Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Cycle 2

Discuss the draft strategic direction

Healthy, inclusive communities

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

My opinion is that this is a necessary foundation for any of the other themes, but seemingly difficult for the WMF to directly influence. The WMF can hopefully implement improvements to attract and retain new editors. Improving interactions between existing/established members may require focus within the community (e.g. WP:ArbCom).

• Improved tutorials and training - well trained newbies remain surprisingly positive despite criticism (73% experienced reversion and 56% experienced correction, yet 95% stated beneficial interactions) Consequently training (possibly multistep) can make a big difference to whether newbies continue on
• Even basic positive feedback and rewards during training make a big difference Ensuring support for people to train, welcome and support new contributors will help.

T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 13:22, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

References

-- As of now, this theme would be apparently more suitable to Wikipedia as the current sister projects are not as impactful as Wikipedia, Commons, and Meta-wiki. Wikipedia can still attract more people, yet the sister projects can attract general audience and should coexist to help balance Wikipedia. Wikiversity... um... I don't know. It still needs more courses. Wikinews has a long journey to attract new editors and potential journalists, especially those who can do original reporting. It struggles to compete successful news outlets. Also, its relic articles struggle to attract new readers, especially when Wikipedia considers news articles from Wikinews unreliable. Other sister projects can still attract new readers, but attracting new editors may vary. Two central projects, Wikimedia Commons and Meta-wiki, can still attract more readers and editors because they are part of the Foundation. Commons is interdependent with its sister projects and can still have many more files, and Meta-wiki can bring in creative people who can propose new projects, like Wikijournal and NonFreeWiki, and researchers and organizers, especially of movements.

In conclusion, attracting new readers is easy, but persuading readers to become editors either is not or may vary, depending on projects.

A couple of future projects, on the other hand, may have potential impact on the world. Wikijournal, now part of Wikiversity, can attract new audience if it becomes a stand-alone website. Same for NonFreeWiki, which still needs more support. --George Ho (talk) 01:07, 13 May 2017 (UTC); edited. 04:09, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

-- I realize the actual nature of NonFreeWiki after re-reading the whole proposal. If it exists by 2030, and it does as exactly proposed, all local wikis would not be allowed to upload non-free content locally. --George Ho (talk) 04:09, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

I do think, that online interactions will gain more and more influence in all our lives. Being part of a healthy inclusive community will help people stay healthy and happy. So by taking care of our community, we as Wikipedians can take good care of ourselves - and of others. We will not only be distributing knowledge (which will also be much easier, as the community will be respected better, if it is considered healthy by others), but also well being. In addition I do think, that we have a lot more knowledge to share, if the community is inclusive. Since interacting with Wikipedians on an international level, I have begun to realize, what knowledge is missing on the de.WP (for example about geographical locations in Northern Africa, political leaders from India, artists from Armenia and much, much more). I do think a lot of people with good knowledge and the abilityto contribute do live in Germany, as we have immigrants from many countries living here. Often they are bilingual and could add knowledge from sources that are not accessible by me or most German Wikipedians. But I do know only very few editors with a migration background in our community, so we are missing out on a lot of knowledge by being not inclusive enough at the moment. And this is just one of many examples. --Kritzolina (talk) 08:13, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Hello, I disagree with T.Shafee that it's "seemingly difficult for the WMF to directly influence".

Financially, they can support activities that promote diversity, instead activities that ignore or undermine diversity.

Organizationally, they can encourage affiliates and partners to promote diversity, and intervene when they undermine diversity.

Publically, they can use their communication channels to promote diversity, and discuss issues that undermine diversity.

Also, I disagree with George Ho that "current sister projects are not as impactful as Wikipedia".

There are many social groups that lack photos, videos and audios about them. Wikimedia Commons can help to promote diversity in that aspect. --NaBUru38 (talk) 20:58, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

--NaBUru38 (talk) 20:58, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Apologies for making a misleading statement, NaBUru38. I amended my statement to declare Commons and Meta-wiki as impactful as Wikipedia. --George Ho (talk) 04:09, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Bad impact in the sense of smarm. --Mautpreller (talk) 10:51, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

@Mautpreller:, could you elaborate please? External links may be helpful, but I'd be grateful if you used your own words, in our context. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 10:09, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Okay. The language ("healthy", "grow in size and nature", and so on) seems to show that there is no intention to deal with criticism, conflict, dissens and so on. This sunny scenario has nothing to do with reality. My suspicion is that this goal will simply lead to more language of the same kind, but with an underground of steel: everyone who is not "positive" will be called "toxic" and will be excluded. However, that's just the opposite of what we need. We need a civil way to quarrel (hard), not a way to make everything "inclusive", "rewarding", and "fun". Moreover: this is not a question of the "Wikimedia movement" (whatever this may be). This is a question of the communities. The Foundation should definitely not interfere here, least of all with rigmarole like "healthy communities".--Mautpreller (talk) 18:52, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

You could also look here: Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Sources/Cycle 2/German Language Kurier discussion. The language of your statements produces massive mistrust and strong counter-reactions.--Mautpreller (talk) 20:50, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Quoting one edit: "This is telltale language: healthy, advancing, truly global, most trusted, engaging. This is the vocabulary of modern exploitation: you are to burn for your project, you are to toil for it voluntarily (!) until you drop." I think user:Felistoria is right there.--Mautpreller (talk) 08:44, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I mostly agree. Though genuinely abusive behaviour - as opposed to robust dissent - has done a lot to drive off good editors. I'm not sure if the Foundation is the right body to deal with that, or whether there is a way to tackle one without silencing the other, which also drives off people who don't feel they are being heard. The hazards of mixing an organic site with an organisation's strategy... Orderinchaos (talk) 19:47, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree it is a problem. I often saw it on German wikipedia. It is not easy to tackle abusive behaviour without silencing robust dissens. The communities are not very good at this task. But WMF is definitely the wrong address here. And in my experience, this "fringe movement style" of health, reward, fun, great experience, and so on is anything but helpful because it prevents to see the serious conflicts that inevitably go along with community projects.--Mautpreller (talk) 09:03, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Global public discourse is fragile right now. Between online harassment and alternative facts, we find ourselves in a precarious situation: it seems increasingly difficult to judge what to believe and whether you’re safe. When public discourse deteriorates on either front—toward harassment or falsehood—our advancement as a civilization stalls or regresses.

What would be the benefit to human life if we made significant progress over the next 15 years on both fronts—reducing harassment and increasing veracity? Well, let's consider the opposite first... a world where people are increasingly harassed online and alternative facts are used to create an environment of disinformation.

I know of no society that has significantly advanced within an environment of disinformation. If they have advanced, they do not match the pace of advancement in societies coursing with evidence-based information. In societies flooded with disinformation, people grow confused. Then, they grow wary. Slowly, trust in any fact is undermined because people do not know what is true in a bigger sense anymore. And somehow, almost as if by contagion, people begin to lose trust in each other. The end result is that most people withdraw from the commons. That’s an overall loss in greater human potential.

In societies or environments where people are harassed or shut out of the conversation, there are equally costly results. The cost to our civilization when all of us do not realize our potential is substantial. When I think of all of the untapped talent globally—the lost insights in math, science, engineering, literature, comedy, psychology, history—to me, it seems like burning the Library of Alexandria every hour.

