blew smoke. Lila herself is now acknowledging that she hasn't been as nearly forthcoming as she should have been. (We'll see how much she actually pivots on that) But why are you sticking to your guns? What are you doing? (that is a real question) The WMF board created this mess by not being transparent. Don't point your finger at us. Or at me. I am really worried and you have said nothing to give comfort - only made it worse. Jytdog (talk) 09:52, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales - so above you wrote something that looks an awful lot like a lie. Why are you behaving this way? Why are you not trying to engage with the actual concerns we have? Please answer. Jytdog (talk) 15:52, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I have not said anything that is a lie. Can you point to which specific statement you are talking about? I am engaging with your actual concerns. I'm surprised that you are responding in this way.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:13, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Please look just above. You wrote "There is absolutely no plan that I have ever heard from anyone that articles should be built on the fly from Wikidata." I provided a quote from Denny just after that; he wrote about "ways to generate articles in any of our supported languages on the fly." and I understand that Denny has been talking about that for a long time. Now maybe you are putting some weird emphasis on "plans" or "articles" or some other "it depends on what 'is', is" sort of thing. As I said, that looks an awful lot like a lie. That is just one example. There are others where you have made flat, definitive, dismissive statements like this that look an awful lot like lies once we got more information. I do not understand why you are not talking and instead are behaving in this dismissive way. it is not helpful. Jytdog (talk) 16:58, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jytdog: You appear to be describing the Article Placeholder project (see also the project Phabricator board), that the Wikidata team occasionally put some development effort into.
The idea is to be able to offer an auto-generated stub, as part of the search returns, if there appears to be a hit for the search term on Wikidata, but no obvious hit in the Wikipedia of the user's preferred language.
It's very early days yet -- you can see a mockup here of how far the team have got so far, and as you can see it's a lot less polished than, say, Reasonator for the same item.
An Article Placeholder wouldn't be presented if the Wikidata item has a sitelink for a genuine Wikipedia article for the topic in the desired language. But if there is no article, then the proposition is that (i) it is useful to show what Wikidata has about the topic, in a more friendly format than the native Wikidata page; and (ii) it is useful to make it easy for people to then be able to create an article in that language, based on some kind of stub. (Hence the "create" button at the top of the prototype page). An experience that certainly I have had, helping new editors to start writing their first articles at editathons, is that if you can give people the basic outline of a stub, with a partially filled infobox, the beginnings of a lead, some references, and the standard headings in the right order (ie "See also" before "References" before "External links"), that can really help people get off to a quicker start.
As I said, things have so far only got to a very early stage of initial development, not even pre-alpha yet; and I would imagine there would be a long road through alphas and then betas -- so lots of time and lots of scope for comment and discussion -- before any live deployment (or even any live deployment as an opt-in beta). But in my view, we would be crazy not to offer people information, and not to offer the chance to edit a stub, if there is information in Wikidata that we can give people. I think this would be particularly of advantage for smaller wikis, where currently in too many languages there are too many topics where we simply have nothing -- but even on en-wiki, there are many many topics that we don't have articles on, where there may be developed content in French, German, Russian, Japansese etc, and/or on Wikidata.
There seems to be a lot of paranoia on this page about Wikidata or Wikidata-generated content as a threat to Wikipedia articles. I think that paranoia is misplaced. At most what you can get from Wikidata is a glorified infobox and some external links. In no way does that compare to a hand-written encyclopedia article. Nobody is turning their back on Wikipedia. The amount of content on Wikipedia far far exceeds all that could ever be extracted to Wikidata. It's also where the vast majority of the community make the vast majority of their contributions. The articles are always going to be the bedrock of content, the crown jewels. Secondly, like a supertanker, Wikipedia is incredibly slow for anybody to try to change the direction of, in any direction. Fifteen years worth of content, culture, bizarre template code etc aren't going to be changed by anyone in a hurry. It takes a long time for anything to make an impact.
So I really don't think the Article Placeholder project is cause for concern. But what it will need will be advice and participation from the community as to how to get the best out of it for Wikipedias. For example, looking at the initial mock-up, it appears that the team have been aiming for the Placeholder look to be clearly and distinctively different from an actual article -- ie to signal to readers that this is not an article, but you could create one. Is that the right call? Or should the Placeholder try to create text, and present something closer to the stub you might create? etc.
Development is very much in the open, as you can see from the Phabricator page. Progress is included in the weekly Wikidata progress summaries posted to d:Wikidata:Project Chat (Wikidata's village pump), which you can subscribe to. There is an active Wikidata discussion community on the wikidata mailing list, a natural place if there are specific issues you want to raise. Or, as with anything else on Wikidata, you could ping Lydia directly at d:User talk:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE), Wikidata's equivalent of User talk:Jimbo. There is also a project talk page on MediaWiki, if there are points that it is useful to discuss in an on-wiki environment.
I think Article Placeholder looks like it could be a good way to leverage some of the information we have on Wikidata, that is not necessarily available yet on particular Wikipedias in particular languages. But like everything on Wikidata, the more bigger a community that get participating, extending, developing, contributing, trying new things, the better things will go. So rather than getting paranoid, why not come and get involved? Jheald (talk) 13:27, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Jheald thanks for providing a mostly kind and useful response, last sentence and some other tone notwithstanding, that shows how the "placeholder" search results could fit very well with existing content. Filling in gaps is great. Absolutely. I am sorry that you cannot see that the behavior of Jimmy and the WMF board around the vision for all this and how it relates to existing WP content is "paranoia"-inducing. Above, Jimmy lied
"There is absolutely no plan that I have ever heard from anyone that articles should be built on the fly from Wikidata."
instead of giving an actual response. Now he may be making some fine distinction about what an "article" is with which he believes he can defend what he said along the lines of, "it depends on what 'is', is" but the response is a far cry from actually dealing with the concerns that folks including me are raising - his responses have all been about distracting and discrediting, all along. This set of questions has been raised for months here. This all traces back to the WMF not disclosing their vision for the knowledge engine and how it fits with the encyclopedia. It is why Doc James says he was dismissed (and that is something else the Board handled terribly - and is still handling terribly by not getting a joint statement out.) Lack of transparency. Lack of accountability.
Also, when you write "Secondly, like a supertanker, Wikipedia is incredibly slow for anybody to try to change the direction of." I agree with that, totally, with regard to the editing community. What I am writing is directed to the WMF. They own the servers and control what software is implemented. They can change the software overnight, and with that, change the entire nature of this place. They have definitely changed their relationship with the community dramatically for the worse, in a relatively short time. Jytdog (talk) 15:14, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
The other datapoint I would like to add is about federated search.
I don't know if you are aware of it, but one of the things the Discovery and Wikidata teams did last year was to get up and running a SPARQL query endpoint for running queries against Wikidata. Here's a page showing the kind of queries you can now run against Wikidata -- and by extension, against Wikipedia, since Wikidata items link to Wikipedia articles, so it's easy enough to output the Wikipedia URL rather than the Wikidata ID for any item returned. I think it was no small job identifying the right software to use (an open-source project called Blazegraph) and getting it up and running; but they have done a really good job -- the service is solidly robust, updates in real time, and gives an extraordinary flexibility to frame queries about really anything you can imagine. (Some more examples here, mostly of a data maintenance / data integrity type, with a bit of tutorial introduction).
The service really is being used all the time now by wiki-projects over at Wikidata, to see what they've got, and what they ought to have more of.
But perhaps one of the most interesting things about the SPARQL service is that it naturally lends itself to federated queries -- as part of the language, you can specify that the input for part of your query should be the returns from a SPARQL query running on another SPARQL endpoint. Currently the Wikidata Query System (WDQS) doesn't allow onward queries "because we don't want to be running an open proxy", according to the management. But what it does do is easily export the results of queries run there -- for example, here's a service on a server in Finland that can send off a SPARQL query to any SPARQL endpoint (in this case to Wikidata), and then plot the results. Furthermore, what you can do is run your own personal local SPARQL service, eg using Apache ARQ from a linux command line on your own laptop, and simply submit a single query to your own service to automatically bring together results from multiple endpoints. So in a very real sense, federated query is already with us.
I have to say, I think this in many ways is a very good thing, and I think fits in and extends very well WMF's mission to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. There is always going to be a place for more specialist databases than Wikidata -- we're never going to try to store all the world's knowledge; and of course there is a real (if flexible) d:Wikidata:Notability policy to stop us even trying. But one thing we are doing (and gaining a reputation for) is building up a Rosetta-like capability, on the items we are prepared to consider notable, for translating to and between the different identifiers used by different external databases. This opens up huge possibilities for making otherwise tricky things simple -- for example, suppose I want all the texts written by a particular group of authors. With SPARQL I can write a query to get the relevant authors satisfying the particular criteria from Wikidata, together with their VIAF IDs, then get all the works by people with those VIAF IDs from Worldcat; or the Library of Congress; or the BnF; or the British Library; or all of the above, all from a single query. (Or I could, if they were all running SPARQL services; which I think at least some of them already are).
Once you have got used to the power of being able to run SPARQL queries, it starts getting really frustrating when you get to a database which you can't query in a sane way. For example, PASE is a really fantastic academic project, which built an index of every person mentioned in any item of Anglo-Saxon literature over 5 centuries, from AD 600 to AD 1087. At the start of the month I spent a couple of weeks adding PASE IDs to every single article I could find for Anglo-Saxon people on en-wiki. It's a brilliant resource. (And one we would never ever duplicate). But it's really frustrating not to be able to query it -- for example, a classic list one might want to extract might be the "league table" of who witnessed the largest number of charters during the reign of (say) King Æthelred, with their PASE IDs that one could then cross-reference to what we had on Wikidata. But it's not possible, because there's no queryability.
I can see a potential real missionary role here for the Foundation, to use what we have learned about setting up our own SPARQL service, and approach major data sources to try to encourage them to also set up SPARQL query endpoints to their data, (a) to make stand-alone queries far more possible and capable; plus also, at the same time (b) making joint "federated" queries far more possible, that bring together information from multiple sources, to produce something much more than any of them.
I would see that as a project well worth asking the Knight Foundation to support. And support is needed, because we're still on a learning curve ourselves, learning how to run a solid SPARQL service, learning how to run federated queries that draw on it efficiently and effectively. And there's a hell of a lot more work to do building up our own Wikidata, to reflect more of the knowledge it could contain, more of the infobox and category-type knowledge that's in the Wikipedias (of which I don't know if even 5% is yet in Wikidata), more of the data that is in Commons (which really is almost untouched so far).
At the moment, we don't even have very good federated search across our own different projects, certainly not qualitative search -- though Discovery are working on it; and things like Structured Data for Commons, and more detailed Wikidata entries, will certainly help. So there's no shortage of work to be done. But in terms of unlocking the world's information, IMO there is a hell of a lot to be said for making ourselves front-line evangelists for federated search -- also, IMO, the Rosetta-like capabilities of Wikidata, together with our own standing as an independent honest broker and a top-5 website give us a real standing to change the world in this space, if we step up to the opportunity. I do believe it is a challenge we should step up to, if we are serious about a goal of trying to improve the knowledge richness of the world.
I think it is unfortunate that the focus seems to have been stolen by how Wikimedia might present a portal to such federated search. I don't think that's the real prize here -- I think the real prize is to evangelise for a world in which federated search is widely possible at all. It's also clear that Foundation communications recently have been diabolical; the whole Doc James saga is a nightmare; and as for Lila's memo, it sounded as if it had been written from pink unicorn land, so vague and fluffy and ungrounded was it. I was horrified. I have no idea what WMF actually presented to the Knight Foundation, and frankly the way things are going at the moment I'd be scared to look. But I do want to say that I think the Discovery team are doing some first-rate valuable and needed work at the moment; and secondly, that evangelising to institution for open query access to their data is something that we as Wiki are extraordinarily well-placed to do, and something that I think would have extraordinary value to the world -- I think the opportunity and the significance are on a par with where we were with GLAMs five or ten years ago, lobbying for them to open up their content as free content. Now there is a similar opportunity in lobbying for institutions to open up their databases as free databases, freely queryable using standard query languages like SPARQL. Jheald (talk) 18:13, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Jheald thanks for writing all that, it was really helpful. I do understand at a high level the vision for all that, and I too see it as really valuable. (it is not work i am interested in doing and i will be the first to admit there are universes there about which I am ignorant; I learned a lot from your posting, so thanks again) In nothing I have written, have I denigrated the work that the Discovery team is doing. (and if I have, i apologize) My concern has been about where the WMF board is heading with that - their lack of disclosure about that and how it fits with the encyclopedia, and the bad communications with us. thanks for acknowledging that in the last bit of what you wrote ("diabolical"!) And yes all of this completely avoidable blow-up really harms everybody's efforts to improve things. Maybe worst of all, hurts the WMF's credibility vis a vis other organizations that have great data stores that it would be great to open up for collaboration. Jytdog (talk) 18:47, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, if you do not understand what I referred to about a free licence, than I seriously do not think this is the place for you. Sorry, you are still not making any sense, if anyone finds a "machine generated" article better than the article I wrote - so be it - more power to them - I'm in this for giving information after all - but your speculations are weird and warped, and it's as if you have not read the FAC, and then make-up stories in your head and complain about your own made-up stories and on top of that complain you are not being communicated with - listening and reading is actually your responsibility - so don't complain about not having a conversation when you do not listen and read. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Alanscottwalker I completely understand the deal we all make when we edit here - the nature of the license each of grants under the copyright that is created when each of us generates content. (I work with IP and licensing in the real world) I am saying that those issues are not relevant to what I am saying here. You are not hearing me. I am sorry I am not communicating more clearly. If you have any questions about what I have written I would be happy to answer them. Jytdog (talk) 16:54, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, if you understand as you say, you must understand that you already agreed to let anyone, anyone, run it through any algorithm they want, including a new search algorithm at wikipedia.org. That's Great! Someone has taken the gift you gave - don't complain about that. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
You continue to misunderstand. Content is not the issue. The issues are the tools and platform we use to do our work, and the stance the WMF board is taking to the community with regard to the tools and platform. (and I should mention the dismissal of Doc James from the board, which according to him was due to the stance he took on those two issues) Not content per se. I won't take up more time dealing with your misunderstanding and misjudgment based on that misunderstanding. Again if you have questions about what I am saying, please ask me. Jytdog (talk) 17:30, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
If you don't want to take up time just don't, but you're the one who started out this talk of yours by complaining about using "user generated content". I'm sorry you don't like people using user generated content but that is what you agreed to. As for the "tools", I just completed an article -- so thanks WMF for the tools -- as for another thread on Doc James - you could have just said that in the beginning, instead of demonstrating you do not know what wikipedia.org is. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:42, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
I know your point. You take umbrage at changing technology, I get it. It does not matter to you if someone then uses the words like wikipedia.org, like they are meant - you take it as insult. Changing technology, means things change, and change is hard, I get that too. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:05, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
I acknowledged your input/correction about wikipedia.org. It was helpful. Everything else you have written has been offtopic. Jytdog (talk) 20:59, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Much of what you have said is mistaken, and unnecessarily paranoid. No offense intended, so let me go through this step by step, line by line. First the idea that Wikidata could be used to "construct articles" with "no need for editors to edit actual article content" is pretty absurd from a technological point of view. Major breakthroughs in AI would be necessary. That isn't what is intended at all, obviously. The Foundation is talking to the community all the time, and listening, and so this idea that something horrible is about to be shoved down our throats isn't very plausible. Yes, there have been some disastrous rollouts of bad ideas. But that's in the nature of moving forward - missteps and errors will happen. The point is to make good things happen as well, and fix the bad things. You mention Flow - guess what, it isn't active. So how has it been "foisted" on us?
One of the things that I strongly support is that we invest serious resources in engineering and product, and in particular on product planning that deeply involves the community. There is no question that in the past, a lot of developer resources were spent on things that no one actually wanted or needed. This should not lead us to the conclusion that the Wikimedia Foundation shouldn't do software development - it should lead us to the conclusion that it needs to invest more resources in doing it correctly.
Flow would have been foisted on us, if we hadn't kicked and screamed and dragged it through the dirt. Moreover the fact that the community has to teach WMF engineers about the minimum viable feature set of MediaWiki extensions is a travesty. BethNaught (talk) 23:02, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
We'll just have to disagree about Flow, as it isn't relevant at the moment and so not worth a big discussion. I'm not sure what you think is a travesty about the community building resources to help engineers understand our needs. What's a travesty is that there hasn't been traditionally a lot more of it, and a lot more investment by the Foundation in supporting more things like it. I'm glad that Lila is building a real product and engineering organization so that we can bridge this gulf.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:14, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Do you disagree that it would have been foisted on us? I already knew you liked the idea of it. But anyway, I'm not saying the WMF shouldn't listen to the community, but the WMF should not hire engineers who do not even know that the community needs a baseline set of tools to moderate the site, and then expect the community to give them job training for them. I don't think Lila understands these issues either, but that's what you get when you hire an ED with no experience whatsoever of Wikimedia. And sending in so-called "community advocates", like Melamrawy in the case of Gather, to patronise us, stonewall our concerns and tell us like children that everything is fine and that the WMF does care and it's all fine. What business does the WMF have spending donor money on that? BethNaught (talk) 23:32, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for replying, Jimbo. I will ignore the distraction about paranoia. Let's focus on the issue of talking to the community. WMF clearly has some idea about what it intends by "Develop prototypes for evolving Wikipedia.org, which will become the home of the Knowledge Engine". Where and when has the WMF discussed that with the community? If I missed it and there it is a record I will gladly go absorb it. If there hasn't been discussion about what that means, please acknowledge that, and please tell us what it means. Jytdog (talk) 23:06, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Also wanted to add - while using my iPhone 6+, I asked Siri a question and the FIRST result that came up was a WP article. Gotta love it!!! Atsme📞📧23:28, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo, the only info about KE there, points in turn to the FAQ which is very vague. Your response expresses exactly the disdain and lack of accountability that I discussed above - it is not "paranoia" to call you and the WMF out for blowing us off with impunity, when you actually do. Why not just come out and say: "We have not made any detailed public disclosure of the Knowledge Engine nor what its search results will look like, nor how its search results will relate to existing WP content, and we have no intention of doing so anytime soon."? All you are doing is making things more poisonous by obfuscating.
I will ask you again, as others have. 1) What does it mean to Develop prototypes for evolving Wikipedia.org, which will become the home of the Knowledge Engine? 2) In what form will the Knowledge Engine actually provide information to the public - what will a search result actually look like? 3) How will KE search results relate to en-wiki articles? Surely there are at least sketches of all this. Please answer all three. WMF is not a silicon valley for-profit company with trade secrets; there is no commercial value that needs to be protected by not disclosing this. Please lay out the vision to us, concretely. Jytdog (talk) 23:42, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jytdog, you poor fool, "the vision"? no great mystery there, you and all the other playbour suckers build content, WMF develops ways to extract value from that activity, simples. 2.121.1.94 (talk) 01:09, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Wow. I am really impressed with this and this. Great work! When I took AI classes at University of Cincinnati back in the 1980's, we only imagined something like that. The idea of using Lambda calculus and predicate logic for programming in languages like LISP (very popular at M.I.T. in the day and required knowledge for those who wanted to make macros for the then almost universally portable editor Emacs) (See also [6]) and Prolog were quite unique and useful for programmers to consider programming from a very different angle using recursion rather than iteration, thinking in sets and relationships of data in trees, rather than the most common data types found in most programming languages of just characters, integers, floating point and arrays of these. And there were Lisp machines proposed or made in prototype but such abstraction just slowed things down, just like with neural net based machines, and the use of standard microprocessors that look more like a Turing machine still have won out. Now there is a practical application of a database of information for lay people. Nice work! I support it. --David Tornheim (talk) 05:16, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
David Tornheim, you really think it is fine that the WMF board is acting like the board of a for-profit and ignoring the community, even lying to it. You really think it is just fine for a corporate board to hijack the efforts and work of the editing community without its consent - for the board chair to call raising concerns "Fucking bullshit". You think it is just fine for our community-elected representative to be thrown off the board over this. Whatever. Jytdog (talk) 05:44, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog: You might want to review what I wrote and you might learn something. I don't see the Board acting for corporate interests in this case. In fact, it appears just the opposite. The purpose of the search engine is to undermine corporate interests and commercial interests in search engines. And the greatest concern is that the big search engines would undermine this effort; hence, the need for secrecy. I have seen no evidence that the Knight Foundation fights for corporate interests either. I have been following the Doc James removal and I do not see what the hullabaloo is about. It seems like his cadre of supporters thinks he can do no wrong and that they represent all Wikipedia users, which is not the case. The Board, including one of the other democratically-elected members, voted 8-2 for his removal for a reason, and the more I learn about this, the more I think they made the right decision. --David Tornheim (talk) 18:33, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
You didn't address at all the issues this thread is raising. And you are misunderstanding - I said nothing about for-profit interests and if you review what I wrote I didn't say that. The WMF is a corporation - a nonprofit corporation. The point here is that Jimbo and the WMF Board are acting like the board of a for-profit software company, not like the board of a nonprofit that is accountable to or even cares about its users. (I do believe that they think the KE will serve its ultimate "customers" - people in the world who want information - very well.) They just don't give a rat's ass about the editing community that actually generates and maintains the existing content and that they will need to rely on to curate Wikidata. They are treating us like dirt here. They dismissed our elected board member who was advocating for the editing community. And you seem to be just fine with that. Which is surprising to me in light of your advocacy work in WP and in the outside world. Please think about what I am saying, not how you feel about me. Let me ask you this - if/when the Knowledge Engine is up and running, and search results through it lead to KE-generated "articles", how do people access WP content? What will the WMF be doing then, to foster access to that content? Do you believe that an algorithm can make good judgements about difficult issues in articles, that the community works on very hard, trying to come up with content that is reasonable acceptable to everyone and complies with policies that call for judgement, like NPOV? We have no answers to these questions. They are important to all of us. Jytdog (talk) 19:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
I wonder if a KE-generated summary piece with a link to or being attached to WP content; i.e. our more detailed, curated, policy compliant article, would be the best of both worlds? The KE articles being more like a glorified dictionary and the attached WP remaining encyclopedic? Thus serving 2 information markets? Nocturnalnow (talk) 05:47, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
False rumors are circulating (see below) that the search engine is for making money. b.s. I see why Jimbo is pissed. It undermines this exciting experiment. The board is *not* acting like the board of a for-profit corporation like Google, because they are trying to invest in a project that will be an alternative to the for-profit search engines, and that is great. And no, the Foundation is not there to serve the interests of the editors. A soup kitchen does not make its primary priority to make the volunteers who serve the food happy, but instead those who need the food. The Mission of WMF as I understand it is to provide a democratized source of content that is not corrupted by $$$$ or ideology and this search engine is consistent with that Mission. Yes, they should *listen* to editors like us, when we have problems and ask for help in the Mission, but if they find a way to promote the Mission and know how to get $ to do that and it needs some level of secrecy, so that moneyed interests don't try to kill it, I am fine with that. One of our other elected members seems to have understood that. If you think the for-profit entities should make everything public, and be accountable to their workers and/or the general pubic, go for it. Until then, some things the Foundation does must be kept under wraps. And it is clear to me that is why the Foundation did not want to broadly advertise this knowledge engine project. Now because of Doc James's difficulty in working with the Board, they have been forced to and instead of having a positive roll-out, they are doing it as a defensive measure. Very unhealthy for Wikipedia and for the knowledge engine. I can see why there was a trust issue.