Living with harassment places most people in a state of fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety are most often not the best conditions for learning, especially not for sharing new ideas. That brings us back to lost potential, but let’s not leave it there. For most people, it’s not a good quality of life to be around people that are hammering on them. It puts people on edge. Threats of sexual and physical violence are commonplace for minorities and women online. Those threats are designed to evoke fear. The fear people experience in just reading threats can be substantial. Now imagine a group of people coming after you. People often grow symptomatic—from clinical signs of stress all the way to PTSD—without the threat ever materializing in real life.

Online harassment is bad, for sure, but on the internet these days, it’s tough to know just how far someone is willing to go. Will they take it up in real life? We now have a budding vocabulary to describe when someone online tries to mess up your life offline (e.g., doxxing, swatting). It’s terribly uncool. The end result is similar: most people withdraw from the commons.

What if we went in the other direction? Doubling down on healthy communities and evidence-based information?

Together, we could build healthy, networked communities supported by tools to welcome and mentor new contributors. We could build better tools to support discussions. We could build tools, networks, and cultures—on and offline—to prevent, stop, and deal with harassment, as those kinds of interactions do not promote human development and do not foster a learning environment. But it’s about more than tools and programs. We would likely need to evolve our norms across different cultures, different languages, and different projects. That’s not an easy thing to do, and it's absolutely not a one-size-fits-all. We’re going to need everybody. People inside communities will most always know best. When they aren’t sure, other regional communities are likely the best resource for them.

Simultaneously, we pursue our love of truth out in the open. We would likely need better infrastructure to support it—infrastructure for an open, digital future. It is not the sexiest play, but it appears to be essential. We could partner to build an open, scholarly infrastructure, for example. We could get ever-more serious about open citations. We could work to bring down the wall between private and public knowledge. On that front, it may be important to think beyond technical solutions. It could be equally useful to think of moral solutions designed to influence public opinion. “Knowledge is a foundation” for any learning civilization. Will we share it openly and freely? Or will some of us keep it to ourselves? We are standing on the moral high ground. We should speak from that ground and inspire others to join us.

What would be the benefit to human lives if we built ever-healthier communities who share a love of truth?

• As a species, we need to learn to solve problems digitally at scale and these precious projects are one of the world’s largest running pilots. We could help chart one way. We could learn, and then teach, so much more about how to structure factual, polite discourse online at a global scale. We could learn about how to build healthy communities and network them. The world will find those learnings and example useful over the next 15 years and beyond.
• Healthier communities are usually more attractive to more people. More people would likely be inclined to join us. So more people would likely learn and teach others. That means that many more people, just like us, all around the world can realize their desire to teach themselves, self actualize, and offer the opportunity for others to do the same.
• More people could be interested in documenting more knowledge in more languages. There is so much knowledge to document, in so many languages, we have only just begun.
• Other online communities may be tempted to follow suit. The influence on public discourse online could be substantial.
• With additional investments in open infrastructure and the right partnerships, we could build an open digital commons for the future, ensuring a broader legacy for future generations. AStillwell (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

I simply cannot understand such statements. Health, truth, happiness. I thought I was part of an encyclopedia project, not a religious cult.--Mautpreller (talk) 08:15, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedias have a potential of attracting more contributors by a conscious effort to resurrect thematic WikiProjects (those that already have at least a few followers, however inactive those projects might be at the moment). We are convinced that the existence of a group working together on a specific topic can bring new contributors (from the particular subject area). -- On behalf of the Wikipedians of Brno, Blahma (talk) 21:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

We think that many people are unlikely to edit or stop contributing after a short time, because they are not getting what would keep them here – if people do not work for material profit, they want at least to feel appreciation, satisfaction, usefulness – and this is what the rest of the community and/or the readers have to make them feel very clearly, so that they see a meaning in their work and keep contributing. -- On behalf of the Wikipedians of Brno, Blahma (talk) 21:18, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I agree that we havet to share topcs in more languaes rhan previous season. In.adddition I would like to make sure that information of wikipedia are credible and faithul to trueí Vidamzenesz (talk) 00:03, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

-- Are we certain that this theme will impact the world? There have been allegations of sysop abuse filed at Requests for comment toward local wikis, yet some or more users refused to participate at RFC subpages.. Examples are Croatian Wikipedia (post-2013), Romanian Wikipedia, and Hindi Wikipedia. Those wikis lack their own ArbCom, yet I was told that even an existing ArbCom in a local wiki would be owned by the same admins who would abuse their powers and statuses (tools or no tools) to harm, intimidate, and bully decent or good-hearted contributors. I'm not sure this counts: Requests for comment/Administrators' abuse of authority in Russian WP, closed as inactive last year. The person who filed for RFC changed his/her username and then was blocked at English Wikipedia. One RFC proposal was passed to close any discussion older than two years. If two years pass, and no one else participates in those RFCs, how else can admin abuse in local wikis, including smaller ones, be addressed? Also, who else is in the wrong, the admin or the editor? Without sufficient participation, and without sufficient translators, we may never know. --George Ho (talk) 01:35, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

It is foundational to achieving the other objectives, but is only a means to an end for ultimately supporting improved content. In particular it is important to attract newer contributors who may be able to add new ideas and expertise to the community. An expanded and diversified community is also necessary to support more niche interest groups. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 13:27, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

If I want to export something to the world (3, 5) I should decide what. (1) a culture, (2) technology or (4) high quality. The world needs the wiki culture. (1) is the asset = people and how they interact. If we had more of this, the world would be better, a more democratic and framåt = forward-looking place, mlg Susann Schweden (talk) 19:25, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

I totally agree, that this is the fundamental issue, that will help all other themes along. --Kritzolina (talk) 08:15, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Deffinitelly the most important. Wikimedia stays on active participants, but Wikimedia is still techy and hostile to certain needs of people. We need to easy editing and contributing as much as possible and set a friendly environment for all people needs. So looking on the question again I would say that this theme is highly important, but still we have a lot to do in tech area (e.g. English categories and way of contributing to Wikimedia Commons is still very difficult).--Juandev (talk) 09:26, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

I also agree with the importance of the theme, although I don't see what leverage the foundation might have to act on this topic. I can indeed think of some "minor" points, like, we should put far greater priority on ability to contribute whatever the language a person is accustomed to. So for example, not having localization for Phabricator is a real bad point. I say that to my mind it seems minor, as indeed throwing some resources affordable for the foundation should help resolve it. But for bigger problem like "how do we make people act kind with each other so they all contribute in peace and harmony creating always more great works of greater quality", well, I'm not sure that it makes any sense to target such a thing. At least I don't see what are the action the the foundation might intent to achieve it as a specific goal. Even for willingly people, nonviolence isn't an easy goal, and that's not the kind of goal you can "impose". So, in short, to answer the question, this theme is of course the most important of the five but means nothing in itself. --Psychoslave (talk) 12:39, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

This may be an unpopular view, but support for community members that we do not yet have is as important as the current users. A classic example would be VisualEditor, which makes a massive difference in training a large number of new users, but could be unpopular amongst some established users. To clarify, I'm not not suggesting throwing existing userbase under the bus if it'll increase numbers overall. I do think that the current community has a (loud) voice, but those who never joined, or rapidly left do not have that representation. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 13:31, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

the glib answer is that we give up the non-productive behaviors that we do because they are easy, and adopt the productive behaviors that we do not do because they are hard.

i.e. stop vandal fighting and start community welcoming. this means training and culture change. Slowking4 (talk) 15:56, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

+1, T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo). AStillwell (WMF) (talk) 04:15, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

I can answer this. Stop treating solo collaboration contribution as the only option, and start brainstorming other options, like teamwork. Stop driving out others, especially experts, and start befriending and collaborating with them. Stop treating online communication as the only method, and start socializing offline more. --George Ho (talk) 02:36, 8 June 2017 (UTC); corrected, 01:29, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

-- The above answer I made should not imply that solo contribution is bad. Solo contribution may produce good quality, but collaborative contribution may produce better interaction and teamwork. Another thing I must suggest to others is to stop accusing one editor of endorsing racism or racists or something. Instead, they should ask why saying things rather than jump to conclusions prematurely. --George Ho (talk) 01:29, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

Perhaps this could usefully be 'Healthy, Inclusive and Connected'. Many of Wikimedia's sister projects remain very separate. Better connections can help make people feel like part of a greater whole, and to find resources that they didn't know about. Some examples:

• Cross-wiki watchlist would help people be peripheral members of projects that they don't visit regularly enough to normally check their specific watchlist
• Easier, more informative, and auto-translated links between language versions of a page.
  • E.g. the English Wikipedia en:Cédric Villani is smaller than the French fr:Cédric Villani, so it'd be nice to be told, somewhere on the en: page, that the fr: one is X% longer, has Y pictures, has Z extra references.
  • E.g. I have also posted this exact comment on the en.wiki version of this page, to which there is currently no simple link.
• Even just within e.g. English Wikipedia, the recommend pages function only works for mainspace, but could be very helpful in the Help: and WP: namespaces to suggest possible places that the user could benefit from (tutorials/training, wikiprojects, Signpost, teahouse, help pages, policy pages)
• Support for a cross-wiki, cross-language version of The Signpost (independent, community driven newsletter), which is currently going through a bit of a rough patch in terms of manually-intensive over-complex basic tasks in publishing. Could conceivably be run alongside, but separate from, the WMF blog?

Doubtless there are other ways to knit the communities together. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 04:07, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

emphasize that we are a living example of democracy - something you can't say too many times. Everybody is allowed to be part of this. With the same weight, impact, importance. The only demand: stick to the rules. mlg Susann Schweden (talk) 19:52, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, though "the rules" are not just the written rules but the culture in which they are enforced, which can introduce a considerable degree of power imbalance and inequality. Orderinchaos (talk) 19:34, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Participation must be easy and straight-forward for newcomers if they should feel included and find their way into the community without getting lost or bored first. In practice, this is currently manifested most concretely in the high threshold required to effectively pursue the first crucial skill that a newcome is often required to master – participation in discussion (on the talk pages). Our experience from teaching Wikipedia editing classes shows that users have difficulty participating because they do not understand how talk pages work – and the problems gets even more aggrevated these days when newcomers are shown and taught to use the VisualEditor, while they still need to talk in wikitext and much unlike they are used in social networks etc. -- On behalf of the Wikipedians of Brno, Blahma (talk) 21:09, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I wrote hours ago about cases of alleged admin abuse in some non-English local wikis, especially smaller ones. If we want to make the theme stronger, how about one or more terms that relate to such allegations or admin abuses? How about "vibrant" or "tolerant"? If neither would work, then there must be simple words that should describe how to reform or address how the admin system has been used. --George Ho (talk) 09:37, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Organizers of Wikipedia events for seniors will have knowledge of the obstacles faced by elderly newcomers. -- On behalf of the Wikipedians of Prague, --Petra Pejšová (WMCZ) (talk) 18:44, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Who else will be working in this area and how might we partner with them?

Piping in new users seems to have been particularly successful from groups of people that are strongly motivated to contribute on a topic (e.g. editathons) but don't have the confidence, or wouldn't have thought to do so, or need the training. Supporting more Wikimedians in Residence, and actively engaging motivated groups (e.g. students, societies, associations, academics, other volunteer groups and NGOs). More specific groups that can be suggested later in the strategy process. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 14:01, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

any organization that works with people and interkultural transfers. They do have devoted and expierienced members. How do they interact? Tex how do Amnesty, Greenpeace or those Docs work together and treat missunderstandings, mobbing and all the problems we are facing? mlg Susann Schweden (talk) 19:31, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

wikihow. Slowking4 (talk)

The main interested people here will be the community, so can we find partners able to address accurately to the community, listen it's feedback and provide actionable and attractive processes to achieve the improvement of friendliness and enjoyment of relevant wikimedia contribution? Maybe the Center for Nonviolent Communication might be an interesting possible partner regarding improvement of communication quality among our community. I found clear and full of practical examples and advises the book on nonviolent communication by its initiator Marshall Rosenberg. It's a shame we don't have, as far as I know, free material of this quality on this topic. --Psychoslave (talk) 13:58, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Other

Choices

A question arising from the discussion at the mw:Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 on why we're talking about "healthy" and whether this is perceived to be in contrast with having good/reliable content (and sources). Some may also see "healthy" and "inclusive" to be somehow in contrast, since often discussions about "health" are focused on how to exclude/get rid of some people or activities which are perceived as harmful. So I guess it's good to have both adjectives. However in my opinion the community as a whole is functioning correctly (and hence is "healthy") as long as it's inclusive i.e. able to expand the work on free knowledge, so "healthy" is redundant.

We don't necessarily care about specific individuals or groups thriving in our environment and feeling it as "healthy" for themselves, if their objectives are selfish (like promotion of specific points of views, or anything that goes against free knowledge). Yet such people are usually the most vocal ones at asking for the community to be made more "healthy" (for their own interests) and "inclusive" (of themselves at the expense of others). --Nemo 09:08, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: thanks for your relation. Please note more or encourage others to do so if anything that deserves being taken into account appears. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 10:33, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

To clarify, I was only expressing my own thoughts, although they were somehow triggered by what everybody else said. --Nemo 17:04, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Dlouho neřešené osobní útoky

Ano, jsem zvědavý, jak se vyřeší dlouho neřešené osobní útoky, kdy někteří uživatelé tvrale útočí na jiné a správci či vyšší funkcionáři to neřeší nebo dokonce podporují.--Juandev (talk) 09:22, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Comment by Orchidrose

Moved from the theme's main page by Kbrown (WMF)

Geographically understood locations and regions are a relevant topic for the discussion of culture and other influences on Wikimedia. Wikimedia is then better able to exist within the different cultural and geographic norms that occur worldwide. Question: What is the betterment for Wikimedia 2030 to be this way? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Orchidrose (talk)

Feedback from the Central Eastern European Wikimedia Community

In a Facebook poll, 10 people from the CEE group rated this theme as the *most* important to our movement's future. Shani Evenstein 20:06, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Wikipedia & Medicine Community

In a Facebook poll, 2 people rated this theme as important, making it the second most important theme for the group. Shani Evenstein 20:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the GLAM-Wiki community

In a Facebook poll, 5 people from the GLAM-Wiki global group rated this theme as most important to our movement's future, making it one of the top 2 most important themes to this group. Shani Evenstein 20:29, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

The augmented age (Advancing with technology)

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

Huge impact! But automation is not the primary goal for human resources that create content in colaborative wikis. And since automation and knowledge required thereof is out of reach for the vast majority of users globally, wikipedia will be more and more complicated to edit. Keep in mind simplicity for editors without technical knowledges--Kalogeropoulos (talk) 07:18, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