As for concerns about the search engine not acting WP:NPOV, I find your concern laughable. It would be far better than Google at filtering out commercial interests and bias. I think you and others are upset because you feel you won't have control over it and can't prevent it from producing scholarly articles and other NPOV resources that you and other editors have been successful in suppressing in our articles. And if readers can now have access to high quality RS through the search engine they are seeking, rather than being forced to start with Google, I am all for it. So, no, I do not think the WMF board should serve the interests of editors who want to direct users to corporate PR spin and block NPOV RS, but just the opposite. So I support the search engine concept, and find these false rumors about it troubling. --David Tornheim (talk) 20:19, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Fear not, as perhaps the hijack will be a truckload of snails. So far, we see a "rising tide lifts all boats" as WP is still getting some improvements (see thread: "#Wikitext editor awesome Preview of references"), and we need to thank and help the wp:developers who directly improve Wikipedia software. Meanwhile, for decades, some computer people have become enamored over new "revolutionary" tech-toys only to learn years later how they were on a "fool's errand" of minimal long-term value, as "much askew about nothing" but such diversions are part of what Mankind needs to learn about techno-babble and beware deadend efforts. Wikipedia has become a vast, valuable resource and distributed free, so it is not going anywhere; even if WMF lost funding, the 'pedia would survive in other places, and hence the work isn't all for nought. Keep editing. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
And I'll add here a note about this post left on my talk page, that has examples of articles generated from Wikidata using WMF tools. Yet Jimbo treated my guess about KE generating articles from Wikidata with disdain and insult. This gets uglier the more it goes. I at first had some faith that there was ~some~ legitimate beef on the part of the WMF board with Doc James, but the more I see this kind of baldface distraction and obfuscation, the more I think that Jimbo and the WMF board have become lost and that Doc James was tossed for disagreeing - and strongly - with this trade secret/for-profit approach to developing new products at the WMF. Any for-profit board would have dismissed him, in a heartbeat. For-profits do seek to keep their competitive advantage by keeping things secret until products are good to go, and rightly so. Jytdog (talk) 00:23, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi, Jytdog, perhaps I look at these current events differently. It doesn't mean that I am seeing things more correctly or better than anyone else, however I am, just like all of us, allowed to express my view.
I look at this non-profit/movement/community/whatever you want to call it, as an extremely dynamic and eclectic event in progress. If we were all parts of the world of art, I would describe Wikimedia and Wikipedia as an impressionist painting in progress...i.e., impossible to manage, and hard to pin down, predict and quantify or even describe....Complete with all of the similar inner turmoil up to including Van Gogh's slicing off his own ear.
And as I step back and have a look at how the "work" is starting to look, I see something that is already starting to look beautiful and rare, especially for 2016. I look at the ,current situation as part of the development process, with your input and mine and even Jimbo's as simply being 1 or 2 or more strokes of the brush. Nocturnalnow (talk) 15:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Nocturnalnow From the point of the editors editing and dealing with each other, sure. What I am talking about is, say you are a painter and there is a monopoly on canvas. The people who make the canvas are preparing to make dramatic changes to the nature of canvas and you find out about it some weird way. That is what is going on here. It's a bad analogy in that the canvas company is a for-profit and does whatever it wants to make money - that is why it exists - and has no groovy discourse about being good to painters or fostering their work. The WMF is a nonprofit and one its stated missions is fostering the editing community. Firing our elected representative, planning huge changes to our canvas without talking to us, lying to us and ignoring us, not giving us the kind of canvas we are actually asking for, etc, is not "fostering" us in any imaginable sense of that term. Jytdog (talk) 15:22, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
The mistake is in thinking this encyclopedia belongs to the volunteer editing community. It doesn't and never has. While we may be asked for input into decisions there is no agreement that allows us any kind of control or that says what we say or advise will be implemented. I hope we can carry on discussions with our calling anyone liars on any side of this. Further when did this become a movement. This is a collaborative project which is building an encyclopedia. (Littleolive oil (talk) 17:51, 16 February 2016 (UTC))
You are missing the point. I do not think WP "belongs" to the community - the issue is not about content. The issues are the platform and tools we use to do our work, and the relationship between the WMF and the editing community, specifically regarding the platform and tools. According to Doc James, the reason he was dismissed, was also about those two things. The issues about "ownership" here, are that WMF owns the platform and controls software implementation, and is not accountable to the editing community in any way, and is working on making radical changes to the platform/tools without discussing it with us. Apparently in a few years, the website you log into will not exist anymore in any form that you would recognize - instead there will be this "Knowledge Engine" thing and your "job" will be to move little pieces of data around inside Wikidata, that the KE can build articles from. Apparently. (even if that is wrong, the WMF is clearly going to invest tons of time and money into the KE and has not told us at all, how its search results will relate to the kind of articles we work on now, nor if searches through any WMF site will lead to actual WP articles anymore... none of this is clear. And WMF is giving no clarity) I care about that and I struggle to see why you don't. Jimbo and the WMF Board say they value transparency and their relationship with the editing community. Yet they are acting in a way that expresses the opposite of both of those values. They are not being transparent about the KE, and they are treating the editing community with disdain (dismissing Doc James, and ignoring, obfuscating, or insulting with regard to requests for transparency). Jytdog (talk) 18:02, 16 February 2016 (UTC) (corrections Jytdog (talk) 15:54, 19 February 2016 (UTC))
The issue is that we, in actuality, whatever we may think, do not have the kind of power that we think we do. Don't assume I care or don't care; I am suggesting that while we may make recommendations we cannot control so there is point where all of the arguments we make concerning our own desires are just that, points about our desires. After that its not up to us and I think this is where this derails. The is a baseline false premise that allows us to build arguments about our own importance, and I am suggesting that if we dismantle that premise the ensuing discussion takes on a different flavor, not one where we demand something but one where we have arguments and a forum which demands close scrutiny. Even then I have no idea if this community can influence change or if as a community as a whole, we even have the expertise that should influence decisions. There is very little I've seen on Wikipedia that indicates to me that reasonable, logical, civil discussion is a possibility. Leaking documents does not impress me. When we operate in that kind of environment for this kind of situation, integrity and honesty die. (Littleolive oil (talk) 18:45, 16 February 2016 (UTC))
Why Doc James was dismissed is not clear so I'm not in favor of attacking anyone on that issue.
@Littleolive oil: Literally, Wikipedia belongs to the contributors. Each edit is copyrighted by its owner and distributed to the world under a CC license. The portability of the content is the final safeguard when all others fall. Of course, the WMF, and its millions, are another story. Wnt (talk) 19:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Content may belong to the contributor; Wikipedia doesn't. By this I mean the carrier for the content can be changed without our permission, is not copyrighted, is not owned by the editors. If the power editors has lies in the content, that is where the argument should be. My cmts are in response to highjacking WP; we can't claim highjacking something that isn't ours. Anyway. I will leave this to others.(Littleolive oil (talk) 19:11, 16 February 2016 (UTC))
Littleolive oil WMF is hijacking the mission and the way we the community participate in the mission. They are hijacking the platform out from under all of us, how the public will access the information (search results will produce machine-written articles on the fly, not WP articles), the way that content will be generated, the form of that content, and yes ultimately the content itself which the KE will generate from Wikidata. A Knowledge Engine search result is a very different thing from an article written by the community of editors. To the extent that any of us are here and have put all this time in, because we value the mission, this is a huge deal. Jytdog (talk) 19:45, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog, as I read your points and the responses of others, I am drawn toward realizing especially, imo, especially the reality of the need, perhaps urgent need, to address what you've identified as the relationship between the WMF and the editing community. How to do that, I have no idea but I'm confident others, maybe you, do. Nocturnalnow (talk) 06:00, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
I would be very surprised if the "Knowledge Engine" is able to create an intelligible, readable article from wikidata alone. Many others have tried and failed to do exactly that, as the number of spambots loaded with absolute gibberish on the internet can attest to. Besides, there is so much more in every article which cannot simply be filled from data, even if Wikidata is substantially expanded. Pinguinn(🐧)02:18, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Please do see this presentation that appears lay out how the KE will work some more, and this video, the latter of which is called "Are we failing our users when they search Wikipedia?". The KE - this "open channel beyond an encyclopedia" - seems to be very much about directing the public past the Wikipedia-that-exists and toward the article-like query results that the KE is apparently intended to produce. What are the WMF's intentions with regard to the Wikipedia-that-exists, in the world where the KE is up and running? I don't see any discussion of that and because of that lack, it appears that the WMF intends to leave the Wikipedia-that-exists in the dust. To simply bypass it. This is also what I mean about hijacking the movement. And all of this with no discussion with the community. Jytdog (talk) 17:04, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
I have no idea what you are talking about. There is not, and has never been, any intention to replace or substantially alter in any way what we do here. Improving our internal search (and more broadly, improving "discovery") doesn't mean anything like that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:36, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
and again, instead of even trying to talk about the issues, you issue flat statements, denying, distracting, blah blah blah. The more you do this the less credibility you have and the more you push the community and the board farther apart. Not even trying to fix things. Not asking a single question. At least Lila has begun making an effort with her FAQ/AMA at meta, although she seems to have walked away from it. Jytdog (talk) 15:02, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I have no idea what you are talking about. I am talking about the issues. You seem to think that there is an idea or effort to replace the editing community with a knowledge engine. That's totally and completely wrong. I don't know what else I can say about that. You've got an idea in your head that is false, you've been told that it is false, you have produced no reason for anyone to think that it is true, and that's where we are. If you have a more specific question, I'm here and happy to answer it. But repeating the same questions over and over, when you've been given the answer, isn't really moving this forward.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:18, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo, in my view, you have been as stubborn about your old desire to build a search engine as you have in admitting Rand's misogyny and pretending a single inconclusive literature review in economics weighs with any substance against the near-unanimity of the conclusive reviews against trickle down supply side economics. You have brought the Foundation into disrepute because readers and potential and long time editors and donors now see that the Board is willing to say one thing while doing the opposite, i.e., compete with Google. So I stand by my recommendation that the entire Board of Trustees should be elected by the community, not merely nominated. EllenCT (talk) 20:11, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
I have not been at all stubborn about any desire to build a search engine. I do not want to build a search engine. I do not Wikimedia to build a search engine, at least not in the sense of a broad general search engine to compete with Google. I was not and am not a driving force at all in the "knowledge engine" stuff. I do support that we need to improve search and discovery on Wikipedia. We are not building a search engine to compete with Google. We are not building a search engine at all (in the sense of a broad general search)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:50, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
That's a great idea. I think Jimbo should be on the board for a variety of reasons. If the rest were elected by the community it would add a lot of positive energy and excitement going forward. Nocturnalnow (talk) 23:14, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
The Foundation was originally envisaged as a member's organization. It's a shame that this vision wasn't seen through. All the best: RichFarmbrough, 23:34, 16 February 2016 (UTC).
Ditto. By all means have a few co-opted experts on the board if necessary, but they should be a minority; the WMF should be run by those who understand its mission, not by Silicon Valley insiders playing out their fantasy of building the next Apple. I wouldn't be opposed to having a publicly elected CEO/ED, either, or at least considerable community input into the selection, given that the last three choices of the board haven't exactly covered themselves in glory. ‑ Iridescent23:42, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
Did the Board know that the Knowledge Engine grant explicitly required competing with Google when you said that the WMF would ever was "a total lie"? EllenCT (talk) 22:20, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
The WMF described the project, in communications to the Knight Foundation, as "the Internet’s first transparent search engine." Are you saying that is no longer part of the agreement, it would not compete with Google, or that the money will be returned if the Knight Foundation doesn't allow that to mean not competing with Google? EllenCT (talk) 17:27, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Responses that focus on some little piece, and twist even that, and ignore the thrust of the question are in your choice words "fucking bullshit". This is a really lame tactic Jimbo and everyone can see what you are doing, which is ducking, spinning, writhing - anything to avoid straightforward discussion. The WMF board has made "discovery" a big priority and is intending to dramatically change how the public will access the work of the community. Without talking to the community. That is a big deal. Jytdog (talk) 17:13, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
I don't see any evidence for this assumption, and it wouldn't seem to make much sense. The tools I'm looking at appear to be testbeds of using Wikidata and other sources to build stub-like things in the absence of an article. The obvious end-result of this would be to add data to actual articles when we have one. Even the Ada Lovelace and J. S. Bach "Reasonator" results are clearly next to useless on their own, containing only trivia and a one-liner summary, and are intended to be used with actual content when complete. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 04:41, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Indeed. There is a certain desire for some evil to be there that is not there. Some of the same editors who like to accuse others of believing in conspiracy and WP:Fringe theories for things that are found in WP:RS. --David Tornheim (talk) 18:32, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
This is what I know about the interactions here. We do not for any reason have permission from this community to repeatedly call people liars. We do not have permission to bully people, Jimbo Wales or anyone else. This is sickening and against all this collaborative community stands for. If we allow this dialogue here, we allow it everywhere else on Wikipedia, and I would add perhaps it has been allowed elsewhere on Wikipedia and this is just a further manifestation of behaviors that are not acceptable. I wonder where our admins are? Is this OK because someone doesn't like how Jimbo responds? Is this OK because this is Jimbo Wales and he doesn't deserve our civility? I don't always agree with Jimbo Wales but this is not acceptable behavior from any of us. I will not respond to any arguments from anyone that this is OK because of what is potentially at stake. Its not OK for any reason.(Littleolive oil (talk) 16:36, 20 February 2016 (UTC))
Thank you. We need to enforce civility, actually. We need to make the editing environment more friendly. While Jimbo may have a thick skin, others may not. If we let people bully and call names, then people less willing to expose themselves to abuse for volunteer service will leave by attrition and we'll be left with a more concentrated level of bullying, and then more will leave, and so on, until Wikipedia is a concentrated venue for bullying, as appears to be the case from my view. SageRad (talk) 19:57, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes and no. We need to refocus, reinterpret, reapply. What we have now is an interpretation that amounts to "you have to obsequiously nice even when you should be, because you will be punished if you use a sharp tone, even with people who are obviously nuts or clearly here to do the project harm", as if the assumption of good faith must continue forever even after the assumption has been disproven. At the same time we have this cognitively dissonant interpretation going on, that perversely takes WP:CIVIL / WP:AGF / WP:NPA to also somehow mean "it's perfectly fine, as long as it's between long-term editors, to use empty threats of noticeboard actions to intimidate people, to tell people to fuck off, to stake out a stand on an article or other page and say you'd rather resign or just see the page deleted than allow that person to get their way, to use WP:SANCTIONGAMING language to imply that other obviously reasonable editors are having psychological problems, and otherwise be a big flaming WP:DICK, as long as you have a track record of reasonably good contributions such that WP:ANI will be reluctant to lift a finger." These are both real problems. The first is a WP:GAMING situation constantly exploited by WP:CIVILPOV pushers, and the latter just leads to a hostile editing environment where anyone who's made some friends and has an WP:FA under their belt is effectively immune from any repercussions for ridiculously shitty behavior. We have to stop being squeamish about WP:DUCK and WP:SPADE, and stop being squeamish about issuing non-permanent but non-trivial blocks and topic bans for people who cannot stop battlegrounding, either about a particular topic or against a particular other editor or alleged faction. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 10:26, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
"Lila does view not communicating more with the community about this as a mistake"[8]
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
I (and I am sure others) made it clear when she joined how important (and valuable) engaging the community was.
I do not understand, how, after super protect, V E, Flow, Liquid threads, the graphic redesign, and probably other matters she could still be missing this point.
Rich Farmbrough the header is confusing. Did you maybe get lost in double negatives? Lila seems pretty clearly to acknowledge that not engaging the community was a mistake, on her meta user page here, in the section "Why didn’t you discuss these ideas with the community sooner?" Jytdog (talk) 06:21, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
It's a direct quote from Jimbo's answer to you - and grammatically correct. To clarify what I wrote, I fail to see how, after all the history during her tenure (never mind previous mistakes like flagged revisions), and with advice from the board, staffers and community members she could make this mistake.
Latest comment: 8 years ago52 comments8 people in discussion
(Jytdog made some refinements to this after he posted, but I was in the middle of in-line reponses. I hit save and of course there was an edit conflict. :-( I decided to just overwrite those refinements, and I'm sorry about that, but the cutting and pasting to fix it all up seemed like it would take enough time that I would probably hit another edit conflict. Our software for facilitating discussions depresses me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:37, 20 February 2016 (UTC))
Hi Jimmy. In response to your invitation, here are questions. I would be grateful if you would please try to understand the heart of each question, and if you would try to respond to that. If there is anything unclear or invalid about what I am asking, please ask me to clarify it or tell me why the question is invalid to you.
What I am looking for is how to move past all this and start looking forward. To do that, however, like any reconciliation process, there needs to be an explanation and acknowledgement of what happened, apologies given where needed, repairing whatever damage can be repaired, and an understanding about how things will be different in the future. I am trying to encompass all the things that folks have been saying, that appear to me (to me) to be the key issues.
Thanks again.
Looking backward
About Doc James being dismissed from the board, I am looking for an explanation that goes beyond the he said/she said we have been provided to date. In my view, a joint statement is what is needed, and would probably contain difficult things for both parties to acknowledge. I would like to understand what the Board has been doing about trying to arrive at a joint statement with James about what happened. What efforts have been made? Have you tried a mediator? Is there anything ongoing, and if not, would you please consider starting to try? There is a lot at stake in such a statement being issued for me, and I reckon for others. If you are not aware of it, this issue, and specifically Doc James claims about what happened and why he was dismissed, are for me and others a key sticking point that makes us unable to let go of the Search issue and makes us believe there is much more there than what has been disclosed to date. Doc James is not a crazy person. He is not. He is in fact respected. Please try to understand what position that leaves many of us in. Maybe he misunderstood something, and misunderstandings got compounded into a really poisonous situation. That is the most sympathetic perspective on what you have been saying that I can muster. But a set of misunderstandings by him that profound, seems very unlikely. I hope you can understand that. I would really love it if efforts to arrive at a joint statement led to a reconciliation and James' re-appointment, but I recognize that is a very long shot. (this is damage that i am hoping can be repaired) But the questions are - what is the board doing about getting a joint statement together, and if the answer is "nothing", would you please commit to working on that? Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I don't think a joint statement is really possible, nor at this point something that I think is worth working towards. James has publicly stated beliefs about why he was removed from the board which have been completely refuted by everyone who was there at the time. He has put forward a view to the community that this was some grand struggle for greater transparency which he lost with disastrous consequences for his board seat and presumably the rest of us. That wasn't true. Indeed, given how often I press for greater transparency and openness far more radical, I'd be the first on the chopping block if that were the case. The fact that he would lead the community down this path after leaving the board was, I'm afraid, entirely predictable and illustrates in my view why people lost trust in him in the first place.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
First, thanks for answering this and the other questions and for generally making more ...moderate statements than you have in the past.
On this one, I hear what you are saying, and this echoes what you have said all along. I understand that things got very bad. But I don't feel like you are hearing me, that James remains very respected in the community, and what you are saying makes no sense in light of my (and I think many other people's) experience with him. And the distance between what each of you are saying is almost impossible to bear, to anybody who really cares and thinks about what each of you are saying with respect for both sides. I am asking you to commit to trying, perhaps with a mediator. Maybe this is something I need to do an RfC on, to see if a joint statement is something the community really wants. Would you find this request more compelling if it had an RfC behind it? Do I need to go there for you to understand that this is something that is tearing up the community and that has done a lot of harm to the relationship between the board and the community? I don't even hear from you, that you understand that. Do you? Jytdog (talk) 23:42, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales that is a step in the right direction. What I am asking is that you actually commit to trying, perhaps with a mediator. Dispute resolution processes are available in the real world, as you well know. And that you let us know when that process actually commences. Will you please do that? Jytdog (talk) 20:26, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
an aside, trying to get to the heart of the matter
Jimmy, I want to add something here, and I am saying this with regard to where I stand on all this stuff - the picture I have put together, based on what everyone (especially you, Lila, and James) has said, and importantly - what has not been said. I do see that the board got to a point where it felt it couldn't function with Doc James there; I do see that Doc James expected much more transparency than some of the people he dealt with were willing to consider. I cannot ignore either side of that.