Larger impact relative to de-emphasizing the theme, as it seems clear that modes of knowledge discovery will expand from simple screens and web searches to audio, curated augmented reality experiences (eg. while wandering about a foreign city, museum or historical monument), virtual realities designed for the purpose of education and simulation, and so forth. Pratyeka (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Something tells me that the world would resemble that of w:The Machine Stops, whose setting is apocalyptic, futuristic, and bleak. The machine would be close to dying, and the knowledge to repair the machine is lost. Hmm.... the prediction is too hasty. I'll try another prediction. Leaving the work up to learning machines would make the system and computing more complicated than it should be. Also, human knowledge of computing the Wikimedia projects would be affected or nearly lost. Why not make computing more simple and easy to edit instead? --George Ho (talk) 22:53, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

I rather think the theme will impact on us, since we (i.e. Wikimedia and its participants) will just be one of many groups, organisations etc. who will use this technology. It appears that we need to deal with it to maintain our impact on the world, but we should not forget that machines can fail, as can humans, hence we will always need a fallback level. --Schlosser67 (talk) 07:10, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

I think that on the "augmented" side, we should greatly improve our mobile front-end. For example people who install the Common app on their smartphone should be notified when they are near a place for which we miss an illustration. We already have the "near here" functionality on the wikipedia front-end, but we could think of something more social like "meet the wikimedians near you" (at least those who opted in localization), find Wikimedian events, and so on.

On the back end side, we should augment cross-projects interaction. Wiktionaries should get automatic search result and statistics (like usage frequency along time) about lexems from Wikisource corpus for example.

More than anything else we should also augment people knowledge and skills, including communication tools for maintaining "healthy and inclusive communities". --Psychoslave (talk) 14:32, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

A. Data technology is fun och attractive for many. But it is a means to help accomplishing goals. 1,3,4,5 are goals to discuss. The 'winner' will decide/determine, which technology will be the most worthy to enhance. B. My personal experience with manually cleaning up bot/program contributions is long and not especially positive. mlg Susann Schweden (talk) 12:47, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree - technology is a means to an end, and our principal goal should be to provide quality content that is accessible in both high-tech and low-tech ways. --Schlosser67 (talk) 07:10, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Very important if Wikipedia is to remain relevant as newer technical media with more personalization and interaction come to dominate public experience versus today's primarily publishing/consumpion-focused web. Pratyeka (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

I've been thinking. If the technology must improve, then communication and relationships must also improve. If offline communication is not desirable to others, how about audio and/or video communication? There are en:webcam and computer headset. The projects need improved technological communications, especially if they would rely on AI or machine learners in the future. Maybe some video cam software or some audio communication software, compatible with the projects. If the projects can't handle such technology, at least we can use already available stand-alone video/audio communication software. --George Ho (talk) 19:11, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

Rigorously review and reduce all formatting related markup on all projects, since reformatting for new media will render such markup useless and anachronistic. Pratyeka (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

If we set fokus på technology - we unset fokus på us. Susann Schweden (talk) 21:05, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

@Susann Schweden:, could you elaborate and clarify? I need to summarize your thoughts, and the more elaborate your feedback is, the more precise my summary can be. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:32, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

with 'us' I mean the contributing people. A human beeing and its interaction with other human beeings. It is so utterst important how people communicate, put into words what they want, listen to others, come to conclusions and by this work together. I personally like or even love the way we work together in wiktionary, but the whole wiki-world is democratic in a practical sense and it's aiming at the goals to reach, which means it's seldom chewing on yesterday stuff. The wiki-way to come to results which you can actually see and read and listen to is fantastic. This should be the core-present we can offer to the world: 'look it works!' mlg Susann Schweden (talk) 17:48, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

@Susann Schweden: first, sorry for this late response. I don't know how your clarification applies to this theme and how it answers the question in the heading. Please, explain it. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

now I understand, I think. It is really the wrong header. I didn't suggest what we should do less of, and this is required here. I wanted to note that we should not reduce effort in human communication even if we are willing to increase effort in technology. Susann Schweden (talk) 18:22, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

The new technology will surely be harder on the bandwidth which is limited not so much for technological, but definitely for physical reasons. Hence we need to cut down on gimmicks and concentrate on economy and reliability. --Schlosser67 (talk) 07:10, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

Potentially the addition of technology, concept development and hardware manufacturer partners... eg. makerspaces, startup hubs, research institutions, corporate R&D labs, existing industrial and experience design houses. Pratyeka (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

"Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software." Found on https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607831/nvidia-ceo-software-is-eating-the-world-but-ai-is-going-to-eat-software/ Augmented reality will require hefty doses of Artificial Intelligence, and we need to prepare our user facing interfaces to understand their requests if we want to stay relevant. --VMasrour (WMF) (talk) 23:22, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

I want to know what page you can go to in order to get an overview of the major technical tasks that are currently in progress. It is not feasible for me to keep track of every Phabricator entry. The VisualEditor came rather as a surprise to me, and just as that feature was under development for a while before, it would be nice to see which features are currently in development. Mikael Häggström (talk) 12:14, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

• @Mikael Häggström: maybe Elitre could help to address the issue you raised. There are a few newsletters, Tech News, quarterly reports etc., but - if I get your point correctly - there could be a larger-scale non-techie-friendly overview. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

• Tech News seems to works acceptably for the purpose, but yes it would be more nice with at least a small "non-techie-friendly overview" of what is currently in development. I would personally want the option to see directly in-line who has done the latest edit to any individual sentence [1], but there are apparently many other issues to be amended before. Mikael Häggström (talk) 18:54, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Speaking of what we already have, Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures (especially when consulted from time to time on mediawiki.org) kinda does the trick. mw:Technical Collaboration Guidance/Milestone communication already recommends simple language, so that we make the work easier for ambassadors and translators. This said, with the exception of knocking on people's door, it may be fair to say that every venue for communication has been explored so far and several are in use. In our experience there will always, always be people surprised by changes, no matter how hard those were communicated in advance. My team works precisely to reduce the number of those people deployment after deployment. Feedback and suggestions are welcome at the talk for the page I linked above. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:24, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing out these pages Elitre! Thus there seems to be existing tools for estimating the credibility of individual edits. Now I'd just like to be able to see it directly in-line in Wikipedia articles.

As for technical aspects, it is usually not that much of a deal to be surprised by updates, since it's always possible to suggest improvement (or removal) of them afterwards as well. Mikael Häggström (talk) 19:00, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

• What software / improvements we work needs to be determined to a greater degree in collaboration with the movement as a whole. Would be great to see the community tech team expanded to double or triple its current size. And maybe part of such a team could specifically work on issues facing the global south? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:04, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

The important thing will be to stay relevant with technology. I think that in order to do this, a Wikimedia 2030 could possibly take part in a Wikimedia "note". The searches could be temporarily saved, organized and utilized for educational purposes. A Wiki "student" could do this. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Orchidrose (talk) 19:37, 1 June 2017‎

Who else will be working in this area and how might we partner with them?

• Device manufacturers and makers. Competitions may be useful, perhaps with some form of sponsorship opportunities if this is allowed under Wikimedia's funding options. Pratyeka (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

• One knowledge-based application of augmented reality is human anatomy. Software like ZygoteBody and BioDigital Human provides a way to visualize 3D knowledge. Those 3D models can also be used for more immersive experiences.

There's an existing project that hosts CC licensed anatomy content called BodyParts3D but it doesn't have user-friendly software that allows for easy browsing. I think it would be great if Wikimedia would develop a software that allows browsing this kind of data and to display it in virtual reality software.