Jimmy I want you to know, that every... single... response... that you have given to the community to date with regard to technology strategy and commitments, has only re-inforced the perception I have, that the board considers the WMF's technology strategy and budgetary commitments to be confidential. Your answers have either been more or less friendly but high level, or fairly curt negatives with regard to specifics (along the lines of "We are not doing x"; that is silly") There is a big hole where I am looking - namely, disclosure of what the technology strategy and budgetary commitments have been, as they evolved. The presence of the absence, as it were, is not ambiguous - it is clear. (of course, the questions I and others have posed about that, remain standing, and can be answered at any time)
So again, what I am seeing, is that to arrive at a joint statement with Doc James would mean acknowledging in public that at least part of where he has come from is valid - that the technology strategy and related commitments of the WMF board and ED are confidential, and will not be disclosed to anybody, including the community. (and maybe that is just perhaps Lila's perspective and some board members, and not anything as unified as the actual stance the board and Lila have decided to take) I understand that if this is the case, for you to acknowledge that might be expensive with regard to the good faith of the community, and that if you are unwilling to acknowledge that in public, a joint statement with Doc James does seem to be impossible right now. (One thing I am hoping is that good faith discussion, and even perhaps mediated discussion, can help things... evolve.)
I also think there would probably be some hard things for James to acknowledge in making a joint statement with the board. I can imagine that maybe he got frustrated and said or did things that he maybe shouldn't have. I don't see anybody as an angel here.
But this is the only picture that I can put together that makes sense of everything, trying to treat both sides with respect. I imagine that others have arrived at this picture as well.
Keeping things confidential is consistent with my experience of working with high tech and biotech companies that are developing new products - of course you keep all that stuff confidential as much as you can. It is a bit surprising to find the WMF taking that approach. (And as far as I can see, that is the approach that has been taken - there has been no disclosure of the strategy and budget, despite repeated requests by many people, not just me. Please don't treat that as an accusation; it is just a fact. If it is incorrect, please don't just say it is wrong, please provide a link to the clear disclosure of the strategy and budget commitments as they have evolved)
I could see Lila trying to drive a culture change in that regard, as an experienced tech executive stepping into the ED role (which is what the board wanted), and I could see the board being open to it and supporting it. There are arguments that could be made to support that, even for the WMF.
Anyway, that was bold of me, and I do not want to derail this discussion. But I do want to try to get to the heart of the matter with you. If you like, would you please let me know - does the WMF board and the ED consider its technology strategy and related budgetary commitments to be confidential? Or has there been some "culture clash" around confidentiality as Lila has come in? Anyway, I look forward to hearing from you on this - which seems to be the underlying set of issues here. Jytdog (talk) 20:26, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
resuming the thread
Would you please recount what transpired among the executive leadership and the board with regard to this whole "search/Knowledge Engine" thing over the course of the last year or so? If you are not aware, please be aware that very focused questions have been asked about this, like here and it would be great if your response makes the major decisions clear - especially executive, board and budget decisions. The budget decisions are really important, as they go to how much money the WMF was intending (and is intending) to commit to this. I understand it is probably messy and that there seem to have been competing visions. But the actual decisions that were made, is what I am after. Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Sure, but keep in mind that "among the executive leadership" in great detail is not something that I, or any board member, would have direct knowledge of. And as to what the vision was or is, yes, it's "messy" as you put it. What that means is that it's preliminary, that the kind of big picture strategic decision that people seem to be afraid of, and that you've talked about explicitly several times, just isn't there. Nor, in my view, with respect to "Discovery", should it be there. Obviously different people will have different ideas about it, and brainstorms, and proposals, and that's all good. But it's too early to make a really big decision. One of the things that's great about the Knight grant is that it's some small steps in the direction of learning more so that we can get to the point where a bigger vision can be intelligently articulated - not blue sky thinking, but an actual plan.
Lila gave us a run down at the board meeting in Mexico and we encouraged her to move forward. One of the things discussed in that meeting was explicitly that this is not a "Google competitor". And it wasn't. I've only just learned (yesterday) that Damon was circulating to some people under extreme cloak-and-dagger secrecy with GPG keys and all that, an idea of his to build a Google competitor, but that idea never got real traction. What did get traction is that one of the things (not the only thing and, in my view not even the most important thing) we should be investing resources in is "Discovery" - improving internal search, thinking more about what www.wikipedia.org should be, etc.
That's pretty much all there is. If some were fearing (or hoping) that the board had approved some massive project and budget which would radically change the nature of how Wikipedia works, or how people interact with Wikipedia content, well, no. It's a lot more mundane than that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for replying, and for acknowledging that there are some valid bases for concern in the community based on what Damon was circulating. Based on this you are either unwilling or unable to be more detailed, about what the board actually committed to, with regard to various decisions made along the way and budget allocations that were made. I guess we will have to wait until someone is willing/able to reply to this. This is unanswered. Hopefully Lila will disclose more at her AMA/FAQ. But do let me ask - would you please be more detailed? I asked a concrete, answerable question.... Jytdog (talk) 23:46, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm not unwilling, my point is that you seem to me to be asking for something that doesn't exist. That isn't how it works. The board is not consulted along the way regarding various specific decisions, budget allocations, at that level of detail. The formal decision taken by the board was to approve the Knight grant, as you know led by James moving to approve after his confusions were corrected and his objections answered. What I can tell you is that it was, and is, too early to approve a specific budget for tens of millions of dollars or whatever - there's the Knight grant and support for the "Discovery" team, and I've already talked about what that means.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:11, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimmy, hm. The current tech budget is larger than 250K and the board must be aware of the programs that the larger budget is for. Can you please talk about that? And again, even though Lila and the board have apparently not settled on long term strategies, it is really clear that planning has been done. As you noted the board approved the Knight grant, and the grant itself has projections in it, that the WMF was comfortable enough with to submit. Will you please talk about that stuff? I and others are looking to understand the story of what has unfolded - will you please tell it? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 01:05, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
If it is helpful, here is the budget from the Knight grant, from page 9 of the pdf:
Search Engine by Wikipedia Budget 2015-2016 (Board approved)
There you go. I can only take "board approved" for its face value. You all obviously accepted only 250K and you all have walked away, fiercely, from the "search engine by Wikipedia" thing, but we have no story from the WMF board, you, nor Lila, to make sense of all this, what other commitments you made to use the WMF funds, really important, how those commitments changed (from what to what), nor where you all thought it was going. Really. We would like to understand the story. Would you please tell it, concretely? Jytdog (talk) 01:56, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
A lot of the upset-ness has stemmed from the sense among some of us, that pretty big plans seem to have been made about expending significant resources to develop some kind of new technology, without engaging the community. Maybe I am misunderstanding, but Lila seems pretty clearly to acknowledge that not engaging the community was a mistake, on her meta user page here, in the section "Why didn’t you discuss these ideas with the community sooner?" Among other things she says : "However, I was too afraid of engaging the community early on. Why do you think that was?" That is a gorgeously human statement, in some ways, and calls us to try to stand in her shoes. But to me, it raises the question of where the board was on this, with respect to providing her guidance, direction, etc. So my question (I am trying to ask this in a non-accusing way)... Where was the board on engaging the community on this whole search thing as it unfolded? If (and that is real "if") the board supported Lila in not engaging, or even directed her not to engage, do you Jimmy, or the board also see that it made any mistakes here? Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, Lila does view not communicating more with the community about this as a mistake. But, speaking only for myself not for Lila or the board or anyone else, it was mainly a mistake because it led to the false impression that this was some big huge thing. There was no reason to be secretive about it. I don't know of anyone on the board who would ever encourage Lila not to engage with the community, but at the same time I'm very well aware of how frightened the staff can be of the community - and not for no reason, let's all be painfully aware of that. Engaging with the community, which I've been doing for a long time, isn't always rewarding. Some people are hostile and engage in name calling and insults. The staff are human and mainly very committed to the mission, and they are treated like evil parasites with a grand conspiracy to destroy the community on a regular basis. So they are fearful of engaging.
Now, let me be clear about one thing: there are some historical reasons why the community can be so hostile. We've underinvested in software development for a long time, and we've had some disastrously bad rollouts of sub-par software. This has led to a dynamic where the community has been less willing to forgive bad software, which means that things have to be perfect at rollout or face a storm of criticism. This had led to a feeling among some staff that the community hate all change, regardless. It's not a healthy place to be.
So it's in that context that we have to understand this. Investing more in "Discovery" is a good idea. It's not a radical departure, so speaking only for myself, it never occurred to me that the staff wouldn't be sufficiently engaging with the community about ideas for it, plans for it, etc. And it didn't occur to me that it would come to be viewed with such suspicion and hostility. It obviously could have been avoided with transparency from the start.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for all this, and I do hear your thoughts that it would have been wiser to engage, just to avoid the suspicion, and I hear you on the bad history. however, my main question here was: "Where was the board on engaging the community on this whole search thing as it unfolded?" Would you please respond to that? Please bear in mind what was written here, and other places, about disclosure in general. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 23:50, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
The board has always been 100% (every single member) in favor of engaging the community in detail about every major initiative. I am personally unaware of any deviations from this. There are of course times when the community can't be consulted (legal matters are a common example, but there could also be matters of commercial negotiations on price for hosting services or similar, and other kinds of examples) but not around things having to do with the fundamental direction of the Foundation.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:11, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for this general answer, and that is good to hear. Lila already acknowledged the mistake of not earlier engaging the community sooner on this whole discovery/search/KE thing. The Board signed off on the Knight grant so was well aware of it and discussed it in Mexico. So the question is still hanging there - where was the board on engaging with the community on this whole discovery/search/KE thing? Surely the board (and you) knew that Lila wasn't engaging the community. So what was going on? Please answer this specifically - please answer the heart of the question. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 01:37, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
That is looking backward, now a set of questions about where things are now, and where they are going in the future:
What is the current cluster of visions about technology at the board of the WMF? Where are you currently intending to take us? (I understand that several avenues may be under exploration, but I would hope there is some vision, currently). If this is a vision created without consulting us, that is what it is. I would just like to know what it is. I do see a valuable role for bot-generated content and I think that will only get more likely say 10 years from now as computing power grows, and I would hope the visions encompass this. Assuming they do, I would like to understand how that relates to the WMF's commitment to our traditional user-generated content. Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I think it's very hard to characterize the vision of "the board" because we are a diverse set of individuals, and realistically speaking, the role of defining and leading and getting buy in to a longterm vision is really the province of the executive director. But I'll take a stab at it. I think there's a general view by the board that we've underinvested in software development in the past. This view was first articulated by Sue Gardner, who made finding a tech/product person to be CEO a cornerstone of the search for her successor. Things have improved on that front under Lila's leadership, but obviously not without some serious bumps along the road. Speaking more personally about my own views, I think we need to invest still more resources in technology and hire very good people who can help us become an organization that can actually turn out software features and products that the community needs and wants, on a regular basis. I think that "Discovery" is an important pillar of that effort, but not necessarily the most important. I think it needs to be easier for intelligent and smart and kind people to become Wikipedians, without having to learn so much arcane tech stuff. I think we need to stop wasting the time of volunteers who end up having to do stuff in convoluted manual ways rather than using tools that work. But I don't work at the Foundation, and my views on specific product ideas aren't any better than any other long time Wikipedian's views, so I don't think we should privilege what software I think should be built - we should all work together consultatively... but also decisively.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I love everything you said. But this is very high level, and doesn't really answer what I was asking. You hired Lila almost 2 years ago, and that is plenty enough time for her to propose a set of long term strategies to the board, with reasonably clear timelines and budgets to achieve them, and for her and the board to negotiate to get those proposals to a place where the board signs off on them. Would you please describe the current strategies? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 00:00, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
What are the WMF's plans (board and/or executives) plans to engage the community on really big picture stuff, like this whole "search" initiative and the technology-vision more broadly? Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I think there are some excellent models that we should expand and follow more regularly. Geoff and the legal team have done some great consultations that led to generally well-received changes to the terms of use, etc.
I also think, and have said many times, that we should not get into a bizarro world again where we think that the community should be literally voting on software features, only implementing things after they achieve wiki-consensus. As I mentioned above, we need to work together consultatively but also decisively. We've seen enough fiascos of committee-designed software that ends up being super complicated to the point of not working, only to be rejected by the community in the end. We need highly talented product people to understand the needs of the community, and execute on fulfilling those needs. If we can be agile, then initial problems can be iteratively fixed and improved.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Having seen (not nearly as much as you and others) the messiness of decisions-by-consensus here, I understand what you mean. I did ask concretely about what plans there are to actual consult with the community on this big picture stuff. Are there any concrete plans? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 00:04, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
I think it best to leave that to staff to answer. There is a deep understanding that a big mistake was made in not consulting more with the community. As to concrete plans, that will of course depend on the specific context of the department and what they are working on and how much it involves the community and which parts of the community are involved. To give some examples: Something that impacts primarily GLAM work will involve mainly consultation with people working on GLAM stuff and with chapters who are affected. Something that primarily impacts heavy editors will involve mainly consultation with people doing that. It's not really for the board to direct that work, it's for management.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:11, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
What might the WMF board be willing to consider, about making itself actually (not just ethically) accountable to the editing community? (example, some of us have been talking about how to set up "members" of the WMF... this is just an example, please don't get caught up on it) If the answer is "nothing", that is what it is. Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
I think we're willing to consider anything. I think that Erik Moeller has spoken eloquently (somewhere - I saw it yesterday but I don't remember where) about the history. In my view, there are some interesting ideas floating around that could help us move forward on our classic dilemma: we want to remain a strongly community focussed organization, but also need to have expertise on the board. The one thing I would like to add: based on my very long experience doing this, a lot of people imagine that the community-elected board members will somehow be more on the side of the community than the appointed board members. That has never really been true.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
It seems that there is widespread unhappiness among the staff of the WMF, as reported in the staff survey results and as one can infer from the spate of recent high-profile departures. I realize that there are HR issues here, but whatever you can say about what the WMF board is considering about getting things on a better track, would be good to hear. Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
It's hard to say much in detail, so I'll just speak broadly. It is my belief that we need to be a lot better about hiring at the top levels. We've had too many C-level positions vacant for too long, and also situations in the past with C-level positions where the person in the role wasn't a great fit.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
That is enough for now. I reviewed all the discussions that have been going on and tried to capture the "mainstream" issues. I apologize to anybody if I missed something. It's all yours, Jimmy. Jytdog (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Where this stands
Jmmy, in my professional life I generally wait three days before following up on an ongoing conversation. So I have here. Here is where we are.
About James dismissal, I explained how the gap between what the sides are saying is tearing up the community, asked if you understood that, and asked if you would commit to work toward a joint statement, perhaps with a mediator. you wrote, I understand that. I'm open to trying, but I don't see how it is possible. Perceptions seem radically different.. I asked if you would actually commit to trying. That is unanswered.
I've asked in several different ways for you to tell the story of how the vision for technology development has evolved over the past year - the vision that produced Discovery's three year plan and the long-term plans discussed in Knight grant including its board-approved $2,445,873 budget for Stage 1. I've also asked where this vision stands now. You have not provided that.
I've asked you to let me know if the WMF board considers that vision and its evolution to be confidential and said that this appears to be the case. You have not responded to that.
As Lila has acknowledged that not engaging the community sooner was a mistake, I've asked you about the board's role in that, as the body to which she is accountable. You have not responded.
I set this off in a subsection, to keep the above discussion clear. I hope that is OK... Jytdog (talk) 18:48, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
To me this sounds alarming! Trying to fill command or chief level positions to match those found in a typical corporation implies a degree of centralized command similar to that found in a corporation, which is to say, zero role for the community. These are expensive positions for ambitious people who are supposed to develop their careers by making a mark, and unfortunately, that mark is made on us the community. I think Wikipedia would do well to keep the C-level positions vacant, keep their salaries far, far below corporate standards, and task those holding any such positions with a much less commanding role than is typically expected. Wnt (talk) 16:09, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
I disagree with almost every aspect of what you are saying. I want ambitious people of very high levels of talent who are in great demand elsewhere, and i want them to make a mark - not "on us" (that's a terrible notion) but "for us". Imagine an incredible top executive who, 2 years into the job, is universally recognized in the community as having dramatically changed the functioning of the Foundation for the better. Consider the CTO position as an example: I want a CTO who can do a fantastic job of creatively engaging and inspiring the community and the developers to work together to jointly deliver improvements to the software that are meaningful and matter to us. I want to see software that meets the needs of experienced users and new users and takes away some of the many barriers to accomplishing our dream of a free high quality encyclopedia for everyone. Yes, we could attempt a radical (and very likely to be a complete failure) effort to not have executives, or to fill the positions with more junior people who are less qualified, but why? What would the advantage be of not having great leadership at the Foundation?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:26, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
I fully support this strategy. It is too easy to slip into the following thinking:
(Wikipedia volunteer:)
I am unhappy with something the WMF did.
Therefore the WMF should stop doing things and let the community of volunteers do them.
I am unhappy with the way the WMF has communicated what they are planning to do.
Therefore the WMF should get permission from the community of volunteers before doing anything.
The problem with this is that the community of volunteers lacks several attributes that are necessary to run the WMF. Attributes such as "the ability to make a tough decision without deadlocking" and "the ability to enter into legally binding contracts that the rest of the world recognizes as such".
I prefer this sort of thinking:
(Wikipedia volunteer:)
I am unhappy with something the WMF did.
Therefore the WMF should figure out whether they actually did something wrong and if so figure out how to do it better.
I am unhappy with the way the WMF has communicated what they are planning to do.
Therefore the WMF should communicate with (not get permission from) the community of volunteers whenever possible.
Doing this will be hard. It would be easy for the WMF to think "Well, the Knowledge Engine project ran into a shitstorm while in the 'blue sky, think about what we might want to do eventually, but only budget some preliminary studies' phase, so clearly we need to do a better job of keeping such things secret until the plans are pretty much agreed-upon and set in stone." Once you are in that mode of thinking, the community of volunteers are the enemy.
Watching the one unfirable WMF member (Jimbo) be viciously attacked and called a liar (still no shred of evidence that the accusation is true) really doesn't help. If I was part of the WMF I would avoid any communication with the community of volunteers for fear of ending up on the unemployment line. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:08, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
I'd suggest a somewhat different approach. In my view this should be a volunteer led organisation where the staff do things that volunteers want to have happen, but aren't volunteering to do. In the 2009 Strategy discussion the first priority was "keeping the servers running" and I hope we'd agree that this should still be the WMF's first concern. In the last few months the WMF consulted the community as to what software changes we wanted and what priority we gave them. This only involved a small part of the WMF's programming budget, but I think it could be the start of a much healthier relationship between the WMF and the community. ϢereSpielChequers21:08, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jimbo Wales: I really do appreciate your response to me ... still, I don't really understand why you feel this way. The whole idea of Wikipedia is that a bunch of unpaid amateurs can write a better encyclopedia than a smaller number of well-paid professionals. So why shouldn't this apply to software, or corporate governance? We live in a world where practically everything that regular people do, on the job or off, is presented as the accomplishment of a certain executive class, who are the ones paid for it. For a long time Wikipedia was, at least in part, a shining exception to this, and I don't see why that should change. Wnt (talk) 18:05, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Wnt, for what it is worth, i think even nonprofits and government agencies need to be well run, including WP. Full time staff is needed to make WP function - the servers and underlying software that make all this go - and if the WMF has employees it should have competent management (just to be a decent employer). Don't you think? Jytdog (talk) 01:43, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jytdog: Well, what's being described is a change from the past. If WMF did without many C-level employees before... why have them now? The notion that adding them will make something better seems at best a hypothesis; WMF is not just another employer, but something new in the world. Wnt (talk) 04:53, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for replying. I don't want to get into a big thing here, but there is a bunch of software and hardware that needs to be maintained and always improved and people need to do that (not to mention accounting people to pay them, etc, and all the other functions you need to build an organization that actually runs a technology enterprise). I don't want to demean what the WMF staff do in any way and they do a lot more than this, but at minimum they have to keep the site running while we part-time volunteer creators do our thing. You can start drafting today and come back tomorrow and it is all still there. Right? Randy from boise couldn't keep this place going - it takes an organization. And even among for-profits WMF is renowned for keeping the site up, and relatively quick to respond, even under the crazy-heavy traffic that readers create. And this is how it is at pretty much any company that relies on "user-generated content". Twitter has about 3500 employees, just so we can write 148 character tweets. What you are saying is just not realistic, in my view.... That is just my view. Jytdog (talk) 05:03, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog, I had the pleasure of working at the WMF for six and a half years, and I think your analysis above is one of the most sane things I've read in a long time. Thank you for it. I am in full agreement. -Philippe (talk) 22:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jytdog: Perhaps a utopian notion of an all-volunteer WMF is a way off. But certainly the WMF employees have done everything you've said without the C-level hires currently under discussion. If you are skeptical of change in one direction, why not be skeptical of change in the other? Wnt (talk) 12:40, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 February 2016
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Thanks. That was some interesting reading! The drama goes way beyond the "Knowledge Engine". I heard about staff discontent, but that timeline makes it sound far worse than I had ever imagined... But this may be only one side of the story. I have a feeling we'll be presented with another view soon that makes it sound like just a "small" bump in the road. :-) --David Tornheim (talk) 05:05, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for sharing this here, Jytdog. David Tornheim: I would be interested to hear such a presentation. I did not use the same standards of NPOV when writing this as I do with my Wikipedia articles. I do indeed have strong feelings about this—I see the Wikimedia Foundation falling apart, and I see my friends who work there miserable and afraid to say anything about it. But I did try to keep editorializing to a minimum, as I want people to also be able to view it and draw their own conclusions. I would be very curious to hear what Jimbo Wales and LilaTretikov have to say about it, though I also have seen so many questions go unanswered throughout these past ~two years that I would be shocked if this was one of the few that did not. GorillaWarfare(talk)07:43, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, GorillaWarfare and others for that condensed timeline (has been a struggle to read Jimbo's talk-page for the related details among all the rants). There are tons of good jobs out there, and it can be upsetting for some employees to change software plans. I myself have been through numerous software transitions or computer conversions, including the ultra-stupid "dotcom crash" when numerous web-master people were dismissed as absolutely "no future" for Internet-based marketing and sales [too funny!]. Years earlier, a software interface was radically altered to change all menu choices to numbers only, to avoid those difficult keyboard letters for top-management users, only to watch the Chief place his finger tips on the home keys– he was a touch typist. However, my biggest shock about employees leaving was a keypunch billing secretary who could not adapt to direct digital keyboard entry and loss of punchcards when we replaced her IBM 403 Accounting Machine with all-electronic databases; I was totally stunned when she learned all the new computer procedures but then quit. Software transitions are extremely difficult, and programmers think the super-human, mindboggling algorithms are the hard part. Some amount of secrecy can be helpful when changing software plans, but it can be a complex juggling act to keep all balls up in the air. -Wikid77 (talk) 01:29, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Interesting stories. What was that interface about changing to numbers only? Never heard of that.