The same software that would allow for browsing human anatomy might also be used to browse the anatomy of a tomato or a human-made item. I think it would be great if Wikimedia has such 3D browsing software in 2030 and maybe even earlier. ChristianKl (talk) 12:06, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Whilst editing text is easy in mediawiki, creating and editing rich media is currently not possible. Although creating an image or video editor from scratch isn't really efficient, there may be existing solutions/partners (e.g. GIMP, inkscape, fotor?) that could help implement some easier way to edit existing files within commons (or possibly outside it?). Even just cropping an image from commons is currently quite a multi-step process. Similarly, for video files, being able to type a script that is then voice synthesised over the video would allow the sound to be edited more easily if information needed to be changed. The greatest challenge for this and other rich-media-editing interface extensions will be finding partners with a compatible open-access mentality. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 08:50, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia should partner with other providers of on-line knowledge and cultural content and become the entry point into a linked world where various sources are accumulated and several different views of the same topic may be presented (the latter can be applied also on the content of Wikipedia only). Currently, Wikipedia articles present just one narrative, but if we use the structure of the encyclopedia (articles, categories, Commons metadata, Wikidata, maps…), we could build various interfaces that would present the same reality through various means and from various angles. -- On behalf of the Wikipedians of Brno, Blahma (talk) 21:14, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Cooperation with developers and academics in field of automated translation, data handling for improving Wikidata. Development of Wikimedia Commons App and other mobile apps communicating with Wikipedia. -- On behalf of the Wikipedians of Prague, --Petra Pejšová (WMCZ) (talk) 18:34, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

What is learning machine?

I have no idea what the learning machine is. You mean machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence? --Ryuch (talk) 13:05, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

• @Ryuch: I don't know whom do you mean by 'you', but yes, undoubtedly this is about machine learning. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Other

Feedback from the Central Eastern European Wikimedia Community

In a Facebook poll, 6 people from the CEE group rated this theme as the third *most* important to our movement's future, after community health and engaging the knowledge ecosystem. Shani Evenstein 20:10, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Wikipedia & Medicine Community

In a Facebook poll, only 1 person chose this theme as the most important, making it the least important theme for the group. Shani Evenstein 20:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

A truly global movement

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

I think many able people in West would enjoy wiki editing but have never had the idea of doing it. A massive potential resource. Maybe a few media adverts... JCJC777 (talk) 03:36, 11 May 2017 (UTC)User:JCJC777

Wikipedia's role and newer projects needed

-- Wikipedia can still attract more audience, but its global impact has already been done. Nonetheless, rural areas and developing countries, especially ones from Africa, still need Wikipedia. This theme won't prevent further governmental censorships on Wikipedia and further petitions to appeal the bans, like Turkey's current censorship on Wikipedia.

However, a few more projects are needed as the Foundation's current projects are challenged by global factors, like slowly stagnating technology, government repression, and anarchic chaos. If Wikijournal, currently part of Wikiversity, becomes a stand-alone website, many academic journals may be affected. Academic journals have been published on paper and online. One can decide whether it's a good or bad thing, but the publications of those paper journals would diminish or remain the same... though not as much as they are currently. Even subscriptions of such journals would be affected. On the plus side, Wikijournal can attract those interested in original research, especially academics, and make people more creative. Whether it would be as successful as Wikipedia is uncertain, but Wikipedia needs more balance and more sister projects.

Also, if NonFreeWiki is established, one can wonder how it would challenge the copyright laws. Nevertheless, I predict that NonFreeWiki can impact the Foundation a lot and can collaborate well with Commons and local wikis, even when the opposition is concerned. Also, it may attract more new contributors a lot. A few other proposed projects still have potential but require more support enough in Meta-wiki to become established projects. --George Ho (talk) 01:18, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

-- I realize the actual nature of NonFreeWiki after re-reading the whole proposal. If it exists by 2030, all local wikis would not be allowed to upload non-free content locally. Also, attracting more contributors would be more difficult than I previously imagined. --George Ho (talk) 04:10, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

The biggest revolution in education, ever

Everybody wants 2 sell what's already been sold,

Everybody wants 2 tell what's already been told,

What's the use of money if you ain't gonna break the mold?

Even at the center of fire there is cold.

All that glitters ain't gold.

- The Artist Eternally Known as Prince

That's the impact we will have on the world if we follow this theme: The biggest revolution in education, ever.

In the dark ages in Europe knowledge sharing was flourishing, but only in very particular places, mostly monasteries and universities, to which very few people were actually exposed. Knowledge started getting to the masses only during the Renaissance. Its dissemination became wider thanks to Gutenberg and then the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. So it started going out of monasteries into the masses—but only in Europe.

By 2001, when Wikipedia started, some countries already had a long tradition of having accessible public information: public libraries and schools, universities, printed textbooks, reference books, encyclopedias, newspapers. By "accessible" I mean that you didn't necessarily have all of it in your home, but if you went to a library, or a paid a reasonable fee, you would get it. Importantly, you would get it in your language. This didn't pop up by itself: It was done by people who were supported by governments and foundations, and in some cases by private enterprises. This covered all of Europe (including Russia and Turkey), most of North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of the Middle East and East Asia. The rest of the world, however, was either not covered at all or covered in a very patchy way.

Wikipedia made what was already accessible more accessible. Now you can get most of this information without going anywhere or paying any fees, but simply by tapping on your home computer or pocket phone. And when somebody wanted to write something, they could do it on any computer available in their countries, because they all came with localized software and localized keyboards. This improved accessibility only covers the same areas, however. Wikipedia simply reflects the culture of education and information accessibility of every society.

Where knowledge had been accessible in 2001, it became more accessible. Where knowledge had not been accessible in 2001, it didn't become more accessible, at least not by far. In large parts of Africa, South Asia, Middle East, and some other areas, you still don't have any schools, libraries, or textbooks in the languages that people in these places know, and you still cannot buy a computer or a phone on which you can read and write in these languages. Computers are perceived as something to be used only in English, French, Russian, or another "big" language.

It is easy to be blind to this problem for people who have the privilege of being accustomed to having these things. Even people who live in these places and know English, French, or Russian, become mostly blind to it; once you can read a book and use a computer in a language that you learned, you ignore the fact that it is not accessible to people who didn't, but learning a whole foreign language shouldn't be a part of learning to use a computer. Expecting people to learn big languages is patronizing and mostly unrealistic. It did happen in the past that some cultures transitioned from their languages to other, bigger languages; while this made education more accessible to them (though it didn't necessarily improve their economic situation), it destroyed the indigenous knowledge which was embedded in their language itself. We want to make knowledge accessible, not to destroy it.

So what is to be done?