I didn't get the feeling from reading the timeline that people were leaving because of a software transition. I don't remember anyone saying that, although it can't be ruled out entirely. Reading between the lines, the finger is undoubtedly pointed at the hiring of the new CEO. I was a bit skeptical at first of the negative implications as I was reading, thinking this might just be normal change of management, where the new manager replaces the people that directly report to them with people they have worked with before or trust--no fun to be replaced like that, but it is not unusual. I also wondered What the turn over was before the hiring of the new CEO. And what was morale like? And was there a productivity or other major issue(s) the new CEO was expected to tackle, possibly requiring a shake up?
But the number of people who left with almost zero notice and young people supposedly because of health or other dubious reasons started to add up. I don't remember even one of these highly qualified workers said they left because they found a better job, which should be the most common reason for leaving.
As the number of unusual departures added up, considering a budget of only $65 Million budget, I was left convinced--unless I see further refuting evidence--that there must be either: a serious morale problem, an intentional shake up, a new direction that many long-term employees strongly dislike or something else unpleasant that employees are expected not to talk about. The inability of employees to speak frankly about what is wrong seems especially troubling and does seem to match the communication problems expressed by a number of editors about poor and one-sided communication from WMF to them. I haven't experienced that myself, but I have never tried to talk to WMF. I assumed they were too busy making sure the servers are working with all that content on such a low budget! (and defending us from lawsuits that might arise when anonymous editors add libelous statements in our articles and we don't take them out fast enough.) --David Tornheim (talk) 05:33, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Lawsuits seem minimal, as the legal warning shown before the Edit-SAVE button blames each anonymous editor for whatever text saved, and that seems to protect WMF from liability, but many editors or wp:edit-filters also remove links to notoriously bad websites. In the software transition(s), there were many radical changes beyond the wp:MediaViewer, wp:FLOW talk-pages, and superprotect as WMF-only pages (removed in Nov 2015). There had been talk of forcing editors to use VisualEditor (VE) and removing the wikitext source editor, before 2013 when VE was the default for new users and inserted numerous sets of <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags to allow strings of spaces or botched literal markup code all across any (major) article, plus VE allowed any user to overwrite a prior editor's many changes without warning (not good as the default for new users).
For years the wp:developers refused to help Wikipedia editors with software improvements, such as refusing to install fast text-string wp:parser functions to find substrings in parameters, or to save global variables between templates to pass mode-indicators or counters, and to this day, our templates cannot count how many template errors occur across a page, as a red-flag re widespread hack-edits vs. rare typos in a few templates. Then the nested wp:expansion depth limit was forced to stay 40/41 levels to limit if-else guarded command structures plus nested templates to only only 40 deep, when programming languages allow if-else over 200 deep.
The developers had refused crucial software improvements for many years, but tried to force their unwanted software products onto the WP editing community while denying core features such as string-handling which we emulated (before Lua script was installed) by coding hundreds of sequential if-functions comparing to every possible masked character to split a text-string into separate letters to detect quotemarks or end-dots to remove double-dot ".." punctuation, etc. Years of refusing useful software transitions. But now we have the Community-Tech team supposedly improving the MediaWiki software, per community requests, rather than tell us we're stupid for wanting those features to make editing much easier (diff that sees a blank line was added, not a shifted line marked as totally different) or to make templates faster (Dec 2014) or smarter. I get upset just thinking about those past years of no major improvements, but thankful for recent major improvements while Lila Tretikov was here. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:03, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Sounds like you got into some pretty deep programming! I love programming myself. I looked at the templates and got interested in how they function. I was curious how the software dealt with infinite recursion and other problems like that. I do notice some templates could use some work: for example, the "for" {{for|...|...}} template only allows a maximum of 4 parameters. I think there should be no limit. But I am also surprised how many important templates act more like macros: e.g. the templates for vandalism (e.g. {{uw-vandalism1}}) just replace the template with a bunch of boilerplate text--that seems needlessly wasteful given how often those templates are used and the fact that they probably never (or almost never) need to change once standardized. I am always impressed with the bots that clean things up. Debugging those must be a nightmare, especially making sure they don't wreck every single article by some slight oversight. I'm guessing you worked on some of those? I think I know who to talk to if I have a template concern. :-) I agree that the kinds of things you talk about above they should have attended to. --David Tornheim (talk) 11:06, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
And one more staff member leaving [9] "After 12 months of continual stress, losses and workplace fear, I no longer wish to work for the Wikimedia Foundation." The board really need to do something to sort the toxic atmosphere out. The first action they need to take is becoming rather clear. --Salix alba (talk): 07:11, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, clearly Lila and Jimbo need to open a talk-page dialogue with the community, but the potential for uncontrolled rants will make communication difficult, and if Lila was not "scared" enough at angry developers, then pent-up rants for years of WMF ignoring the editing community will likely terrify her. There is no easy way to discuss years of botched software mismanagement, when people will want to blame her for 10 years of WMF problems with those developers. -Wikid77 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 10:04, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
The particularly striking thing to me is the number of new high-level hires who departed after only three or four months on the job. Even a single event like that is a major failure; the time-line shows at least half a dozen over the past couple of years, and that's a huge red flag. Looie496 (talk) 15:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Software is hard, and Lila wanted that: It is difficult to say why people leave for higher-paying jobs with easier work than writing an entire wp:FLOW talk-page system, or fixing diff to show added blank lines, or auto-merging wp:edit-conflicts to append 2 replies at the same line, but people do prefer easier work with simple tasks for higher pay. Perhaps explain that some other way. In the U.S. Govt, numerous people are often dismissed after competitive procurement selects one contractor, and then the others lose all of those jobs. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:38, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Knight Foundation Grant continued
Latest comment: 8 years ago32 comments17 people in discussion
What is the true goal of the search engine? The search engine will be designed to access a mix of Wikimedia content and content from other sources. Unlike other search engines, a major part of the search results for the Knowledge Engine will direct people to Wikipedia-related projects. I think that may be the main purpose of the search engine. They want to create a search engine to encourage people to Wikimedia owned content. The Wikipedia community does not want banners ads on Wikipedia articles. But with the new search engine there can be ads with each search result to make money for the WMF. The world does not need another search engine. But this search engine can be used to indirectly make money off of Wikipedia content without the ads being on Wikipedia. If the search engine will not have any ads then it would be extremely expensive to run. How will the search engine be funded once it is running? This question should be answered now rather than later. If the search engine was only for editors it would not have a mix of Wikimedia content as part of the search results. It will be for anyone person that wants to find public information on any topic. Correct me if I am wrong. It is important to ask who benefits from the search engine. QuackGuru (talk) 19:02, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
This is all very confused, as are most press reports. We are not building a separate new project. We are not building a search engine to compete with Google. There has been no discussion of putting ads on anything, and I would very firmly and publicly oppose it, and I don't see any possible way that it is going to happen. We do not have the resources, nor the interest, nor the engineering resources, to build a search engine to compete with Google or anyone else. All suggestions that we are planning to do so, that we have ever planned to do so, are completely and totally false.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:45, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Probably its purpose is to keep WMF projects' content relevant in a world where screens and attention spans are too small for parsing an encyclopedia. There is already [10] that bills itself as a "knowledge engine", it mines public databases for facts in response to natural language queries, and it monetizes those searches. Wonder what sources it uses? Not surprising if the WMF wanted to make one of these themselves. Geogene (talk) 19:17, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
User:Geogene, something is not quite right about this. According to a news article "Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation have said externally that the Knowledge Engine will primarily improve search within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, but leaked documents and the grant application itself paint a different picture."[11] Is this true? Has Wales and the WMF have not been totally honest with the Wikipedia community? The search engine will have its own website. It appears the search engine is not directly intended for editors to improve Wikipedia content. QuackGuru (talk) 20:58, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
That news report, like many, is false. The search engine will not have its own website, unless you count www.wikipedia.org as a new separate website. (It has always been a front end to our internal search and I know of no plans to change that.) It is not directly intended for editors to improve Wikipedia content, although that is one design possibility that I personally think is quite important.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:45, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Please show evidence that "The Wikipedia community does want banners ads on Wikipedia articles." I seriously doubt that is the case. I certainly do not want Wikipedia degraded by advertising; that has always been one of its major appeals. --David Tornheim (talk) 22:00, 16 February 2016 (UTC)
I find it quite troubling that rumors such as these are circulating: "But with the new search engine there can be ads with each search result to make money for the WMF. The world does not need another search engine." There has been no evidence I have seen that WMF plans to make a search engine TO MAKE MONEY. These false and destructive rumors needs to stop. One only need to look at the documents recently uncovered and discuss the knowledge engine here to see that its purpose is being misrepresented. --David Tornheim (talk) 19:19, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
I think that what may be happening is that a kind of conspiracy theory is developing, based upon a bad-faith interpretation of what is happening with this knowledge engine. I've always felt the search function is clunky and can be improved. I don't see anything sinister, though I suppose a case can be made that there are higher priorities for devotion of resources. Coretheapple (talk) 17:29, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
That's how I read it too. As for priorities of resources, that *is* a legitimate complaint. But that is not what I am hearing in these complaints. As a "user" of Wikipedia and Google, I would like a better search engine when what I am looking for is not a commercial in nature. So I am delighted by this project, and I think others should be too--unless as you say, they think it is part of some "sinister" conspiracy that they have provided no evidence for. And FYI, more of my thoughts on this matter and other discussion are taking place here. --David Tornheim (talk) 01:24, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes there is a lot of bullshit swirling around. But Doc James is not a crazy person and according to him there were big plans at one point per the Knight grant itself which talks very clearly about a search engine to compete with commercial search engines, and per insiders like this. Doc James has said there was a huge amount of secrecy around that, and that has been verified by insider people per comments like this. It seems that the WMF has moderated those plans but what is bugging me is the lack of acknowledgement of what actually happened in the summer/fall/winter. A clear statement from the board/Jimbo and Lila of what they were doing then would be amazing helpful and I cannot see why they will not out with it. Lila has at least acknowledged that they made a mistake by not talking to the community. Jytdog (talk) 02:45, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
You say "the Knight grant itself which talks very clearly about a search engine to compete with commercial search engines". (See Grant]). I never saw such language in the grant, and I read all of it. As I argued on SlimVirgin's talk page here, there was an obvious need for secrecy (undermined by Doc James) stated in the grant here:
Risks: Two challenges could disrupt the project:
1. Third-party influence or interference. Google, Yahoo or another big commercial search engine could suddenly devote resources to a similar project, which could reduce the success of the project. This is the biggest challenge, and an external one.
2. ...attrition...
And the need for secrecy as I explained there was because it does things that the other search engines, including things like Google Scholar do not do, and hence the other search engines might want to devote resources to a similar novel project and get credit for it and get new users because of it. Not because WMF was trying to create a full Internet search engine to compete directly with theirs. Google has a market capitalization close to $500 Billion [12], while Wikipedia has an annual budget of $65 Million. Behemoths like Google can crush, co-opt or duplicate little projects like the Knowledge engine. Those who work on projects in Silicon Valley know this.
I found this very helpful in seeing why the rumors have been swirling around that the "Knowledge Engine" was going to compete with Google. Apparently a high level person named Damon had brainstormed some big plans that got ditched. I am guessing they got ditched because staff and other people who know Wikipedia knew it would never fly. Those in the Discovery team meeting seem to have a lot of common sense and expertise, and I have the sense they understand the community. And all seem eager to be more transparent and avoid secrecy, but also to honor secrecy when appropriate. I have confidence in them, and I really appreciate their willingness to share the meeting notes. I think this incident will be a wake-up call for the future for leadership of the organization, and we will see further improvements with communication from the top from now on. Until this happened, I never paid any attention to what was going on at the top. --David Tornheim (talk) 12:09, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
"I do not want to build a search engine"
Hi Jimbo, above you stated that you don't want to build a search engine. [13] However in the past you have said "It’s something I care about deeply. I will return again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader." [14] Could you tell us more about when and why your views changed? the wub"?!"21:32, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
Sorry I missed the question. Why do you think something has changed? I would gladly be an investor in an open source search project if I thought it looked promising. I would gladly contribute as an advisor or whatever the organizers might find useful. I would gladly donate money to an effort. I would gladly be a cheerleader. So, nothing about that has changed. I do not think the WMF should create a general purpose search engine - indeed, I find that idea completely far-fetched, and I don't have any interest in doing it myself.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:33, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
How do you feel about usability experiments where ordinary people recruited through, e.g. neighborhood postbill flyers or Craigslist gigs ads, come in to some office without any Wikimedia or Wikipedia branding (but with usability studies branding), are offered payment for their agreement to be observed answering questions requiring general reference information with a web browser on low-end phones, laptops, and tablets, with their behavior analyzed to identify deficiencies in Wikimedia search and default search engines' interface with Wikimedia projects? EllenCT (talk) 15:39, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
I strongly support usability experiments with various classes or categories of users on a variety of devices. We have a poor understanding, mostly anecdotal and not sufficiently systematic, about how people find us, what they are looking for when they do, and also importantly how they fail to find us when they are looking for what we provide. I just went to Wikivoyage and looked at recent changes. Someone just edited the entry on Lapu-Lapu, the section about arriving by plane. Then I went to Google and searched for "Lapu-Lapu by plane" - we are the 8th link, and the ones above us are all selling plane tickets. I think that's interesting, but what I don't know is whether people who do searches like that are looking for knowledge resources or if they are shopping. This is a totally random example. I think we - in the communities - would like to know more, and I hope that the Foundation, which is uniquely positioned to have the resources to do this kind of research, does a lot of it and shares it widely.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:55, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
How do we move forward placing the needs of the community ahead of boardmember aspirations?
The community should poll each member of the Board of Trustees, asking when they became aware that the Foundation was accepting large grants with strings attached that were not being characterized correctly in public statements. But to move forward, how does the community get engineering resources assigned to the projects which the community actually wants, without regard to the aspirations of members of the Board? EllenCT (talk) 01:55, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
If the Board passed a resolution saying that engineering resources should be directed to the projects requested by the community tech team within some quantified measurable margin, would that solve the problem going forward? EllenCT (talk) 15:25, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
@Jimbo Wales: I didn't think so, but I hope it's clear that having us elect a board member, then immediately ejecting him and appointing a replacement (from among previous board members) instead of having us elect another, is going to convey the impression that the board has a low "you lot don't matter" regard for the community, whether they really do or not. It was a poor move both strategically and tactically. It's clear that much of the negativity and suspicion above about KE is a direct result (causally, not just correlated). This has come at a bad time.
I have a lot of experience at such organizations (9 or 10 years at EFF, several more at CRF). At EFF I "survived" five different management changes and top-to-bottom major organizational shifts that affected the internal culture, the relationship between the board and the rest of the organization, and the nature of the mission and the work to accomplish it. I've seen it all, including what works and what is like organizationally punching yourself in the face. Whatever the underlying rationales for it at the time, much of what's been going on comes across as closer to the latter, and looks a bit like insisting that continuing to self-pugilize is very important for reasons that an outsider isn't privy to.
Which kind of brings us full circle: Why is the editing community being treated like outsiders? I've been in a enough boardmeetings to know how they work for a group like this. Of course they don't want cameras in the boardroom so that every idle thing they say can be picked apart by people looking for something to vent about. But that is not the only way to increase transparency, responsiveness, accountability, and connectedness between the community and the board. The current situation is not tenable. Especially not when WP and presumably WMF are on the cusp of an (overdue) transition into a new phase of the organizational lifecycle. There are so much bigger fish to fry, and the community having more awareness of and input into how these issues are dealt with is going to be necessary and beneficial.
Top on that list for me is organized PoV editing (which is often not commercial, but ideological). Our present "assume good faith and keep assuming it in face of all but the most damning mass of evidence to the contrary" collective mindset is being ruthlessly exploited by WP:CIVILPOV gamers. The current administrative approach amounts to a belief that being obsequiously nice to one another is the most important thing on WP. It's not. Rather, it is being an encyclopedia with reliable, readable information instead of a firehose of nonsense and trivia-wankery. It's time that WP grew up a little more and took WP:ENC, WP:COMPETENCE, WP:5THWHEEL, and WP:NOTHERE more seriously. [End mini op-ed.] PS: I posted essentially the same comment last night, but do not see it in the edit history or in the page's text. I've been having this edits-not-actually-going-through problem fairly often lately at en.WP, and I have a 170 Mbit connection. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 20:27, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Voters often select candidates based on the extent to which they believe the boardmember will aspire to propose and dispose of resolutions according to the voters' preferences. If there is a different way representation is supposed to work, please let us know. EllenCT (talk) 15:28, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Honestly, for this soap opera drama to have dragged on for so long, in my opinion, there's only one former board member still feeding his aspirations (& this isn't his talk page). AnonNep (talk) 16:06, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #1—2016
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Among experienced editors, the visual editor's table editing is one of the most popular features. If you select the top of a column or the end of a row, you can quickly insert and remove columns and rows.
Now, you can also rearrange columns and rows. Click "Move before" or "Move after" to swap the column or row with its neighbor.
You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.
Recent changes
You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.
Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.
The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.
Future changes
The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:
Remember my last editor,
Always give me the visual editor if possible,
Always give me the source editor, and
Show me both editor tabs. (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)
The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.
Please try out the newest version of the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You may need to restore the default preferences (at the bottom of test2wiki:Special:Preferences) to see the initial prompt for options. Were you able to find a preference setting that will work for your own editing? Did you see the large preferences dialog box when you started editing an article there?
Can you read and type in Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Indic, or Han scripts? Language engineer David Chan needs help from people who often type in these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help. Report your results on wiki (Korean – Japanese – all languages).
If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thanks!
Staff afraid of the community -- and the problem with Incivility in general
Latest comment: 8 years ago40 comments13 people in discussion
The Incivility Problem
Hi Jimbo. Above you said:
I don't know of anyone on the board who would ever encourage Lila not to engage with the community, but at the same time I'm very well aware of how frightened the staff can be of the community - and not for no reason, let's all be painfully aware of that. Engaging with the community, which I've been doing for a long time, isn't always rewarding. Some people are hostile and engage in name calling and insults. The staff are human and mainly very committed to the mission, and they are treated like evil parasites with a grand conspiracy to destroy the community on a regular basis. So they are fearful of engaging. (21:32, 20 February 2016 (UTC)) [emphasis added.]
This does not surprise me at all. What I have seen since I first started editing on Wikipedia many years ago is that a high level of incivility is tolerated, in particular by admins. who often have free reign to act with impunity. Name calling (ad hominem attack) is used on a regular basis. Bringing the uncivil editor to a DR noticeboard is rarely helpful for those who happen to be on the "wrong" side of a POV dispute that has a large gang of editors backing them up. The gang will show up at any noticeboard and defend the uncivil behavior, write walls-of-text, confusion and distraction, point more fingers and threaten boomerangs. Neutral third parties are drowned out by the yelling, and are often too scared to enter into the fracas or appear to be "taking sides".
As an example of how futile it is to complain about incivility: Consider the dismissal of this complaint, which was used as a supplemental argument for the successful topic banning of the editor who complained about incivility. Softlavender made an excellent suggestion that got quite a lot of support to ask for more civility from both sides of the dispute, but those who wanted to continue the ad hominem argumentation won the day when the complaint was dismissed. Was anyone really surprised?
We need a system of justice and DR where neutral third parties make the final and binding decisions rather than those directly involved in a disagreement. The current set up makes no distinction. I would actually like to see something like jury duty or admins. assigned at random to make rulings on disputes, just like we have in the American court system. As it works now, it's more like mob rule with hanging judges, guilty until proven innocent and anything goes if a gang with admin. back up supports you. I have no doubt this is why there is a problem with editor retention and why the staff is afraid to interact with bullies who are never held accountable for their incivility. It is a very hostile place and works far too much like the Wild West. (That said, it's still better than allowing $ to drive the material everyone sees in the media, so I am still happy for your work in creating a more democratic system than we had prior to Wikipedia and I intend to continue to work here because of that.)