• We need to carefully reconsider the stance of supporting only "self-starting volunteers and communities". European Universities, libraries and textbook writing projects were started and completed largely with support from governments, churches, or foundations. Wikipedias in languages that are currently successful wouldn't exist without them. This includes the biggest languages: English, Russian, French, Spanish.
• We need to understand what knowledge do people need. Animé is great, and so are public policy and geology, but we need to understand whether these are the topics that are useful for the daily life and development of people in the areas where we don't have active communities yet. We don't need to decide for them what is important — we need to learn it from them.
• We need to realize that in the whole world there are significant differences in infrastructure, culture, language,, lifestyle, and information consumption needs between rural societies and urban societies. The Wikimedia movement is currently good only at serving urban societies, even in "The West". This is a deep topic that needs to be understood and addressed.
• Some of the things that these people need can be translated from other languages. Having translation tools, like Content Translation (which is still being developed), is just one piece of this puzzle. Some other pieces of the puzzle are:
  • Humans who know a big language, and a small language, and have the skill and the time to translate. They need to be found, trained, and supported. The Bible, for example, was translated to a lot of languages, and this was supported by religious groups. For many languages, a Bible is the only thing written in them. If there are donors who would support translating the Bible to a lot of languages, would there be also donors who would support translating something like "The 5000 Most Important Encyclopedic Articles" to a lot of languages?
  • Keyboards and fonts that support the relevant languages. And they need to be available not only to a small group of people who are involved in writing, but to all people who speak these languages and need to read and write in them. This requires partnership with computer and phone vendors and with national and local gov
  • Discoverability of this information through major search engines, which would have to support more countries, and give results in more relevant languages.
  • Technical and scientific terminology. Many cultures have some kind of a Language Academy or Terminology Service that create it: France, Netherlands, Hungary, Slovenia, Israel, Russia, Catalonia, Wales, and others.
• Some things cannot be translated, and must be written from scratch, because they come from inside the culture itself, but were never properly written down. I'm talking about things like ceremonies, histories, agricultural techniques, crafts, local stories and songs, etc. Support is needed in collecting these, from ethnographers, anthropologists, etc. As an example, Russia has plenty of programs in its universities, in which students travel to villages and collect local knowledge and dialects. Even though knowledge accessibility in Russian is generally good, these programs recognize that the work is never done, and there's more knowledge to collect all time. Much like us in Wikipedia, with out "unfinished puzzle" logo, and our hopefully shared understanding that for some things there is a deadline. Such programs need to be done worldwide, and they will also go a long way to resolving the old "oral citations" dispute.

Some of these things can be done by ourselves with direct WMF support. Some of them have to be done in a partnership with organizations or experts, but these partnerships must be actively sought out.

All of these problems are often presented as a chicken and egg problem, for example: "Keyboards in local languages are not common because people don't demand them". Let's be the egg. Let's create the demand.

"The West" is what it is thanks in no small part to The Enlightenment. Let's do another Enlightenment, for the whole world. The biggest revolution in education, ever. Let's be proactive.

One precursor to the Renaissance was the Plague. Let us not wait for another catastrophe to start the new Renaissance; let us do it now.

We need to spearhead it. Why we? Because it's our mission, with my emphasis added: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

If you read so far, enormous thanks for your patience. This is far longer than most talk page comments in the Wikimedia world. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:56, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Due to our emotional side, every human values Wikimedia projects only as much as it does for or about the language, the country or other topic that's dear to us. Some sort of permanent culture-specific outreach group (think-tank) to develop and promote best practices throughout the movement seems necessary, if we are to engage more people in various cultures.--Frhdkazan (talk) 06:45, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Local wikis

Reading "List of Wikipedias", the stats of admins seem pretty decent for those having over one million articles. However, has the Foundation accomplished diversity globally? The smaller wikis appear low-managed and have small number of active users. One would wonder how necessary local wikis using lesser-known languages are. Same for sister projects. Of course, the projects are voluntary services, not mandatory. However, because of that, we would end up with poorly- or low-managed small wikis. Must more low-managed local wikis be created to achieve diversity? --George Ho (talk) 05:47, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, wikis in many languages must exist, because most people don't know English.

The fact that many wikis are not growing and not well managed is a problem that must be resolved.

The WMF as an organization practically never approached this problem in any focused way. There were some tiny attempts at resolving some language technology issues (I was involved in some of them), and there were some grants for small outreach activities, but nothing big. Also, some WMF staff people engage in helping small wikis every now and then, but not in an official capacity.

Should the WMF do it? Yes, it should. It won't be easy, but we are trying to get all human beings to share in the sum of all knowledge, and most human beings don't know English. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 07:26, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

I'm surprised that no one else has answered this question yet in Meta-wiki. This is utterly the most important of all themes. After weeks thinking and studying the themes, I realize that this is the most important. Who cares about automation? Even global movement is more important than having a highly advanced gizmos or semi-automated tools or glitzy-looking software ever made.

If the Foundation wants to achieve all themes, the Foundation should consider its global influence as one of top priorities. Why must be too highly dependent on developed nations and highly developed areas, like Silicon Valley (California) or Western Europe? South Asia, which has so many rural areas, has some decent folks speaking English language. However, there are many others typing or writing non-Latin languages, like Hindi language. Many South Asians might not have basic technological needs, including mobile products and computer, as we expect them to have, especially in India, where there are 50+ million PCs out of over 1 billion people! The Foundation can focus on its regional citizens and chapters more than it has been. Also, if the Foundation wants to achieve theme "A", i.e. a healthy, inclusive community, the Foundation should travel all over the world learning about different cultures, backgrounds, languages, and values.

Well, tolerance does not mean endorsing and supporting what people don't believe in. Even embracing diversity and multiculturalism does not imply that rural areas should not be urbanized or highly developed or something. However, limitations, like climate, environment, and other challenges, would make the global movement harder to achieve. Even pride over retaining languages... that's something to deal with. The limitations of most keyboards would make non-Latin languages harder to type.

While "Augmented Age" ("B") Theme has promise, how else would a Chinese editor efficiently write Chinese language on desktop besides a keyboard? Why not provide a Chinese user some pen-tablet or stylus-tablet tech gizmo as substitute for desktop keyboard? Chinese language is not easy to pronounce and to type (see also en:Transliteration of Chinese). Even writing Chinese is not easy as well.

As I hate to admit, basic technological needs, like Internet, computer set, and a mobile electronic, are essential to help Wikimedia projects survive. Companies make them, and the Wikimedia projects are highly dependent on those basic technological needs. Still, many developing nations need more such basic technological needs.

I kept thinking about what people suggested: policies respecting oral traditions and oral citations project. However, those are suggestions from English Wikipedia, which disallows original research currently, so creating content using oral references would be harder, especially if oral references are considered unverifiable. Wikiversity should collect content based on oral references. However, if Wikiversity can't adequately collect oral citations or oral traditions, which other projects can collect such references and traditions? Wikinews collects oral references, but they are just interviews... just interviews. --George Ho (talk) 12:36, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

Yes.

• We can reduce various projects that only target content addition in languages that already have an active community. They are self-starting, aren't they? This includes projects like the past Public Policy Initiative, and various current GLAM and Wikipedian-in-Residence projects. It's not that these projects are bad; contrariwise, they are great, and the people doing them are great. But they don't serve this area of strategy at all. If they become slower, the Wikipedias in the big language will barely notice the difference. It's super-important for me to emphasize yet again how it very literally hurts me to write this, because a lot of people who are involved in these projects are my friends and they are excellent Wikimedians, but this is a question about tradeoffs, and the answers may be unpleasant.
• We can reduce the relative weight of projects that address problems that are typical for languages that already have an active community, but are irrelevant for small or not-yet-existing communities. One example is the various "anti-harassment" initiatives. Not because harassment is not a problem; it very much is. But harassment is a problem for somebody that tries to make a good-faith contribution in a community that has 200 or a 20,000 other people writing and has their contribution rejected for bad reasons, because some of those other people are nasty. It is not, however, a problem for somebody who is trying to contribute to a community that has 0 people: such a person has completely different problems: the very outdated software in the Incubator; the many lacking features in Content Translation; lack of technical terminology; lack of a keyboard that can write this language; lack of time to volunteer; lack of confidence that their contributions will be read by anybody; etc. These problems are under-resourced, or not resourced at all. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 10:29, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
  • I would second Amir E. Aharoni, that harassment and availability of art images are not a priority for the greatest majority of Wikipedias' communities. If we want true impact (in making the sum of all knowledge available to every human), we should concentrate our energy and other available means on areas of human knowledge that are not receiving proper attention as of yet.--Frhdkazan (talk) 07:09, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