Do you have any thoughts on this problem and how it might be addressed?
I think Jimmy has made it really clear in the past that he agrees with this. But also that he'd like to see the community solve it and not the foundation/board. I'm not sure we can wait for that however. Like Twitter we have a big social problem, and I'm not sure it's fixable without making changes to the software or at least intervention by foundation/board. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:11, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
The real problem here is that Wikipedia is the venue for a rearguard action by climate change deniers and their supporters, who wish to continue to represent climate science as being in a state of flux and disagreement, when in fact it has by now arrived at a point where the last survey found only one author rejecting the scientific consensus, out of nearly ten thousand publishing. Yes, we do need a mechanism to close down debate. Incidents like the one David Tornheim highlights are the inevitable result of endless querulousness on the part of often small numbers of editors who flatly refuse to accept the world as it actually is, and would rather we reflected the world as their highly selective view of the sources sees it. Just look at List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming. Back in the day, the Institute for Creation research maintained a list just like this, of scientists who reject evolution. The list contains a number of people who happen to work in science but have absolutely no expertise in climate science (e.g. David Bellamy, a botanist). The number of living climate scientists in this list is tiny, and represents dramatically undue weight because the majority of them are only notable due to media coverage of their denialism. Fox News does not produce profiles of mainstream climate scientists, and actually neither does The Guardian. As Brian Cox said on the radio last week, the universe has a liberal bias. Some people think that requires us to "balance" it with conservative talking points. They are this: wrong. Guy (Help!) 09:47, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
@JzG: The editor prokaryotes who got topic banned was not a "climate change denier". Prokaryotes' edits and expressed opinions on climate change are consistent with the scientific consensus expressed in our article on Global warming (i.e. that temperatures are increasing and that human activity is a significant cause.) Prokaryotes did almost all of the work on the Climate Action article [15]. (see also: [16], [17]) Although I have done little editing on the topic, my recent edits at Climate Action Plan were to add more information and support expansion of the article. Neither Prokaryotes nor I are anything like "climate change deniers" and we consider it deeply insulting to be equated with such unscientific thinking/editing. That's why it is an ad hominem. But the closer of the AN/I, basically concluded it is okay to equate an editor's work with such a disparaged group, such as "climate change deniers", Nazi's or KKK members. I don't think that is okay, and such ad hominemn attacks need to stop. --David Tornheim (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, Prokaryotes was pushing a different anti-science POV. Same shit, different day, basically. Have you read Merchants Of Doubt? That shows why people refer to tactics as being similar to those of climate change deniers or whatever. In fact the approach dates back to the 1950s and is also often referred to as the tobacco industry playbook. Many of the same people are involved, oddly. Guy (Help!) 10:01, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I am well aware of the "tobacco industry playbook". This report cover its. And yes, I agree the playbook continues today in other industries like energy or food production: [18]. (<-- No I do not claim that to be RS.) Industry's ability to create science that matches their financial goals is well known as funding bias, as explained by Sheldon Krimsky here. Industry also is very good at affecting regulators with Politicization of science, with the George W. Bush administration having "installed more than 100 top officials who were once lobbyists, attorneys or spokespeople for the industries they oversee." (e.g. the FDA). Yes, tobacco science is a problem. And people who talk about it, like Prokaryotes get topic banned and called "climate change deniers" for doing so. --David Tornheim (talk) 12:12, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
We're obviously talking past each other. Prokaryotes was following an agenda and style which is legitimately compared to that of climate change deniers. Some people vehemently wish that there was robust science to oppose GMOs, but there isn't, and in fact the science shows very little evidence of anything other than benefit. Science is neutral, not all scientists are. Science is a process, scientific consensus is a conclusion. And climate change is a battleground, as are GMOs and several forms of quackery. We owe it to our readers to keep our content strictly in line with the scientific consensus view - otherwise we become Conservapedia, only with a less obnoxious god-king. Guy (Help!) 23:45, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
David, while human beings are naturally afraid of difficult conversations (and talking to the community is undeniably difficult), professionals are paid to do a job. Part of the Executive Director's job and the job of some key roles in the WMF staff -- part of what they are paid to do - is engaging with the community. A key function of any Board, is to see to it that the CEO or ED does their job. Yes the community could behave better (try herding that bunch of cats) and we can understand a human failing, but that does not make the professional failure - nor the failure of board oversight - any less a failure. It is what it is. The key thing for WMF leadership is doing their jobs, and playing their roles, going forward. Jytdog (talk) 10:19, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Jytdog: You are totally missing my point, and illustrating what I said above about using a distraction to dodge the issue at hand--incivility on Wikipedia. I was not suggesting the staff was entitled to avoid engaging with hostile editors because of fear, any more than civil servants who are the brunt of anger of someone who thinks their vehicle was wrongly impounded. Yes, it comes with the job. What I was saying is that we have a problem--that incivility is tolerated and pervasive. And Jimbo was clearly articulating an example of how badly our editors do behavior, so badly that the staff is afraid of us. That really says something. It is unacceptable that we tolerate this behavior and we cannot present ourselves to staff in a more dignified way. SageRad hits the nail on the head in the next comment. --David Tornheim (talk) 03:43, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
David the thing you picked up from Jimmy, is something that he wrote in response to me asking him why Lila has not engaged the community. I stepped around it as it was off point and a rabbit hole, but you grabbed it, and climbed the reichstag with it (humans are generally predictable - someone was going to do it) In any case, this is not something you are going to solve here, and especially not now, when this house is burning down. The village pump is thataway where you will find many, many, many discussions about enforcing WP:CIVILITY (which I recommend you read before trying to reinvent the wheel). I brought the conversation back to something reasonably on point. Jytdog (talk) 04:17, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
You mean you tried to "hijack" the conversation? :-) I appreciate your reminding me that if I speak on Jimbo's page, then I am "climbing the Reichstag", but if you do, well "that's totally different". --David Tornheim (talk) 05:11, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
There is a serious problem here, and David Tornheim nailed it. Jytdog and Guy are part of the problem -- some of the editors who will stop at nothing to push a point of view, being as nasty as they want to be, with near complete impunity. Guy is one admin who pushes POV and bullies constantly. So... consider the sources. I would love the community to be able to solve it, but i think it's gone below the critical mass required, and it's in a tailspin. It's deeply affecting the quality of the knowledge in Wikipedia, which is getting biased toward the "Skeptic" point of view daily. It's a hostile takeover. SageRad (talk) 10:32, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
There is a fundamental misunderstanding going on. Some people seem to believe that civil POV-pushing is civil, while a robust response is not. In fact, civil POV-pushing is an oxymoron. POV-pushing is inherently uncivil: it represents a refusal to accept consensus. In most places where this is an issue, the numbers involved are small. We have managed to maintain a neutral article on homeopathy for some time despite the endless procession of people determined to "fix" our "bias" towards empirically verifiable fact. In a small number of cases - those where politics is significantly involved especially - the numbers are larger. But we need to be really clear: advancing a POV that is contradicted by science, even if done with painstaking politeness, is still a problem. Science is the real-world Wikipedia: it works by consensus to incorporate all significant views and findings in proportion to their evidential support. It can be wrong, sometimes badly so, but it is inherently self-correcting and the quality assurance is vastly better than ours. That's why in articles on medicine and climate, to name just two examples, we defer to the scientific evidence. We can describe dissent from that, and note (as is usually the case) the motives for those who so dissent, but we do not pretend that dissent has any parity with scientific inquiry.
To be clear: there is a difference, which we recognise, between questions of fact and questions of policy. The climate is changing, it is due to human influence, and there's no real dispute about that. What to do about it? Ask ten people and you'll get eleven answers - some of them even valid ones.
It would be great if there were an editorial board who could draw a line under these long-running content disputes. It's not going to happen. So the inevitable result is groups of people getting increasingly pissed off with each other. Take a look at the archives at [[19]] - how many times do we have to go round the same loop before we decide that those who do not accept consensus are disruptive? Guy (Help!) 10:56, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
All i want is for actual policies to be enforced -- for everyone equally. Not with some being more equal than others which is how it is now. If someone can be mean, uncivil, and a bully with impunity then they get worse, and worse, and the environment becomes toxic, and this is what's happened. If i went diff-digging, i would be able to pull up about 100 examples of Guy bullying people and acting against policy, and yet he's ubiquitously still ruling this place with gusto as an admin who says "to hell with rules!" on a regular basis. SageRad (talk) 11:09, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
I support a "Knowledge Engine" or any new search tool, but the knowledge generated by Wikipedia through volunteer editing will be as good as the editing environment allows it to be. Currently the knowledge is under hostile takeover by people gaming the system. The knowledge is the wealth. If the knowledge is distorted, it's less valuable, to WMF and to the people of the world. It can in fact be harmful to the world. Part of it is simply sadistic people finding a place to enjoy schadenfreude, but much of it is a systemic Skeptic™ takeover. SageRad (talk) 11:23, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Guy states: "last survey found only one author rejecting the scientific consensus, out of nearly ten thousand publishing". Guy simply picks surveys which support his POV. I can do that too: "More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims" [20] Why is it OK for Guy to do it, but not me? Biscuittin (talk) 17:18, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Just to be clear, I'm not taking about climate change denial. I'm talking about real science being blocked POV pushing with an ideology under the rubric of a "Skeptic" movement. I'm talking about serious gang-like POV pushing in many topics with an establishment agenda, hiring the integrity of the knowledge in Wikipedia. Equitable enforcement of policy would help this. However the system is gamed. SageRad (talk) 19:39, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Causes of Staff's fear of the community -and- how to address them
I don't follow the climate change fracas here, nor do I remember having any problems with Guy (unless I'm mixing him up with somebody else), but I do agree with many of the main points put forward here:
WMF staff have good reason to be afraid of part of the community - in fact they are routinely vilified in off the cuff comments.
There is no climate change fracas here (in this thread). This is a thread about civility. The climate change aspect is Guy's unbridled attempt to railroad yet another discussion about civility. Why Guy is repeatedly so destructive to discussions about one the 5 pillars is beyond me, but it is definitely becoming a repeat behaviour. DrChrissy(talk)20:05, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
It might have something to do with the fact that the vociferous proponents of civility often turn out to be advocates of non-mainstream views, often with numerous sanctions against them, who want the nasty reality-based community to go away and let them get on with endlessly demanding "compromise" between empirical reality and fringe views, in a ratchet effect that would eventually see crank ideas and reality given equal weight. As I said above, civil POV-pushing is an oxymoron. I am happy to see strict enforcement of civility in a context where wheedling, querulousness and tendentious editing are acknowledged to be a major causal factor so are dealt with equally firmly. Somehow I do noty think that most of the vociferous "civility advocates" would like that. Guy (Help!) 09:47, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
@Smallbones: I appreciate your comments above. Perhaps we can assemble a Project to address the issue(s)? I do imagine process change is possible, because there used to be a different kind of DR before AN/I (some editors thought that was better). If you have seen decent attempts at reform of this issue that failed, you can point me to them, and maybe we can brainstorm a way around them. I have a hunch a super-majority of editors do want more civility, but are at a complete loss how to achieve it. And any attempts at reform will always generate fear of unknown change, just like the "Knowledge Engine" has. There are definitely huge obstacles, but I think it is possible to address the problem, or I would not have made the above post.
I see the constant, unrelenting attacks by on editors like Guy who struggle to reflect scientific consensus, as being a major civility issue. In my opinion, losing editors like Guy would mean a rapid downward spiral of this encyclopedia into a pseudoscientific swamp without any credibility whatsoever. We would end up as vapid as the "New Age" section at the back of your trendy local bookstore. How catastrophic that would be. Cullen328Let's discuss it07:41, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I don't want to make this personal. There are a number of people who are regularly very abusive toward others with impunity, and the ends don't justify the means, nor do bad means even result in good ends generally. The policies of Wikipedia work well if enforced equitably and fairly. The rationale that we need to allow abusive behavior to "keep out the woo" is like saying "we need to keep crime down" so let's accept that cops will act with impunity as the cost of solving the problem. In the end, the cops become the judge and jury and executor, and justice is not usually done anyway. With Wikipedia, certain editors become "czars of woo" with a free pass to be jerks, and it ends up distorting content, and hurting people, and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of accepting bad behavior. SageRad (talk) 23:03, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Let's be clear, here: I am capable of being a rude obnoxious bastard, but I care quite deeply about this project and I have suffered bitter personal attacks as a result of defending biographies before WP:BLP was ever conceived. I can be wrong. I try really hard to admit it when I am. It would be stupid and dangerous to pretend that Wikipedia is not under constant assault form proponents of every form of bullshit known to humanity: this website is pretty much the most important place to get your delusion represented as fact. We have been round this loop more time than I can count: creationists, homeopathists, 9/11 "truthers", climate deniers - all, in the end, get shown the dorr, but rarely without taking a few good people down first. Burnout is a problem. Feel free to propose a solution that does not involve massively-rejected ideas such as an editorial board or expert review. In my view Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. I'd vote for term limits for new admins and arbitrators if I thought it would result in greater numbers coming forward. Jimmy has met me in that "real life" of which we hear, I think he would probably agree that I am not aosme two-headed fire-spitting monster - I am, as my original username had it, "just zis guy, you know?" As are we all. But here's the weird thing: in over half a century on the planet, and a decade of sysopping here, I have come across maybe half a dozen people I would not buy a beer if we met by chance. It's not personal, for me. Is it for you? Guy (Help!) 23:58, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
You're saying "I can be an asshole to others as long as it's for the right reasons" -- and who decides what are "the right reasons"? You and a few others. So essentially you're saying "I can strong-arm the content of Wikipedia"... on 95% of things i would agree with your positions and on 5% i would differ, yet your brand of strong-arming would prevent me from having a fair say in that 5%. "Civil POV pushing" happens in every direction, Guy. You don't have a monopoly on good judgment. We need to work together, which is the beauty of Wikipedia when it works, and how it arrives at very rich content when it works -- and conversely is the problem when it's not working, and the result is emotional harm to editors and simplistic POV content. SageRad (talk) 13:52, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Well you seem to spend most of your effort here on that 5%. That's your choice. It affects a lot of things, including how you see this place and how editors here see you Jytdog (talk) 15:14, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Wow, way to make that a personal attack. I spend time in contested topics because I care about NPOV and opposition that's POV pushing takes way too much time to deal with. That's not me causing the problem. That's me trying to deal with the problem, and this is why we need a revolution of integrity. SageRad (talk) 15:19, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
SageRad there are so many mainstream science articles that need work. The worst thing is that mainstream science editors have to take up their time with your 5%. Everybody loses. I would say that you care way more about your self-image as a person who tries to Save The World than you do about Wikipedia's mission to provide accepted knowledge to the world. I've stopped letting you waste my time. Jytdog (talk) 15:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Staff should not be afraid of the community, they should be part of the community. Admittedly these two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
But let us consider why the staff may find the community unpleasant to engage with. As far as I can see it is because (some of) the community are annoyed with the WMF. This is because we have outstanding bugs from ten years ago, or minor feature requests that are declined as "Wikipedia is not in the business of" or "MediaWiki does not do this" - but features we don't want are regularly foisted upon us. We should always tried to separate annoyance at an organization from annoyance at the limbs. But the fact is the management should not be placing the staff in the invidious position of going against the community.
Afraid is a rather big yet unspecific word. It's a tad more complex than that. From my interactions with staff it usually boils down to the following; when they say they are afraid it's a culmination of:
I'm new and don't understand how the community works
I need some 2 years to really learn to understand this complex landscape.
I realize that by making mistakes as a WMF employee, I will get crucified by the community.
There is thus no viable learning path for me.
I've heard stories of scolding, out'ing, wikipediocracy and stalking (or have been the target of one or more of these myself).
I'm not looking for the potential of such a negative experience in my personal and/or professional life
In light of this, I let more experienced staff interact with the community.
Many will notice that the majority of the more interactive (often unofficial) communication occurs by staff that has been sourced from the community. These people usually already carry 5 years of experience before they have been hired.
It should be noted that even among that more experienced part of the staff, there is a reluctance at times to interact with the community. The reason for that is that it is simply a time drain (even for me as a volunteer btw). You could spend 70% of your week interacting with the community for every remaining 30% of work that you actually do. That is highly distracting, and also an inefficient usage of your professional skills. This is one of the reasons the Community Liaisons were introduced at some point, to create a balance in some of these interactions.
And it should be noted that many 'community hires' actually initially start out doing this community interaction on their own volunteer time, but after several years, they usually realize that 'they need a life' and cap their volunteer time spent on wikipedia.
To some degree the problem here is that where usually managers and customer service get to 'shield the workforce' so they actually get stuff done, in our community this is not really possible, and the only people able to communicate with the 'customer' is that same precious/scarce resource that is the workforce. This creates a rather fundamental resource allocation problem. Not helped by the fact that upper management in the foundation has been unable to present a vision/strategy to the community, so you need twice the amount of communication than you might otherwise require. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:38, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
In my experience, community liasons make two mistakes in how they interact with the community (separate from community's opinions of products, projects and development methodology). First, they avoid the questions, dissimulate, or otherwise stonewall. This is either due to incompetence, for which they should be fired, or because they have been given a set of aims to fob off the community, which is their bosses' fault and for which I would not mind seeing the bosses fired. The second is that they display various character traits, such as being patronising ("we know change can be scary"), dismissive of the communities' needs (as with Flow, when the message was clearly that anyone who didn't like it could just leave, and see if we care - Jan-Bart de Vreede) saying they care ("we want to have a more collaborative relationship" - don't say that, dammit, do something meaningful to start such a relationship), and speaking in grand mission statements instead of real-life details. In parallel to User:Risker/Risker's checklist for content-creation extensions, someone needs to write a "WMF Staffers' Guide to community social expectations". BethNaught (talk) 12:50, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
The only response I have to this, is that to pick on the smallest pieces on this chessboard, is probably not the best way to win the game here... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:02, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Beth is picking on their behaviour. The behaviour is cultural, and we need to change the culture. I would not advocate firing liaisons or their managers for incompetence, just changing what they do.
WMF is effectively a head office. It is a canard that head offices can exist on the work they generate internally (accounts for the IT department, HR services for the legal department, legal support for the executive, facilities managing the graphics people). But that is not the head office function - it is to support the divisions - in this case the projects.
As such the projects are the internal customers of the WMF - no benefit is to be had by obfuscation or insult.
But unless the WMF is focussed on delivering support to our mission of creating open content and making it widely available staff will be placed in an invidious position, to which obfuscation is one response.
I agree with many things said above, including that retraining will get better results than firing workers. Workers might reasonably believe they are doing their job, and even doing it well. One thing that I do hear coming up in the recent drama is this idea that the WMF's purpose is to serve the community (i.e. the editors) and/or the projects. To some extent, I agree yes, that is *part* of the Mission, but it bothers me when editors seem to feel like the WMF should be almost subservient to their wishes and think it is okay to throw a temper tantrum if their perceived needs of "the community"--which is composed of a very diverse group of editors who can hardly agree on anything :-) -- are not met, such as retaining a democratically elected board member who the other board members can't work with. Let's review WMF's mission:
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
These are some very big goals. And, yes, supporting the projects is part of it, but so is development--so the "Knowledge Engine" is not a ridiculous idea. And let us not forget that those who donate money to Wikipedia are probably not doing so to make editors happy--my guess from knowing some is that they are far more interested in the other more idyllic aspects. Ideally we don't want the donors to set the agenda, but we also know that $ has a habit of doing that. So we have to be realistic about what we can expect from the Foundation. Cooperation is essential, and there are communications problems on both ends. Telling WMF what they have to do is IMHO not going to work any better than the other way around. --David Tornheim (talk) 01:08, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Bethnaught's point about community liaisons is fair. The solution is simple: bring back user:Bastique. I know Cary now works for a boss who is even better known than Jimbo, but we need him. Guy (Help!) 23:40, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Bottom line. There is no reason on WP to treat anyone else with disrespect. Because we as editors do not like a perceived POV we cannot allow ourselves the self-indulgence of behaviors that diminish another editor while often blind to the plank in our own eye. We can't treat those we agree with with respect while unleashing hurt on other editors because we think we have , or may even have the high ground. That is not the way collaboration works. I'm pretty sure there are many well meaning editors who have somehow decided that their position in a discussion is reason to attack, to behave in a way that is uncivil. I'm not talking about a few swear words here, I'm talking about deliberate and true incivility: harassment, bullying, name calling, creation of false narratives, using AE to remove people (POV Railroad), piling on editors while derailing discussion, and all in the name of protecting Wikipedia. There is no reason to damage or try to damage someone else; not, he's Jimbo Wales and he's used to it, and not he's paid to do a job here. Pay someone when you hire them, but don't expect any healthy person to tolerate for very long a work place that damages them. We have behavioral policies; we need to uphold them and abide by them. We have content policies. Abiding by them while respecting everyone we work with is how we collaborate and how we protect Wikipedia.(Littleolive oil (talk) 17:54, 25 February 2016 (UTC))
What's in Wikipedia and is it getting better?
Latest comment: 8 years ago27 comments14 people in discussion
Jimmy,
I know you are interested in the question of whether Wikipedia articles are improving, e.g. there was a long discussion here back in September on "Is Wikipedia getting better?" I've continued looking into this question, using a much larger random sample, which allowed me to more precisely answer a question I've wanted to see updated numbers on for a long time now: "What's in Wikipedia?"
Proportion of Wikipedia articles by category. Each book represents one article in the sample, or about 5,000 articles on Wikipedia. Graphic by User:Mliu92
For a subset of the biography articles, it's pretty clear that article quality, measured in 3 different ways, increases over 5 years,
What topics does Wikipedia cover? Has the coverage changed over time? These and similar questions are examined using 1001 random articles sampled in December, 2015. The 18 categories and subcategories are dominated by biographies (27.8% of all articles), with biographies of men (23.8%) being 5.8 times as common as women (4.1%). Sports biographies (9.5%) form over a third of all biographies. All articles on sports total 16.0% of the sample. Geography (17.8%) and Culture & Arts (15.8%) are other major categories, with Science & Math (3.5%) having the lowest proportion of the categories in the sample. These proportions are fairly stable over time. Almost 90% of page views go to the 20% of articles with the highest page views.
The sample is intended to be used to investigate additional questions as they arise, with additional data gathered as necessary. As an example, 27 matched pairs of biographies of men and women were formed and the growth, in bytes and words of text, of these articles was recorded over 5 years from their starts. The results suggest that, on average, all bios more than double in size over 5 years, but that bios of men start about 30% larger than bios of women, and that they grow at a slightly faster rate. Modified data from ORES was also examined and appears to be a useful resource for addressing these, and similar questions.
I didn't know about those stats, thanks for the link. It deserves a close reading, but a couple of things off the top of my head follow. I do have difficulty reading multiple pie charts at the same time, so I'll suggest Wikidata rethink that display choice. There are a few things I just don't understand yet, e.g. "artificial entity: 434,920 (8.6%), other P31/P279: 521,992 (10.3%), no P31/P279: 834,250 (16.5%)." But so far so good. Smallbones(smalltalk)15:09, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Proportion of Wikipedia articles by category. Spoof version on Wikimedia Commons, with one word removed.
Absolutely, yes. I've seen that graph for maybe 8 years and love it because it tells a very interesting story. However, I always wanted to know what the real story was and why nobody filled that in. Well, this is a wiki - ultimately there's no use complaining if you can do it yourself. Smallbones(smalltalk)15:09, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
It is getting better, but still a staggering number of super important articles which have been neglected and nobody wants to write properly. Look at WP:Vital articles for progress, it's not great. It's all well and good having millions of articles and having a broad choice of articles, but I think a lot of even the regular editors here have the tendency to work on the more obscure topics or ones which require less effort and research than some of the more important/well visited ones. I have noticed in the last year or two that more editors now seem to be tackling those really core articles, but we're still along way off having the number of editors working on them that we need. By now I think bare minimum we should have all the Vital articles listed up to minimum GA. Especially the Level 1 and 2 ones. I think we ought to have some Vital article drives and aim to get those at least all up to minimum GA status. I'll consider running something for the Vital articles later in the year if I have support.♦ Dr. Blofeld12:11, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I agree - there are a ton of articles that would be of interest only to a tiny minority of people, and a lot of those are of very low quality. Concentrating on vital articles or featured articles or articles with very high page views is extremely important and it would be nice if many people concentrated on these areas. These are also some of the most difficult areas to work in. The run of the mill or typical article (a stub) is also important. Raising the general level of our work is also important. Different strokes for different folks. An overview such as I present here tends to concentrate more on the later. Smallbones(smalltalk)16:11, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
This might be an understatement. I think the Biology and Geography categories contain more of the mass-produced, sometimes even bot-written content (for genes and places, for example). Wnt (talk) 12:48, 23 February 2016 (UTC) (Actually, looking at the data, more species stubs than genes) Wnt (talk) 12:58, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes that is a huge understatement. Most of the species articles are a couple of sentences or less, could have been written by a bot, and have few or no sources or external links of any type. (I'll ping Casliber here just so he can remind us that this doesn't apply to all species articles.) I'm not sure that these do any harm, in some ways it's nice having a huge series like this. But I'm also not sure that the sub-stub shrub series does anybody any good. It does take up some editor time and other websites probably do it better than we can hope to do.
Geography articles are similar. There are lots of bot created 1 liners about Eastern European villages of 100 people that just have never had any improvement. On the other hand, we've got articles on every municipality and census designated place in the US (maybe the UK also) and that is quite an achievement. I'd guess that the large majority of these were created by bots, and have also improved greatly over time. I'm thinking of following up with an investigation of how these articles have improved over time. It may seem obvious (but always be prepared for a surprise!) but I think the improvement will be related to a) the number of people who can get good info on the municipality (probably closely related to the muni's population), b) the number of people who have an interest in the general area (prob. related to being in a rural or metropolitan area), and perhaps news items or page view spikes, and native language (but of course Eastern European villages are another kettle of fish). Anybody want to help work on this and collect some data? Smallbones(smalltalk)16:38, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Also, notice that the path of least resistance has a banner tag complaining that it "does not cite any sources". That was placed over 5 years ago. It has been edited about 30 times since then and nobody has done anything about it. Again, it is easy to fiddle with grammar or engage in OR but adding properly cited facts is too difficult for most editors and the editing process does little to encourage such improvement. Andrew D. (talk) 12:51, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
In 2007, the bird species articles that were not alrerady in existence were created by a bot with a reference to IUCN. Also, endangered species have been created by bots. Again with sources. I am aware of the narrow focus of many FAs and have written about it elsewhere, which was the main impetus in resurrecting the Core Contest. Cas Liber (talk·contribs) 19:53, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I wonder if it might be better to produce the pie charts without taxa and administrative territorial entities, and then to track those separately. Somehow the Waray Wikipedia has 1.1 million taxa - and not much else - while the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia has only 2000 taxa. The rest of the comparisons tend to get lost after that when pie chart format is used. It would also be worth understanding how these articles are generated, and whether one language or another could be doing it better. Wnt (talk) 13:07, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm not convinced that simply because an editor is interested in something obscure she should be penalized. However there is scope for wikiprojects to set motivating goals such as "get every state capital in India to 'Good' level". How does that grab you? All the best: RichFarmbrough, 15:56, 23 February 2016 (UTC).
I didn't say that. All quality articles count, however obscure. But there needs to be a stronger central focus/drive towards really getting the core articles which a written book encyclopedia would have up to Good Article status. We need to be consistant at least in the Vital articles field.♦ Dr. Blofeld17:47, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Meanwhile the tiny (even obscure) WikiProject Disability has set just such an ambitious goal; to create a "state of the nation" summary article about the status of disability in every country of the world. The navbox is mostly red but we're slowly but surely turning them blue. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:09, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Smallbones - in your ever widening research you may also want to take a look at enWP;
(I do not know if those Icons are up to date) and see what the improvement history of those are. You could also compare those across projects or go deeper into the 1000 (which admittedly have a bit of serendipity in selection). Also maybe write it up for the internal notice. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:37, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
@Alanscottwalker: I am really tempted to take on the 10 Level 1 articles (the 100 Level 2 articles - not so much!) I mean, how much work can analyzing 10 articles be? (famous last words). Let me throw it back to you. What would you like to know about those 10 articles? I can (easily, in theory) collect data, say for the December 31 version every year, on size in bytes, the ORES score (article class prediction), number of words of text, and with some more difficulty page views (there's a new system that works great for the last 3 months only), other things that might be very difficult - number of edits in the last year, number of editors in the last year, even readability index! What would you like me to do with that data? What questions or theories do you have about that data? Can you think of any other data that might reflect on your questions? Can you help collect some of the data?
I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just seeing what is needed to be useful and to satisfy your curiosity. Here's something that I can promise within 2 weeks: I'll get bytes, text size, ORES, and maybe even readability index for 12-31-2010 and 12-31-2015. I might even get enough data to make a nice graph (ORES?). OK, but what would really float your boat? Smallbones(smalltalk)20:27, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
"Improvement" is however, you defined it - I don't really have an addition, although it is possible with those articles that the wikipedia "review scale" (as supposedly they are important) was applied decently over-time - and if no one reviewes it regularly that might say something - (also, if you want, you could randomize a selection of the 100). I also don't have a theory, but I am aware of claims that the important articles are stuck in a limbo of disinterest and lack of knowhow about how to generally and effectively cover a broad concept/thing (perhaps, in light of a tendency elsewhere for "smaller subjects" to sometimes go-on-and-on). Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:58, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm probably going to talk myself into a lot of work here, so let me say anything that I agree to could take 6 months. Most of those series above could be gathered year-by-year for 5 or even 10 years. The 10 level 1 articles could be compared to 10 "randomly selected" Level X articles and maybe 10 other articles that were started about the same time (pretty early in most cases). The random article link in the left-hand column doesn't have a "in the vital articles" function but something could be more-or-less worked out. "Level X" might be the biggest broadest set of vital articles in order to empahsize the difference from the level 1 articles. The other articles - how would we select them to be comparable? There might be enough older articles in the data set of 1000, but there probably aren't enough in the Science, technology, and math category to match up.
Finally, there is a likely selection bias that would work against any clear cut results. It seems likely that the articles improve at a certain rate, not entirely because they are vital articles, but rather they are selected as vital articles because somebody thought they were important enough to improve to a large extent. In any case, this would only be an exploratory analysis.
Why don't I do the simplest stuff in my first answer, post some very basic stuff in 2-3 weeks? In the meantime you and others consider what you really want to be done and consider how much data you are willing to gather. Yes, that last part is important. Smallbones(smalltalk)23:49, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I was dismayed to see, as so often happens when Wikipedia statistics are presented, Engineering/Technology doesn't seem to exist or is assumed to be part of Science. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:27, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Sorry, I think this is mostly because it's very hard to summarize all of Wikipedia into 18 categories and subcategories, and it is even harder to display more than that on one graph. So some lack of precision is needed. The real hard truth is that hard science, technology, and math articles are about 3.5% of Wikipedia's articles, the smallest category, so dividing it up or giving it a longer name is very, very difficult. Do please see the write-up at User:Smallbones/1000 random results where at least the word "technology" is used to describe the category. Smallbones(smalltalk)19:29, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Smallbones has made a very interesting analysis, in particular of the biographies of men vs. women over time. I believe one of the current primary objectives of Wikipedia is to improve the coverage of women, given the "systemic bias" against them. One of the main concerns expressed in the discussions in connection with WikiProject Women in Red is that women's biographies are often deemed unacceptable owning to the lack of secondary sources. This aspect seems to deserve wider attention.--Ipigott (talk) 18:31, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Not just WMF but bugs in Lua templates & phones
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Of course there are bugs and design flaws in software around the world, not just the WMF MediaWiki software. So, I don't want to be sending the wrong message about WMF software quality, as meanwhile the WMF Community Tech team has agreed to fix difficult long-term problems such as the diff utility showing long lines as entirely different rather than a few words changed (or vandalized) hidden within a line of several hundred letters.
For the major Lua script templates (locked down so only admins can change them), some bugs have persisted for years, with refusals to fix them, such as journal cites with slashed months; for example:
Compare that error message to date-autofixing in the French Wikipedia where cites formatted by fr:Template:Lien_web will even auto-translate some English date formats into French, such as July 14, 1789 shown as "14 juillet 1789" with no red-error messages. The template limitations in enwiki are issues of refusal to form broader consensus, not unlike WMF leaving German umlaut sort order as Z-Ü rather than correctly U-Ü. So here with enwiki we have trouble getting consent to fix the everyday frustrations, and bugs in major Lua templates have persisted for years (since 2013).
Similarly, severe bugs in some smart phones might erase entire words upon a few backspace keys, or else jump the edit-cursor several lines away while entering new text. Hence, major bugs in software are left unfixed regardless of charity, or foundation, or commercial business, or academic institution. The problem is an organizational culture that allows poor quality to remain for years, whether that's blamed on a director, the programmer staff or admins, or companies hoping planned obsolescence with bad software will make customers want to buy the new, corrected model. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:24/01:02, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
@Wikid77: I don't think that's a fair criticism this time. Lua scripts are user generated content - we wanted users to be able to do scripts in a safe, public environment, and that's what we got. Now the users aren't perfect. The administrative system here isn't perfect either, but the motivation behind it is obvious - if someone vandalizes the cite templates they'll wreck every article on Wikipedia! Not knowing a word of Lua, I was able to learn enough of the language to do scripts here and play around with them quite freely, and was even offered a chance to become a WP:template editor at one point (as it happened, I stopped doing Lua around then because I was trying some other stuff in Javascript at the time and kept getting the details of the two languages mixed up ... I really should get back to it, but I don't have the stones to play with the cite module just now!) You're a computer-savvy person, more than I am - I don't see any reason why you couldn't play with the cite module in sandboxed mode, propose a patch, and even get template editor status to apply it. As far as I see it, Lua comes as close to the way I want Wikipedia software development to work as I am capable of imagining at this time. Wnt (talk) 01:43, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Major Lua scripts are software controlled by admins not developers: It's not the Lua scripts themselves that are the problem, because the French cite templates were also changed to Lua in 2013. With French cite fr:Template:Lien_web, if a user enters slash months for "May/June" even as invalid upcased French "date=Mai/Juin 2015" then the template autofixes (or autocorrects) the date to show typical French lowercase months, "mai/juin 2015" without a red error "Check date values" as enwiki {{cite_web}} has done for years.
In fact the French cites also allow sub-titles and notes after the title as parameters "sous-titre=" and "description=" to show a note after the title, not possible in English Wikipedia, but the French templates have had these features for 10 years. Hence community software problems are not only with the WMF wp:developers in the MediaWiki software, but also with the enwiki admins forcing a culture of red-error messages while the French templates autofix the cite parameters as enwiki formerly did when I had permission to write the Lua Module:Citation/CS1 in 2013.
The smart French cite templates, including fr:Template:Ouvrage (which autofixes many dates such as "6 August 2015" to show French "6 août 2015"), are perhaps an issue of "Group norms" where our admins have been trying to force red-error messages and limited cite parameters for 10 years. We need some type of random-jury decision to allow better cite templates, after 10 years of stagnation.
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
On the Wikimedia-l mailing list you have said you will be traveling to WMF's San Francisco offices to have discussions with staff. Will this opportunity be made available to all Trustees, particularly the community-selected ones? If only certain Trustees will be visiting the offices, which ones will they be, and how will those Trustees be selected? --Regards, James(talk/contribs) 21:51, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Board members visit and meet with staff, and talk to staff, on a regular basis. I would personally like to see more of that, within certain sensible bounds that I've discussed here before. It's really important that board members be aware of what is going on with staff, and one of the biggest causes for the recent problems, I believe, has been a disconnect from the staff which has made it hard for the board to come to rapid understanding of noise.
In my case, I'm going to visit the Foundation at my own expense, as usual, as a volunteer, as usual. I claim no special privilege.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:22, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
More to the point, does this mean that the WMF's (ill-conceived) internal rule that staff contact must take place only with the chair of the Board of Trustees has been removed? Beyond that I won't draw the parallel to Doc James' proscribed activity, but should. Carrite (talk) 15:47, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
I'll look and see if I can find it again, I did read something to that effect recently. There needs to be a more fulsome communications channel, I believe. Carrite (talk) 02:54, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
There are numerous mentions of "going out of process" at Heilman's page compiling statements made on the removal. The most direct appears to be this one: With respect to Denny's statement that I acted out of process, yes I spoke with staff at staff's request. However, so did the majority of the rest of the trustees. And the chair and vice chair were aware of these conversations. Additionally the situation in question justified these conversations IMO. [...] With respect to the "disruption" I do not feel I can take responsibility for the engagement survey results. I did bring staff concerns forwards to the board but I was simply reporting these concerns. --Regards, James(talk/contribs) 05:43, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales, when you say that "I claim no special privilege", does that mean that you are abandoning your bizarre "lifetime trustee" claim? If so, I commend you for a wise decision and look forward to a fully democratic procedure for electing a new WMF board, to replace the current board which has clearly failed in its responsibilities. Cullen328Let's discuss it07:34, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Jim, it's not a matter of working towards a "fully democratic" board; recent events have revealed that there is no democracy on the board. The community does not elect trustees, it only "makes recommendations" and these 3/10 "recommended" candidates can be removed by the majority vote of the mostly unrecommended board. The replacement need not be "recommended" by the community via a vote, they can appoint whomever they wish. Two more of the board members are "recommended" by the narrow circles of connected Wikimedians in the organized user groups and are equally removable by the board. Four of ten they can pick from the sky based on any criterion whatsoever and they don't even have to know that ~~~~ will sign your name... None of these seem to appreciate that their role is of general oversight and strategic direction of WMF operations, they hire a director and obligingly defer everything. The other seat on the board is more or less a position for life for JW — the others rotate in and out with the wind (now even term-limited). There is no democratic election, period, and there is no mechanism of democratic control — no shareholders and no shareholders meeting. It is a weak, self-perpetuating institution that has one instrument of authority that it takes seriously, the hiring of an Executive Director. After that, there is a lot of nodding and voting yes, as nearly as I can tell — and Doc James is an object lesson of what happens if anyone takes their role differently. Carrite (talk) 12:50, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Sponsorship and product placement
Latest comment: 8 years ago56 comments12 people in discussion
Today's featured article is 2012 Budweiser Shootout and so it gets top billing on the main page. This topic is about a race and the mention of Budweiser is a bit of commercial sponsorship which is intended to promote that brand by associating it with such events. This bothers me as our policy WP:SOAP indicates that we should not be assisting such promotional activity. This trend is spreading from the US to the UK and it bothers me even more to find the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race billing itself as the The Cancer Research UK Boat Race and the BNY Mellon Boat Race. To what extent should we resist this infiltration of commercial sponsors into our topic titles? The BBC has a general policy of down-playing such promotions in their public-service broadcasting. Should we follow their example? Andrew D. (talk) 13:42, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
To be clear, most "topics" retain their non-sponsored name (e.g. The Boat Race(s), contrary to the implication above) and highlight the sponsorship names in the lead (e.g. "... (also known as The Cancer Research UK Boat Races) ...")). The Football League Cup and the FA Cup are other good examples of this. But these events have very clear, easy to identify names. What is the suggested alternative name for 2012 Budweiser Shootout for instance? Are you aware of WP:COMMONNAME? The Rambling Man (talk) 14:06, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
I tend to agree with Andrew that we should be cautious in this area, but I don't think we should have a firm and out-of-context rule against it. Without inviting an edit war about it, please, I just looked at an example that came to my mind that I'm familiar with. I sometimes use what nearly everyone in London calls "Boris bikes". Certainly in everyday speech that's the common name. I don't know about sources, but I suppose most news reports refer to them in the same way. This is likely annoying for the sponsors, who used to be Barclays bank and now is Santander bank. Anyway, our article is currently titled by their official name Santander cycles with Boris Bikes as a mere redirect. I'm unsure that's correct, although the sponsors must be happy about it.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:50, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, we are being cautious about it, and we do have a guideline that helps, it's the common name. All of the examples above where sponsorship isn't in the common name, the sponsorship doesn't appear in the article. It's up to the community to decide on the most appropriate names for these articles. And if we start to strip out the common names for some of these NASCAR races, what are we left with? Something like 2012 Aaron's 499 becomes 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Race 10? Nifty. The Rambling Man (talk) 14:55, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Yeah I checked a few NASCAR ones and I think our answer is reasonable there. But what you do think of the Santander cycles example? I am pretty sure it isn't the common name (though of course real research into what reliable sources say is warranted).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:14, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, Boris Bikes is certainly how I know them, and I was completely unaware that they had changed from Barclays to Santander, I guess they're all red now, and not blue? Either way, it'd be a reasonable shout for a WP:RM. The Rambling Man (talk) 15:15, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm not often with Andrew D., but in this case I certainly agree with the sentiment. Sure, it's probably not something we can do something about, and rules and regulations blah blah. But it's pretty sad that we have to go along with it. BTW, I had to click on the article link to find out that this was a car race. So it's a pretty unhelpful title as well. Drmies (talk) 15:05, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Commercial products should not be featured on the front page
I think the problem is deeper than this - I don't think we should feature commercial products on the front page period. I complain bitterly about once every 180 days when Square Enix gets another one of its products advertised here. (People tell me that some of them are old games, but so what? What company doesn't like seeing its name up in lights?) I think Main Page feature articles should be weighted toward more general articles - things that almost never make it through the process because they can never be "complete", unlike an ad for a single company's product. Now a sponsored event isn't necessarily a commercial product, but I think we would consider excusing some of the exceptions. Wnt (talk) 22:04, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
By "excusing some of the exceptions", do you mean putting articles into the Today's Featured Article space on the Main Page, that are not Featured Articles? MPS1992 (talk) 18:15, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
@MPS1992: I mean that if an article is not about a commercial product, but bears the name of a sponsor, I think we'd be OK with excusing it from a potential ban on commercialism and let it have a shot (a fair consideration like any other article) for TFA featured status. Ronald MacDonald House, that kind of thing. So I'd prefer not having a ban on sponsor names with the articles, and having only/instead a ban on commercial products as TFA. To be clear what I mean though, I think a NASCAR race is very clearly a commercial product - unless they have free admission and let people distribute footage of their race for free! Wnt (talk) 20:17, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, such a ban would certainly make choosing Today's Featured Article a lot easier. Once we have rendered ineligible all cars, airplanes and other forms of transport whether still produced or long obsolete, all buildings constructed by or for commercial companies, all tourist attractions and also historical locations that still have any tourist element, individuals mainly notable for involvement with a product or company, and any events that have or had commercial involvement apart from your few exceptions, the TFA slot on the main page will mainly be a rich diet of politicians, soldiers, and tropical weather systems. MPS1992 (talk) 20:44, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Well, if Rihanna didn't have a TFA today it wouldn't mean that she isn't a very good singer, but I might have taken it to mean she didn't have very good PR people, since after all, you'd think someone good at PR would have the skill and be willing to spend the resources to make something like that happen, to the point where it would seem out of place if they did not. Still, are there not enough animals, plants, countries, tourist attractions not behind a toll gate, astronomical bodies, wars, widgets sold by more than one company, minerals, ligaments, genes, kinds of fermented beverage, meteorological phenomena, firefighting techniques, gods, varieties of edged weapon, musical instruments, chemical weapons, retired locomotives? I know we see such things so infrequently they start to seem out of place, like how did this mook get on the stage?, but we could present a more more encyclopedic encyclopedia if we would feature more things that aren't actively being marketed. Wnt (talk) 18:23, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
It would be possible to propose such a thing. But the discussion of Wnt's extreme approach perhaps will give ideas as to possible pitfalls. MPS1992 (talk) 19:09, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, and while we are at it, lets ban everything else someone doesn't like because they don't like how the world works. Because if you are going to allow your bias to harm this project, you might as well go whole hog. Resolute19:21, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
@MPS1992: I did not actually propose a ban on articles that mention commercial entities in their lead paragraph ... though perhaps that can be gamed ... I was only speaking of articles about commercial products above. Also, I did not say that Rihanna's PR people got that article featured; nor will I say that DC Comics got their character featured today. It's entirely possible that, as Einstein would say, chance favors the prepared PR guy, and that all these companies hire people to sit around and do nothing and their products just appear in movies, news fluff etc. because they are really fundamental to society. Can't rule it out. Now as for the argument (@Resolute:) about censorship and bias, well, I am not a fan of censorship. I do note, however, that not every article gets to be on the front page; we choose them somehow, according to a bunch of criteria, and right now those criteria seem to be delivering a heavy mix of commercial products. I don't think it's really so censorious to feature articles about genres of music, or yearly reviews of music that mention multiple awards, rather than individual singers. I think the criteria are making it too easy to be 'comprehensive' about one little bit of nothing and pushing away higher-level content. Wnt (talk) 02:05, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Wnt! Welcome back. So, how have you been getting on? I have been working on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Hartebeest/archive2#Comments by MPS1992 and of course on the noble Hartebeest. I hope that the Hartebeest is not disqualified due to its meat being "highly regarded" as a commercial product in the lede, nor its "Relationship with humans" section advertising how healthy Hartebeest meat is due to its polyunsaturates to saturates ratio. Does this remind you of your favourite commercially advertised margarine? Are you OK with it? Do remember that the noble Hartebeest is actually an antelope-related critter, not a brand name.
I never denied that the people editing about commercial products do good work; they can be very professional. But... is that what we want? (I didn't get what you mean about the hartebeest) Wnt (talk) 14:49, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
@Wnt: - Yes, articles are picked for TFA on the basis of article quality. If you want to see more articles on genres of music, get to writing FAs about them. But yearly reviews are out, because we would be relying on commercial publications to compile those. Resolute14:43, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Most of the people who work at FAC as reviewers and whatnot are fair, helpful, and competent. If anyone has a different view, please tell anyone involved or post a note on a relevant talk page. If no one has a different view, then I'm not seeing how you can substantiate the argument that more suitable articles are being deliberately excluded from the Today's Featured Article section of the Main Page. - Dank (push to talk) 03:04, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for going through these in such detail. But there are so many inconsistencies and illogicalities in this that I do not think it could ever work as a proposal. You used the example previously of a Square Enix game that was published decades ago, is not for sale and has no commercial value. Here in this thread you explained that such items should not be permitted on TFA because, "What company doesn't like seeing its name up in lights?" But now, you say that if a game has been released under a public license, it would then be acceptable on TFA, even though that obviously will mean the publisher's name will be "up in lights" just as much as the previous example. And then you have an exception for people, so if Richard Branson or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs were brought to FA, they could appear in TFA bringing onto the Main Page a cascade of the brands, products, and services associated with them, but if someone brought the 1977 vintage technological landmark Apple II to FA, that would not be acceptable for TFA.
A proposal that bans from TFA as "too commercial" a historical article about a small loss-making football club founded in 1908, owned by its own supporters for a period of the history in question, is doomed to failure. That article went straight in your "clear commercial entries" list presumably because, of course, football clubs sell admission tickets to their games. But "notable real estate" is acceptable on TFA from your point of view apparently, even if the location in question is a museum that charges a fee for admittance or makes a profit from its attached souvenir shop or tea shop. And a featured article about a culturally significant but commercially irrelevant punk album from 1982 drops straight into your list of unacceptable items, and presumably still would even if the band itself were defunct. It's just not sensible.
It is all very well railing against popular culture and the crassly commercial nature of it, but we do also need to consider the readers. They currently get a useful and educational sprinkling of wars and warships and long-dead bishops and politicians, and to me it does not seem sensible to deny them topics in which they might have more interest alongside that.
Above, when you said we should "feature more things that aren't actively being marketed", I suggested that we should contribute to exactly that, by working on featured article candidates that are not commercial. You don't seem to have contributed - do you plan to? MPS1992 (talk) 19:39, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Like I said, I didn't claim to have this to the stage of a formal proposal - and it is true that some of the nuances would need careful investigation. If enacted, the policy would be a major part of TFA, and what aspect of TFA policy has not felled virtual forests with debate? It is possible I misclassified the football club - what I went by was that I read in the article the club had been sold back in the early 2000s; what you can sell is a commercial product. Also, as I said, people aren't really an exception - the problem is, they simply are not products. How would you categorize Donald Trump? Banning vanity coverage of particular people, based on some criteria or another, is simply a whole different proposal that I don't want to figure out at this time. Lastly, I think defunct products could be excepted from such a proposal, but we'd have to be careful. Defunct products that are still owned can still form part of someone's "brand" and have stringent copyright restrictions to match. Only when the products are genuinely defunct - in the sense that you can claim "abandoned work" status - or have been free-licensed for the world to play with, would I really like to see them showcased on the Main Page. Wnt (talk) 00:50, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Here's the problem. You didn't mis-classify the football team. It is still operating, and it still tries to sell a product. So does every other sports team. Every singer, even every politician. Every book. Every song. Every author. Even every politician. Donald Trump is easy. The man exists to sell himself, ergo he is out. When you talk about "nuance", you are really only talking about making exceptions designed to apply your bias in a ham-fisted ban on what specific "commercial products" you don't like while allowing the "commercial products" you do. And undermining all of this is the fact that this proposal is hostile to the dissemination of information, which runs counter to the mandate of a project that aims to spread information. Resolute15:26, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
I agree with you Resolute. This seems to be more about excluding topics that someone doesn't think are high brow enough to be on the main page (NASCAR, Video Games, Pop Music) than anything else. --In actu (Guerillero) | My Talk15:32, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
As I understand what Wnt is suggesting, what he means is that Wikipedia should not be utilized to promote commercial products. I think that's a good general principle. Execution is another matter. If we have an article on Coretheapple Self-Whitening Toothpaste and it is worked up to GA and then FA status, perhaps with the always-helpful assistance of paid editors, does that go on the main page? That's the kind of situation I would envision, which can be handled on a case-by-case basis. There is no reason for editors to get all defensive and for their underwear to get into a twist over this. Coretheapple (talk) 15:36, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
The genesis of this debate was an auto race. That the race has a corporate sponsor is incidental to the race. But you know what? If someone takes the time to make Budweiser a FA, it deserves its day on the main page, just like any other FA. Resolute17:50, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
I have no opinion on the auto race, but the issue is interesting: where does one draw the line in terms of commercial exploitation of the main page? Does one draw a line at all? In the case of my hypothetical toothpaste, I've utilized the services of the finest paid editors around, drafting entire sections of the article as is permitted, to guide the formation of an article of FA quality on my toothpaste. Does that deserve its day on the main page? Coretheapple (talk) 18:18, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
If someone writes an article about your toothpaste company that reaches FA status, it deserves to eventually be featured as TFA. I don't think your efforts to slant the question by integrating the possibility of paid editing or PR shills aids debate on whether or not something with commercial interest or sponsorship deserves to be TFA. Those are separate questions. Resolute19:47, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
No, they're related, as paid editors congregate in articles about brands and commercial products. I think the way to deal with them is on a case-by-case basis, as indeed the article about my toothpaste may not be written by me or my reps. But it needs to be carefully scrutinized for that possibility, and if I have heavily participated it needs to be taken into consideration. As for NASCAR etc., I don't know enough about that subject to comment on it. Coretheapple (talk) 13:45, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
I see a big difference between an article being about being about a commercial product and an article be written or promoted to featured article status by people directly working for the company that produced said product. With the exception of the fictional toothpaste the only commercial products mentioned in this discussion so far have been the NASCAR race and Square Enix video games. Up to this point no evidence has been presented that employees of either company or people paid by them have been involved in either getting the articles promoted to feature article status or on the main page so I don't think the toothpaste example works here. If there was evidence that would be a different story though.--67.68.20.86 (talk) 19:43, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
To put it another way I don't think we should be basing this hypothetical articles but actual evidence that something like paid editing is actually happening on specific articles.--67.68.20.86 (talk) 19:48, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
(ec) The possibility of an article being promoted through paid editing is entirely feasible, and I think it's helpful to prepare for that eventuality, and also to set some common-sense boundaries in lesser cases. I don't know much about NASCAR and video games so I can't really speak to those examples. Coretheapple (talk) 19:52, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
The issue here is that the original proposel was to prevent all commercial products from being put on the Main Page not only articles about commercial products that have been created and promoted via paid editing. No one opposing the proposal has indicated that the support articles written by paid editors as a TFA and I am confident that if if there is evidence to this nature in a real article it would not become one.--67.68.20.86 (talk) 20:06, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Considering that the large number of articles on corporations and people that have involvement by the subject, in particular by PR firms that operate openly and do a good job, I think it's only a matter of time before those articles get promoted. Coretheapple (talk) 20:11, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
It seems to me that if it were likely to happen, we would already have examples of it. Regardless, you are still conflating two separate issues. Resolute21:48, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
I think it's a good idea to make sure everyone is on the same page so I do have a question for Coretheapple. Are you suggesting that we need to be vigilant about the possibility of companies paying editors to write and promote articles to feature article status or are you agreeing with Wnt's proposal to ban articles on commercial products from being at TFA based on the hypothetical possibility that this could happen in the future?--67.68.20.86 (talk) 22:15, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes to both. I think that Wikipedia needs to not be commercially exploited, even unintentionally. It's bad enough that we have corporate PR people drafting entire sections of articles, and sometimes entire articles. It's a slippery slope before those entire articles to FA, and then on the main page. This is not some ditsy theoretical possibility. Coretheapple (talk) 13:41, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
It doesn't matter. The point is to head off such a possibility, to be proactive, not to close the barn door after the cows have gone. Coretheapple (talk) 14:53, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
It very much does matter, because nobody should be expected to even consider blacklisting of hard work editors put in to topics Coretheapple doesn't like over nebulous fears. What you are doing is similar in principle to the "but terrorism!" arguments our governments have made to place every greater restrictions on us. I am not willing to entertain rule creep that has an objectively negative impact on our mission on the basis of some nebulous boogeyman. Resolute20:33, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
I appreciate that you've ratcheted up the rhetoric to an absurd level, as it indicates to me that this is an area that bears careful watching. I thank Wnt for raising the issue. Coretheapple (talk) 21:00, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
@Resolute: The ham-fistedness of what I suggested (and it is, really) is not the result of my bias, but the result of my attempt to make the line as clear as possible. I'm not saying that the race should be kept off the page because it is sponsored, but because the race itself is a commercial product, by which I mean, something with a price that can be bought and sold. Donald Trump may seem like a commercial product, but at least until he repeals some constitutional amendments he can't really be bought and sold, so he would not be affected by a ban on articles about commercial products. Whereas a sports team, however local and unimportant, that has been sold from one party to another really is a commercial product. What I suggested is also meant to have nothing to do with a ban on paid editing. That ban assumes that you can figure out who is paid editing - I'm assuming we can't, and that PR people will (and perhaps do) get their products featured on the Main Page every week and we can't prove a damn thing about it. So I'm not accusing; it doesn't even matter. What difference does it make if a company really does have die-hard fans who want to work on pushing its products every six months without getting paid to do so? It still distorts the range of Main Page content. Wnt (talk) 17:21, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Without wishing to interrupt or set aside the very valid challenge that User:Resolute has set Coretheapple above, I wish to extend the same suggestion and request to Coretheapple that I earlier extended to Wnt. (Wnt has still not contributed as far as I can tell.) I believe that changes can be made, and that they can most easily be made by introducing a systemic bias in favour of totally non-commercial topics at WP:TFA. The simple way to achieve this is to work on such topics and their candidacies. I am currently working on Hartebeest, which has become even less commercial as the candidacy has proceeded. That article now has sufficient active reviewers, but Coretheapple or anyone else who feels like helping, can take any non-commercial and non-brand topic in WP:FAC#Older nominations and either improve the article based on the suggestions provided, or else add their own comments on how the article might be perfected. This is where articles gain their right to be on TFA, so it's important. Coretheapple, would you like to help? MPS1992 (talk) 23:09, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
The problem with your idea is I feel like you're asking the volunteers to play John Henry (folklore). On one side, there may be paid but unknown company editors bound and determined to get their products featured. On the other, volunteers playfully competing against one another. The competition is to see who can best answer the most picayune complaints about this or that article. I don't think it is possible to overwhelm commercial influence by this means indefinitely, though there are indeed some dogged feature article writers who put up a good fight. As for me, I prefer beginnings to endings - but just because I don't frequent FAC doesn't mean I can't see when we have the same company on the front page every six months. Wnt (talk) 13:50, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
So you feel that making vague insinuations here on Jimbo's talk page every six months when Square Enix happens to be mentioned in a TFA about an old computer game, has more chance of achieving something useful than helping to forward the candidacy of the noncommercial articles that you have specifically said should be favoured for TFA? Hmm. As for "picayune complaints", in the first noncommercial FA candidate that I'm working on, one of the problems that I raised, now fixed, had the entire animal upside down. That's not trivial. MPS1992 (talk) 14:21, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
I hope that this same bias against noncommercial candidates is extended to me when I try to promote my GAs, as they are noncommercial and I feel ripe. Meanwhile I need to explore further the process to ascertain how to guard against commercial abuse. Coretheapple (talk) 16:14, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
I think that indicating GA- or FA-level quality rating is something different. Yes, getting on the lists of GAs and FAs provides some commercial advantage, but compared to the number who browse to Wikipedia.org, how many people really browse through the GAs and FAs daily? The Main Page seems maybe ten thousand times more valuable from a marketing perspective, so I limited my suggestion to TFA appearances only. Wnt (talk) 20:26, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Ahahaha, how much misunderstanding can we have in just this one small topic? I interpreted Coretheapple's comment as meaning that he might soon try to bring Joan McCracken, Michael Kidd, LeRoy Prinz or Johnny Broderick from GA to FA status. Of course, if he succeeds with any one or several, all of those that succeed are then almost guaranteed an appearance at TFA. MPS1992 (talk) 21:33, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I had those articles in mind for elevation. They are totally noncommercial, and if someone is planning to bring out a Joan McCracken Brand Toothpaste I am not involved in it. Coretheapple (talk) 21:38, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Group norms and psychological safety
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments7 people in discussion
With everything that's going down, Jimbo might like to read this recent paper: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. It raises as many questions as it answers but the main message seems to be that making a successful team requires attention to human factors which are difficult to get right. The concepts that it presents include group norms and psychological safety. The latter seems relevant to Wikipedia as well as the WMF as I recall Jimbo explaining how, in the early days, he was rather intimidated by the prospect of writing an encyclopedia article which would be read and critiqued by the world. This may be useful food for thought as we try to perfect our processes. Andrew D. (talk) 18:03, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Very interesting read. Somewhat more relevant to WMF, as much of it relates to physical meetings, but there are lessons to be learned. I would like to see that research extended to groups (such as editors working together) where there is very little face-to-face time and mostly asynchronous conversations.--S Philbrick(Talk)18:19, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
On WP, for "group norms", WP has has "language competence" (people writing words/concepts as others understand them, and being reasonably adept at understanding others). For "psychological safety", we have AGF. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:24, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
We are supposed to haveWP:AGFandWP:Civility but they aren't enforced well or equitably, so in my experience we really don't have them. The article says that psychological safety is "a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up," which would be really nice to actually have culturally in Wikipedia. We have instead a lot of abusiveness. SageRad (talk) 00:19, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
I'm sorry you find abuse, but at some point you have to understand an idea or approach is rejected by others - it's not incivil to have an idea or approach rejected. As for punishment, it's also not punishment to have an idea or approach rejected. If one persists, however, insisting to have their way after it has been rejected than there is nothing left to do except say, no, in increasingly process oreinted ways, in short, find something else to be involved in. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:04, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
"If one persists, however, insisting to have their way after it has been rejected..." It is relevant to ask who is doing the rejection. In my experience, the rejection is done by a small number of editors who claim (without any evidence) to be speaking on behalf of the Wikipedia community. Biscuittin (talk) 19:13, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Saved as PDF. I can't read it right now as I'm having dinner with friends in a few minutes, but hopefully I can read it on my flight to San Francisco tomorrow.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:34, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
For group norms: An intense connection with the editing community will help keep our "group norms" grounded in reality, because the core problems have not changed for us; for over 5 years we have been discussing wp:edit-conflicts in talk-pages as well as busy hot-topic articles where a typo or factual error gets "edit-conflict" and "edit-conflict", plus the diff-utility has been so bad that back in Oct 2012, the page "Help:diff" was expanded to warn users to split paragraphs (or add blank lines) as a separate edit; how many years have categories sorted alpha 1, 10, 11..., 2, 20, 21 (or German WP would sort umlaut "Übersetzung" after "Z" not correctly under "U"!) and people are fed-up now; we have known reliability was an issue and we have long needed per-article watchdog filters and templates to ensure Jeb Bush is NOT an "avid rock climber" nor did Hurricane Katrina make first landfall in "Kansas" rather than "Louisiana"; meanwhile people will always flock to WP to find the latest info about movies, sports, game shows, awards, and new songs but we need smarter cite templates to wp:autofix cite parameters inside a megapage such as "Hello (Adele song)" rather than scar pages with trivial red-error messages for weeks or 2.5 years (see: Cogito ergo sum, rev. 79759); hence all these long-term issues can ground our shared "Group norms" with the WMF staff and other-language wikipedias. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:46, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Important
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Problems with Selecting Correct Link due to Shifting Content
Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion
Please excuse the section title but I'm not sure of the technical term for this and the pun may help attract attention.
I just experienced a common aggravation with the Wikipedia browser interface. What happens is that I loaded a Wikipedia page into a browser. The page happened to be a stub but it can happen with any page and is more likely with long pages. As the page started loading, I spotted a link that I wanted to click on and so stabbed at it with my mouse pointer. But, as the page completed loading, the alignment of the visible portion changed, jerking the position of the link to a different place on the screen and so I actually clicked on a different link. I then had to back up and do over. This happens frequently and it's quite annoying.
My impression is that happens because there's a layer of secondary content presented by javascript or templates and this is only parsed and formatted after the primary page contentshifts as would include banners, menu options and other material which appears at the top of the page display.
My device or browser may be a factor. In this case, it was a Chromebook which has a slow processor and so takes time to digest a complex page. I also observe similar behaviour on my tablet which likewise has a comparatively slow processor and so takes time to finish loading a page.
The WMF developers in SF may not notice such effects if they are using powerful workstations with high-speed internet connections. When Jimbo is over there, please can he find out what is done to check that Wikipedia works smoothly on a variety of common devices – both fast and slow.
Reverted the edit on this. Content is useful feedback & title is 'roll the dice' on that feedback. No need for an over-zealous delete. AnonNep (talk) 13:23, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Happens to me frequently. But usually on Watchlist, where I end up reverting or rolling back useful edits (obviously with no edit summary) or even thanking unknown editors for vandalism (even though it may be really good vandalism, of course) Martinevans123 (talk) 13:31, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Screen shifted by Javascript: See wp:custom to re-customize the screen. The jerk-around screen also happens in some categories with long blurbs, and a click-on a page could trigger a nearby page instead. You might learn to "pre-wrong" click the opposite wrong word so it will become the correct click once the screen shifts afterward, but you need to pace your responses to the speed of the current device. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:41, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
I notice it on the tabs across the top of the page, because I have options selected to reformat them - they show up one way first, and then shift around a little, and I end up clicking the wrong tab and doing things like watchlisting instead of viewing history, etc. I'm pretty sure it's nothing to do with your computer power or internet bandwidth - I'm using a reasonably powerful Mac Pro and 100mbps broadband. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:55, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Take time to extend your life & telomeres
Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
Jimbo, I am beginning to think this talk-page is likely to shorten your life, so beyond drinking plenty of fluids, perhaps also take more time here to read about health issues, such as:
"Life extension" - the general topic about living longer
"telomeres" - the "null padding" after genes to survive DNA truncation
Please take more time, for yourself, to benefit from (re-)reading various acticles here to improve your life. There have been so many scientific advances in the past 15 years, the progress has been amazing, and you can check each article "History" tab to track the updates. As you know, many other users will add replies in other threads on this page, so you never need worry if other people can't get enough key answers. Just sayin'. -Wikid77 (talk) 01:41, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, that's very kind of you. Actually, since December 1st I have been on a health kick. I lost 5 lbs in December and 5 lbs in January - February has not been as productive, but I have maintained my weight. I still need to lose a fair amount of weight to get to what is considered medically optimal, but I already feel much better. A big part of that has been watching my food intake, but another big part is a dedication to trying really hard to average 10,000 steps a day - I haven't quite hit the target for February I'm afraid but I'm damned close and hope to get there in March.
Also, in large part because my 50th birthday is coming up, I've had a fair number of health tests since October and I'm happy to report that I'm in decent shape. Not quite in need of organ transplant from cloned tissues just yet. But I'll read the articles you mention anyway - it's an interesting topic.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:00, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
It might interest you to know (if you don't) that the "medically optimal" weight might not actually be optimal. If weight is classified using body mass index (the usual way), then statistics show that people in the "overweight" range actually have slightly better life expectancy than people in the "normal" range -- people in the "obese" range have substantially reduced life expectancy, and even more so for people in the "underweight" range. (Citations can be found in Body mass index#Variation in relationship to health.) Anyway it's still a very good idea to be aerobically fit -- fitness is probably a more important predictor of heath than weight, overall. Looie496 (talk) 22:54, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. Yes, I've read that sort of thing. I'm currently at 190, down from 200 (actually down from like 208 last summer). Certain charts say I should be 158-159 based on my height - I think that's pretty unlikely! But I think 175 (my first long term goal) is a good starting point, and increasing aerobic fitness is important too. My sister has challenged me to run a half-marathon and so I've been easing into aerobic fitness.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:37, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Some friends of mine have switched to using vegetable soups to stay full, or so-called "negative calorie foods" (celery, apples) which burn calories to chew, but that can be difficult when dining out. I've heard waiters in the U.S. will serve "half-portion" meals when asked, otherwise dining out can derail the meal plan. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:11, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Jimbo, according to the London Cycling Guide, on the last Friday of each month (so you just missed one) there is a "Critical Mass" ride around town. It starts off from the National Film Theatre beside Waterloo Bridge and sounds like a swell way to keep fit. All the best, 81.149.218.171 (talk) 15:54, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Hello Jytdog, I can't speak for Jimmy, but since he has some quite pressing things to deal with at the moment, and I appreciate your concern, I thought I would respond to points that I can. I was not on the board when this grant was submitted, but was until July. – SJ +05:19, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Sj That is super nice of you. Yes I imagine Jimmy has his hands very full in SF and I hope he is bringing comfort, and learning. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 07:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
About James dismissal, I explained how the gap between what the sides are saying is tearing up the community, asked if you understood that, and asked if you would commit to work toward a joint statement, perhaps with a mediator. you wrote, I understand that. I'm open to trying, but I don't see how it is possible. Perceptions seem radically different.. I asked if you would actually commit to trying. That is unanswered. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Sure, I will if he will, but I continue to think that this isn't really going to be the most effective way forward. What I continue to advocate for at the board level is the freedom to talk openly about why we voted James off the board. I think I've been the most open amongst the board members, and that isn't a criticism of other board members - we've been advised to be cautious about what we say, and I'm just a little more empowered by my position to be blunt. I've advocated for something that is probably a bad idea - publishing a whole whack of internal board emails. Ok, so that's probably extreme, so I am not pushing hard for it. But the current situation is not where I would like it to be.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:33, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Doc James, would you please reply here, to the "I will (commit to trying) if he will" from Jimmy? Thanks, Jimmy, and thanks in advance, Doc James. Again, I encourage use of a mediator due to everything that has transpired. Jytdog (talk) 23:19, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
I am supportive of an independent review of these matters as I have stated a number of times already. I am also happy to go over the issues and documents publically following the publishing of "a whole whack of internal board emails". Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:58, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
I've asked in several different ways for you to tell the story of how the vision for technology development has evolved over the past year - the vision that produced Discovery's three year plan and the long-term plans discussed in Knight grant including its board-approved $2,445,873 budget for Stage 1. I've also asked where this vision stands now. You have not provided that. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
I think I've answered with all that there is to know, as I've said. Sj's comment, next, is quite good. I think you're looking for something much more grand. To really understand all this, you have to really grasp that there was never a grand plan to fundamentally change everything. There was what I think is great - a discussion of a challenging but achievable project to improve search and discovery on the site.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:33, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
First, the Board did not specially approve a $2.5M budget for 'stage 1' of the grant proposal. Financial approvals by the board happen in bulk every May-June when it reviews the annual plan. The board approved the 2015-16 annual plan, with funding for the entire staff, in June. This included funding for the discovery team. The board had not seen any version of this grant at that point; the team's budget was funded based on its public projects and targets. The budget mentioned in the grant proposal seems to be the annual budget for that team. [Trying to fit the realities of an annual planning cycle into the requirements of a funding proposal is not unusual in the grants world.]
Second, the vision for the discovery team was only part of the total technical vision (and technical budget). The overall vision was most concisely defined earlier in 2015 by the Call to Action. Portions of that call that this grant might touch on [I am speculating here]: a simplified user experience, new models for knowledge creation, and strengthening partnerships with orgs that use or contribute free knowledge. The only discussion the board had about the development of a Discovery roadmap and vision, before the grant was submitted, was around a presentation at the July meeting. It seemed a piece of the scaffolding in the call to action, facilitating curation. It did not seem like a dramatic shift for the projects or tech infrastructure overall. – SJ +05:19, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
I hear all that. This is more detail that what Jimmy provided in the first go round (now in the archive). You have focused tightly on the Knight grant, and that was not really what I was asking about. It is more about the the vision/long term strategy that produced the Knight grant - the story that would have been told while the three-year Discovery deck was being delivered - the arc that would WMF from where it is now to being a really innovative tech company, centered around delivering value in the form non-commercial knowledge that readers could get only through the wikipedia.org portal. That thing. The thing that Doc James said he was told had a multi-year, multi-tens-of-millions of dollar cost. Was any of that vision solidifying while you were on the board? Jytdog (talk) 07:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Ah, I see. "Arc to a really innovative tech company" – interesting question. I think there are some great innovations now, in individual teams. An overall arc is an open question; every plan and strategy thinks about / touches on that, but I didn't sense a grand arc tied to "changing the tech essence of the foundation" tied to Discovery. (That said: it is a new team, with a new lead, and tackling fairly new use cases, so as with all such teams, a chance for something different to develop.)
I don't recall discussing a three-year Discovery plan; just the ideas around 'Year 0' with some general thoughts about how this could have excellent feedback w/ wikidata and maps. The greater detail seems interesting, and might have spurred useful board discussion - but it didn't come up while I was on the board.
Even in the three-year plan, I may have missed something, but I don't see anyone aiming for 'things readers could only get through wp.org' – the project seems committed to connecting many different free knowledge sources and making them all more visible. I hope it is possible to learn more about these ideas this year, in the public strategic brainstorming. I think it's essential for the projects and the foundation to look outwards, form partnerships, and think+work at this scale, and hope this series of communication failures doesn't discourage such brainstorming in the future.
Finally: I may draw the line at three-indent discussions :) I don't want to belabor these points & trying to support the current changes in other ways. But thanks for these patient questions. – SJ +22:34, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
I've asked you to let me know if the WMF board considers that vision and its evolution to be confidential and said that this appears to be the case. You have not responded to that. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
I don't think long term vision should ever be confidential. My point is that you're looking for something that, in my opinion, doesn't exist and didn't exist. Indeed, one of the major staff criticisms of Lila and one thing she acknowledged as problematic, is that formalizing a long term strategy was taking much too long.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:33, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
This is hard to hear. Saying "vague" and not defining further, is not helping. I feel like you are relying on a narrow interpretation of "strategy" here and above to not tell the story. There is a story. Things happened with regard to planning. I can only conclude that the board considers the evolving story confidential. I'm sorry. Jytdog (talk) 23:40, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Gorillawarfare's timeline makes it clear that things were first pitched to Knight in April and the KE was actually presented to the board at the end of June. The board sat there and heard that, and there was a story that was told as the slides were presented. We don't know what was in either of those pitches, nor if that was in the main stream of what Lila had been talking about or if she and her team went rogue. Please tell the story. If you actually don't know the story, please say that. If you consider the story confidential, please say that. Jytdog (talk) 17:49, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
This was never the case when I was on the board; I do not think that this has changed. It is more likely that the vision was simply unclear, than that it evolved into something confidential that could not be shared. – SJ +05:19, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
I hear that and this is also what Jimmy said - about it being vague. This is hard to understand because things like the 3-year discovery plan was actually presented and the Knight foundation people were told something about the bigger story that the grant application is the first stage of. In my professional life I don't pitch things that are not well thought out and that I have buy in from my management for. The WMF - the entity - seems to have had some story definitive enough to tell. How can I hear that story - and the variations on it as it changed? That is what I am after. I know I am nobody and nobody owes me anything. But not getting an answer (or being told - hey go ask over there) is making it ~feel~ like this is stuff that is considered confidential. That's all. Thanks again! Jytdog (talk) 07:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
"How can I hear that story - and the variations on it as it changed? That is what I am after. I know I am nobody and nobody owes me anything. But not getting an answer (or being told - hey go ask over there) is making it ~feel~ like this is stuff that is considered confidential." Well, if this is all about wanties not needies, and all based on feelies, why not back off and end it here? AnonNep (talk) 10:41, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Because it is important to me at least, and I think to others. And I like Sj and want to explain myself. I don't know who you are, and based on what you wrote here, I am good with that. Jytdog (talk) 11:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
"Because it is important to me" Hence my point - ego based discussions are rarely constructive. "I don't know who you are, and based on what you wrote here, I am good with that." Ditto. Meow, girlfriend. AnonNep (talk) 11:16, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
You may consider it weak, but I am trying to keep this conversation human, and own what i know and don't know, and be clear that I am only speaking for me, and not making Grand Statements like people tend to make here. I am not climbing the reichstag; I am trying to have a conversation. Now shoo kitty. Jytdog (talk) 23:48, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
You wanted respectful discussion & answers? Look at your own behaviour & don't howl about how you didn't get it (in more ways than one) *whoosh* (sound of conversation sliding above your head). AnonNep (talk) 08:36, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
As Lila has acknowledged that not engaging the community sooner was a mistake, I've asked you about the board's role in that, as the body to which she is accountable. You have not responded. Jytdog (talk) 19:26, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
As far as I know, there was never any pressure from the board nor any individual board members to not communicate with the community about long term vision and strategy. Indeed, the sentiment from the board - both community-selected members and other members - has always been broadly to encourage open discussion and disclosure.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 19:33, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes this is what you said before and it is still high level, as it was before. Please be aware that all the information in GorillaWarfare's timeline is there for everyone to see. The lack of transparency, and the criticism given directly to the board over the lack of transparency from many quarters (and not from flakes) is very very clear. Please address the question. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 23:40, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I've read the timeline. What I'm telling you is that as far as I know, there was never any pressure from the board or any individual board members to not communicate with the community about long term vision and strategy. I'm not sure what you think is wrong with that statement. I think I've asked the question - you asked me about Lila acknowledging that not engaging the community sooner being a mistake. You asked me what the board's role in that was. I'm telling you: the board has broadly encouraged open discussion and disclosure, and I'm unaware of anyone individually giving her advice to hide anything about long term strategy about Discovery from the community. How is that not addressing the question - it seems like a very direct answer to me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:06, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
it is not answering the question because it leaves a perfect hole where a direct response would be; my sense is you are asking me to read between the lines of "broadly encouraged open discussion and disclosure" and "no one told her not to" and the only things I can put there are things like: "Lila refused to bring this to the community although the board told her to do so, and we didn't make it clear enough that her job depended on her doing that and doing it well" or "we actually didn't know the kind of plans that were being pitched in the WMF's name; and if we had, we would have driven community engagement sooner". Please don't ask me to read between the lines. I am asking you to please tell me where the board was, on overseeing Lila as she made the ongoing mistake of not engaging the community. Jytdog (talk) 17:23, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
The board has broadly encouraged open discussion and disclosure, and I'm unaware of anyone individually giving her advice to hide anything about long term strategy. Going into slightly more depth than that, I didn't see anything particularly unusual or controversial about the concepts being presented to us about the evolving ideas around improving search and discover, and I simply assumed that there was community discussion and consultation about it. The grander concept which, as I now understand, Damon was pitching via cloak-and-dagger PGP encrypted files (one employee told me that he had to give his PGP key on a USB stick because Damon didn't trust the public keyservers), didn't really get traction and was quickly abandoned. By the time of the board meeting in Mexico City, we specifically discussed that this would not be anything like a "Google competitor". As to the exact details of every single discussion with funders, obviously the board is not privy to those as a practical matter. Certainly had we understood that a disconnect was going on, and that the community was not being consulted, we absolutely would have pushed harder for community engagement sooner. As it is, I think most likely other board members, like me, simply assumed that it was being talked about and not treated as some kind of super top secret thing. Is that helpful?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 23:25, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for replying. With all of the sturm und drang that is detailed in the Timeline - much of which concerns transparency (which includes engaging the community of course) - and it is all right there, from the funds dissemination committee in May, to James email in October, to Asaf's response to Lila in November, especially the Funds Dissemination Committee note on November 23 ("They state that they are "appalled by the closed way that the WMF has undertaken both strategic and annual planning, and the WMF's approach to budget transparency (or lack thereof)" ..... all the evidence says that Board was well aware that Lila was not engaging the community. I started this in the hope that this could be an authentic engagement and you could move toward regaining the community's trust. You. are. lying. You are displaying the arrogance of power and demonstrating the reality that you and the Board are not accountable to the community. And that is where we are. Jytdog (talk) 03:23, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Calling a lie a lie, is not rude. It is completely disrespectful to pretend to have a conversation, which is what Jimmy has been doing. This will all come out eventually. I was trying to open the door wide for him to walk through. I am not taking a break. I am done. Jytdog (talk) 08:50, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Good, Jytdog, you never came here to have a conversation. You came to accuse from your very first mistake laden post. So by your standard: you. are. lying. - Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:33, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
I truly hope that Jimbo Wales will not try to wriggle away from addressing in detail the damning sequence of events described so clearly in the timeline written by GorillaWarfare, and thanks to her for taking the time to compile it. There are many things that could be said, but haven't yet been said, though the slanderous "utter fucking bullshit" originated right here on this talk page, from Jimbo himself. The time to apologize and explain is right here right now, but board members say they need to consult with lawyers first, and the lawyers are just too busy. Why not do the right thing, and resign from the board now instead? Cullen328Let's discuss it07:51, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Tons of weasling here. Why, for fuck sake, didn't the board or yourself come up with this on your own account but hide behind such nonsense like urging towards full publication, encouraging open discussion and other non-content sentences, when you could do this stuff all by yourself? You simply ditched the responsibility you have as a board by staying non-open and thus encouraged the secrecy. Come out in the open with everything, nobody needs to be asked, as openness is one of the fundamental principles here, you have to have very good reasons not to be completely open, and up to now not a single one was given. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ (talk)10:40, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
How is "demonstrating the reality that you and the Board are not accountable to the community" "displaying the arrogance of power" or even "lying"? It's just the way the system works. 81.149.218.171 (talk) 15:48, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Genius: Wikipedia's competitor?
Latest comment: 8 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
To continue from a comment I made above under "WMF mission", here is an example of the sort of thing that Wikipedia could have been doing, which we've instead left to a "web 2.0" type private competitor. According to a recent article, ProPublica is trying to track down records about what 700 U.S. Navy ships were doing in Vietnam, primarily to assist soldiers exposed to Agent Orange to pursue medical claims. Dating back to Wikipedia:September 11 victims and the WP:NOT restrictions, Wikipedia doesn't provide a place for this kind of data collection, and so the people at ProPublica have turned to Genius.com to track the data via annotations on their article page (using various scripts such as at genius.codes). Despite being featured on Google News, it doesn't look like they are getting a lot of response - it's a pretty arcane thing to request help for, especially in a transient news article. Still, it seems like a wake-up call, because as you can see at the genius.com site, the company is trying to get crowdsourced annotations on historical documents in a way that competes directly with WMF projects.
My feeling is that Genius is deeply handicapped by programmer sensibilities - it looks like what Wikipedia might look like if the people who designed Flow had had a chance to write and carry out a complete wish list. Just try reading "Heart of Darkness Part I" scrolling up and down one little column of text riddled with white space. More to the point, the text is filled with contiguous blocks of text that seem to be claimed by the first person to post, apparently, who puts up the wrong kind of picture for the ship for example, and then you read the most-upvoted response for why he's wrong. All this depends on a huge amount of slow scripting from aites all over the web, including one I remember mostly for the time it was hacked and readers of major American newspapers were being sent to the Syrian Electronic Army.[22] It is not exactly a beguiling site, but the rule of crowdsourced projects is that whoever actually does something is the best person for the job.
I'll indulge a moment to gripe about the ill fate of my attempt to do a similar annotation project for Charter 08 at Wikisource (s:Charter 08). I simply linked various terms to what articles I could find about the relevant Chinese history terms, nothing fancy, but I thought it was a good way to add value to something that to me was not very easy to understand. Well, you'll see it's a dead link now because someone over there decided that the charter - which people went to prison to disseminate to the world - was not "public domain", even though the translation I cited referenced itself as GFDL. There are people who say that deletionists are not a conspiracy seeking to destroy Wikipedia, but they would be wrong. Technically, we have a vastly better medium to do this kind of annotation, but the question is, can we harden our resolve to use it? Wnt (talk) 19:24, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
With regard to Charter 08, the deletion log states: "Note that translation has GFDL release, if/when the orginal comes back into PD, the translation can be used." The status of the translation is irrelevant if the original is copyrighted and (presumably, unless you can show us evidence) unlicensed, because it is a derivative work. Are you advocating that Wikimedia projects should host more unlicensed copyrighted material? (This is a more general question.) That would destroy us, because we are about free knowledge, which is why we use free licenses. BethNaught (talk) 19:39, 27 February 2016 (UTC) And before you ask, yes, I do think fair use material is overused on enwiki. BethNaught (talk) 19:37, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
@BethNaught: It's a request for more information than I should need to have. When you find a respectable website that has a copy or adaptation of a document and says the copy has a specific free license, you should be able to take that at its word. It's not feasible to investigate and second-guess further. For example, Wikimedia Commons will host content found free-licensed on Flickr, without trying to track down each and every person who put the photo on Flickr and verify where they got it etc. Especially when it is so implausible that its distribution would be restricted in any way, and many people - such as Marco Rubio, currently a leading candidate for U.S. president - currently host copies of this document.[23]— Preceding unsigned comment added by Wnt (talk • contribs) —Preceding undated comment added 22:51, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
I didn't think that anybody was blaming you. But if it has emerged that the source document is non-free, no amount of reasonable assumptions can change the truth. If someone uploaded a Flickr file to Commons in good faith, and it was later found to be a copyvio, nobody should blame them (I can't say if this happens in practice) but it should still be deleted on copyright grounds. As for other people hosting it, I do not see how that is relevant for our purposes. BethNaught (talk) 22:56, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
This is kind of a tail wagging the dog here, but to go into it a little further, AFAIK nobody ever provided any reason to think the original was not free-licensed. It was discussed here - I think (can't see myself) that after I uploaded the translation with its license, someone added a tag saying it was public domain in China because it was censored - then China changed its law in 2010 to say that censored works didn't lose copyright - then in 2012 someone noticed and deleted the whole thing because under URAA it might not be PD in the U.S. even if it remained PD in China because there was no retroactive change there. If that seems a little crazy, well, the impression I have is that Wikisource will do just about anything to get rid of manifestos, Dylann Storm Roof, that shooter from Finland and so forth - you should see the veritable river of nonsense they tapped into to suppress Ted Kaczinski's manifesto based on a claim that a government auction of stuff in his shack years afterward retroactively took it out of the public domain. There's really no ideological or practical distinction in this kind of thing; anyone who decides to censor the Unabomber's manifesto is bound to censor for the government of China, once they've had a few years to work it through in their head. Just ask the leading Internet corporations... Wnt (talk) 02:56, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia censorship
Any mention of censorship, as in Wnt's last 2 sentences, grabs my attention, because, I was brought up in a maddenly stupid systemically censored society evidenced by when when I let an old black maid sit in the front seat of my parents' car when taking her home, my mom was called by several friends who saw us driving through town and one warned my mom I might be a "niggar lover"; a name I was also called by friends a few times when a child for exhibiting just casual friendliness towards a black boy who had the misfortune to live near our neighborhood. Jimbo, may have a slight knowledge of what I'm talking about, albeit, hopefully not by the time he was a child. I know, the word is racism, not censorship, but it sure felt like censorship, telling me what I can say and do, and so I can argue that one of the perhaps lesser effects of systemic racism is a type of censorship in what people can say and write.
To the point, I was trying to educate myself about the points Wnt and BethNaught bring up here
so I went to our serch bar and typed in "wikipedia censorship" which sent me to [24] a subtopic in child porn and sex stuff. So, I will chime in on the discussion about public domain, copyright, licensing etc. to give my opinion that somebody has to stand up against the Chinese Government pricks and if not us, who? Nocturnalnow (talk) 16:10, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
What an interesting story. May I ask where you grew up? And you are right that by the time I was a child, much of that sort of overt talk had passed, but you did still hear a bit of it around here and there, and of course in many cases it was simply replaced by less overt forms. One topic I'm interested in is how societies can quickly flip from "you aren't allowed to say this is wrong" to "you aren't allowed to say this is right", much faster than the actual practices change.
And yes, I think it is important that we be uncompromising worldwide on government censorship, and China is the prime example.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 16:58, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Hey I travelled through western Russia for 2 weeks; saw thousands of people but one black person; almost got arrested for jaywalking in middle of block rather than at crosswalk, but my Russian tourguide, she claimed my passport was locked at hotel safe, and the policeman did not search for our passports; instead I paid him a small fine in rubles. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:11, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
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