-- Furthermore, The English Wikipedia community has been using the NFCC to use English-language anglicize multimedia content to illustrate on non-English topics in order to attract English-language users who barely or rarely understand non-English languages. For example, the video game and film buffs at Wikipedia have used English-language (i.e. European or American) front covers of video games and film posters, e.g. North American releases of Final Fantasy PlayStation games and en:Son of Saul, to attract readers, assuming that no one cared for non-English languages. Non-English languages have been the beauty of things. Using such languages should help readers be more tolerant and wiser about how things are released. If NonFreeWiki becomes a project, maybe the project can be used for further tolerance. If not, something must be done about this practice. To put another way, editors should stop using "fair use" rules and rules limiting non-free content to westernize or anglicize multimedia content, especially images. Instead, they should starting finding some way to allow usage of copyrighted material using non-English languages. However, I am unsure whether the whole community is interesting in imagery debates. Nowadays, it emphasizes more on article quality than illustration.

Not only the practice of using English-language anglicizing multimedia content for non-English topics dumbs down viewership but also damages the project's role as diverse and tolerant and multicultural. Also, I wonder whether most readers even bother to read the whole encyclopedic article. According to one of MOS rules, most readers skim through lead content, including images, and then move to another article.

If telling editors to stop is not the way, maybe companies, including video game ones, should be told to stop limiting our efforts to use front covers of products and to start allowing us to upload them to Commons with free and compatible license. I.e. tell companies to let us share certain images for Wikimedia projects. Therefore, we don't have to battle over which cover or poster to use. However, obtaining permission to freely use content is not easy, especially when you don't understand a company's native language, like Japanese. --George Ho (talk) 00:21, 11 June 2017 (UTC); amended, 00:48, 11 June 2017 (UTC); struck opening word, 20:42, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

My apologies: NFCC=en:WP:Non-free content criteria, just in case. --George Ho (talk) 21:24, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

A global syllabus

A global 'syllabus' (from Late Latin syllabus "list") or ‘curriculum’. Echoing points above - this would not be didactic or linear - but would be a place that an enquiring mind can ask 'what should I know that I don't' - making sure they are aware of thinking that is considered of global importance or cultural treasures.

It would be a collaborative global -multilingual effort to identify not just knowledge, but how to ask questions and ways of asking questions (such as the scientific method). It will also help guide, to avoid the rabbit-holes and other areas of knowledge that they can get to eventually, but are not considered ‘priority’.

Similarly, it will help guard the world from education, knowledge and thus real-life action being bent towards one particular way of thinking. Rather, it will present all as equal, for the individual to appraise. For example, teaching ‘fallacies’ and logic used to be a common subject in education – whereas it is largely absent today. Telling people about a framework which helps them pull apart everything they are told from that point on is critical and might make up an early part of the syllabus – essentially starting with ‘don’t believe everything you read’. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jacknunn (talk • contribs) 00:58, 17 May 2017‎ (UTC) (UTC)

It would not be age specific but would build known reality up from simple concept-blocks. The blocks could move away from us, to the small and the big - starting with the unit of self, then others, then society, enviroment etc. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jacknunn (talk • contribs) 01:03, 17 May 2017‎ (UTC) (UTC)

There is much more to be said on this and discussion would be most valuable. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jacknunn (talk • contribs) 00:58, 17 May 2017‎ (UTC) (UTC)

Accessibility and availability

I think that during the next twelve years we will face the establishment of countries' borders on the Internet which can affect accessibility of the people to Wikipedia. One month ago Turkey has bocked Wikipedia, and I was told Russia and Peoples Republic of China plans to establish their own encyclopedias and are known for blocking of many websites. Also we wouldn't forget about areas with poor Internet connection where the availability of the Wikipedia offline would be beneficial. This will be probably the problem of Africa, Asia and maybe of South America and in Europe and North America to some extent only.

I think it would be worthy to think about using Tor Hidden Service, I2P Eepsite or InterPlanetary File System to provide private read-only access to Wikimedia projects for example. Or provide Wikipedia on hard drives or USB keys to the schools and libraries in countries with poor Internet conectivity (a vision I remember from the PSA videos from 2007). --Venca24 (talk) 12:51, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Glocalization of wikipedia?

While currently WMF's position is to create same wikipedia for same language user, for instance the creation of a unified chinese wikipedia and the creation of serbocroatian wikipedia, but in the time of various different ideography clashing around in global scale with people of different background often find it difficult to understand or comprehend the view and value held by other parties in discussion even if they are speaking same languages, is it time to change the course of it? Such action would be against wikipedia principle and make it much easier to introduce bias during the creation of wikipedia articles, but the way I view it is that even if the article is biased against a global worldview, however it would be deemed neutral by local editors, and a comprehensive, neutral description can more easily be obtained if readers choose to navigate through different version of article on the same subject, instead of trying to working on a single version of page that everyone are told to agree upon.C933103 (talk) 17:43, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Who else will be working in this area and how might we partner with them?

National contests

One of my long term ambitions on Wikipedia is to set up a National Contest for every country and have somebody working within that country to overlook Wikimedia projects in that country and run the contests. What I'd like to see is more countries in Africa and Latin America in particular being approached and their governments and institutions seeing the positive impact it would have on national development with the improvement of information about those countries. Last year there was a contest supported by AGRIPO, the agricultural agency of Cameroon to create/improve articles on Cameroonian villages. In the end, over 1000 articles, mainly on French wiki were created or improved. If a country like Cameroon can do it then potentially any country could. I would also like to see WikiLoves Monuments type photograph contests operating for more countries individually too, a way to really build up commons resources and get local people involved. I think a grid square type scheme for each country with the aim to photograph every square kilometre, much like Geograph for the UK would work well and generate interest in different countries. I would love to see a truly global Geograph launched as a new sister project, working hand in hand with the Commons and Wikidata and map out all of our images geographically and run contests and schemes which get us missing images for certian parts of the world.

So I think we need to reinforce the plan on how to approach institutions in the developing world and vastly broaden the scope of the agreements and coordination which has been done to date. With Africa in particular, it is difficult to get people to edit for free, I think that's where contests with very decent prizes could rope in new editors from these countries as they come online in the next decade and spark off new interest. If enough funding is put into that sort of thing I can see a way that editors could be trained in English and wikipedia writing and then contribute to the encyclopedia and build up resources on their part of the world in the long term. We will need to approach more universities, museums and instititions like National Library and Archives etc for different countries. This is an exciting time for Wikimedia I think, great to see that we are thinking ahead and taking strategy seriously.Dr. Blofeld (talk) 12:12, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Governments and computer vendors: Accessibility to localization technology

In many countries where a Wikipedia community is well-developed, you can also find that the usage of computers in the local language is well developed. For example:

• Can a computer be used by a person who doesn't know English? The default user interface language for all desktop and mobile operating systems is English. They are translated to many languages, but not all.
• Most computers sold in the shops have a keyboard on which it is possible to type in the local language. The general shape of the keyboard is the same worldwide, but the necessary letters are marked on the keys out of the box. This is true for Israel, France, Russia, Spain, Korea, and many other countries. But it's not true for the whole world. In India, for example, computers are usually sold with a keyboard that includes only English and not Devanagari, Bengali, Kannada, or other local alphabets. This causes people to perceive a computer as a device that can only be used in English.
• Similar to the above, but for phones and tablets with touch screens. In Russia, Israel, Poland, and many other countries, when you buy a new phone and turn it on for the first time, you are usually presented with a screen that is either already localized, or offers a very easy way to select between English and the local language (Russian, Hebrew / Arabic, Polish, etc.). In these cultures many people would consider a phone that doesn't immediately work in the local broken and unusable, and would only purchase a localized phone. The same is not true for the whole world, however: in India you often see only English.
• Are children taught in schools how to write in their language on a computer? They do in Russia, Israel, and France, but not everywhere. In India children mostly learn to type only in English. I heard that in the state of Kerala in India, the keyboard of the Malayalam language, which is spoken there, is taught in public schools, but this is an exception and not the rule. However, you can see a possible consequence of this for Wikipedia: Even though Malayalam is not the largest language in India, the Wikipedia in this language it is one of the most active Wikipedia editions among the languages of India. Malayalam has almost the same number of active editors as the Wikipedia in Hindi, which has far more speakers, and it has more active editors than the editions of Wikipedia in Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil—languages that are linguistically related to Malayalam, and have more speakers.
• Is there a standard keyboard for this language? Is it standard across different platforms? Can it be used with all software or only on particular websites? Is it actually implemented and used? For example, the Hebrew, Russian, and French languages all have standard keyboard layouts, and they are the same in all operating systems, including those with touch keyboards. In India, there are national standards for keyboard layouts in different languages, and they are implemented in desktop operating systems, however, speakers are often unaware that they can type in their language on the computer that they already own because it is not enabled by default and because the letters are not engraved on the physical keyboard when they purchase the computer (see above). And the touch keyboards don't follow the same standard, which makes transitioning between devices hard for most people. You'll find an even worse situation in Africa: During the 2017 Wikimedia Conference I talked to several people from Nigeria and Ghana, and they all asked me about keyboards for their languages. I started researching the topic, and found that Apple devices don't have keyboards for them at all, and that even though Windows and Linux platforms do have such keyboards, some letters are missing, and the implementation for every platform and each language is different, so reusing skills between languages is impossible. In Nigeria, for example, speakers of Yoruba and Hausa languages live in the same cities, and often share computers, but they cannot help each other type in their languages, and this is detrimental to community building.
• Are fonts for this languages available? This problem is less acute than it was six years ago, because the latest versions of iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and desktop Linux all have fonts for many more alphabets than they used to when I first started looking into this problem deeply. However, some areas of the world are still not covered, or covered badly. For example, different variants of the Arabic alphabet are not represented well, and this raises frequent complaints form people who speak Persian, Urdu, and Pashto, and even from people who speak Arabic itself. The Burmese script as used by the government of Burma is commonly used with a non-Unicode font, which makes information sharing highly unreliable.

So, one of the problems that prevents people from contributing to Wikipedia in many countries is that the technology for reading and writing may be available, but it is not ubiquitous, which is not the same thing. If it becomes ubiquitous and standard, creating a Wikipedia will be possible. The WMF's past attempts to resolve this problem within the Wikimedia sites, such as jquery.ime and jquery.webfonts, had some impact, but this is not enough. We need to go beyond our own software and change the whole social and technological environment in which Wikimedia projects exist to allow them flourish.

So what is the solution?

Work with governments and change public policy. Influence parliaments to pass laws that require:

• Sale of all computers, phones, and other devices that allow reading and writing only if their user interface is translated to the local language. The translation itself can be done by volunteers. This is true even for commercial products; for example, the Windows operating system was translated into the Fula language by volunteer Fula language enthusiasts, and Microsoft agreed to integrate it, so the same can be done for other languages and operating systems. But translation alone is not enough: It must also be distributed, and people must be made aware of it, and this is possible with legislation.
• Teaching of writing in the local language on computers in schools, as part of the standard public school curriculum.
• Having a national standard keyboard for all languages spoken in the countries and having it bundled with all computers and other devices with all operating systems that are sold in the country. The development of the layouts can be done by volunteers or through grants, but distribution would be more effective with legislation.
• Integrating Unicode-compliant fonts for local languages in all devices sold.

Who will actually carry out the influencing part? I might be naïve, but the first thing to try is to get local Wikimedians to do lobbying work, either directly or with professional lobbyists. Yes, this is political, but it's not different from what Wikimedia chapters in some developed countries did when they influenced local politics to convince them to enhance the freedom of panorama, for example. It's a political cause that directly benefits the Wikimedia mission, so it's legitimate. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 12:33, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Universities outside of North America

It would be great if Wiki Ed supported Universities outside of North America. Support for educators working in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America would help make Wikimedia a Global Movement. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 15:25, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Translators without borders

The WikiMed initiative to work with TWB to bring medical articles to new languages has shown pretty good results. I would like to see this extended to more fields. We can also benefit TWB by providing technical help, as we have a significant corpus of words in hundreds of languages.--Strainu (talk) 11:43, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Other

So... we're talking about this in English

And that's the way we solve it. Let's discuss it in a language that is spoken by 1/7th of the World population and can be used to discussi only by 1/10th. -Theklan (talk) 18:49, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

• @Theklan: on this wiki, yes, mostly in English, however other languages are OK as well. There are discussions on many other places, including eswiki. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Yes, of course. But we had only one week for making translations in our own language, so, as we are volunteers, we can't reach to all the discussions and our community won't be represented in this cycle. -Theklan (talk) 19:40, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

@Theklan: ah, you mean Basque? I'm really sorry. I'm only responsible for discussions on some wikis. You have 2 weeks left though, something can be arranged, and I can help you. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Well, if you are able to help with translations to Basque ;) -Theklan (talk) 20:42, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

@Theklan: yes, actually I am, because I know what's a sine qua non, and what's additional. Write on my talk page please, if you want to continue this thread. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, yes, I acknowledge it's a problem. A major one.

Bringing people who speak other languages into the discussion is a must. And not just people who speak other languages, but specifically people who don't know English. At all. They are the majority of humanity, and they need to be served differently.

Once a person knows English, that person becomes mostly deaf and blind to the needs of people who don't know English. Even I, even though I am aware of the problem, cannot really feel the same as people who don't know English. I can participate in this conversation, and they cannot. This is a problem, and I am a part of it.

One particular thing I can think is to make the governance of the Wikimedia Foundation more open to people who don't know English. At the moment, knowing English is a requirement for being on the Board, effectively disqualifying most of humanity. Changing that would be great, although again: it's only one thing to fix out of many. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:01, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

If Wikimedia wants to be truly global, English only is clearly not enough. WMF page, all principle Guidelines & News on Meta would have to be made also available at least in such regional lingua francas as Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian & Spanish. It would also be reasonable to have simultaneous interpretation into these languages @ Wikimania & Wikimedia Conferences, for many people worldwide to be able to watch & learn (live or later) in the languages they understand.--Frhdkazan (talk) 07:38, 12 June 2017 (UTC), based on discussions in Wikipedias in the languages of Russia Facebook group

Translation and localisation

Maybe it was considered too obvious, but proper internationalisation/localisation of our software and full translation of our content (such as at translatewiki.net and Special:Translate here) is the first priority to do any of these things. We're better than anyone else in the world, but we still have a lot more to do: MediaWiki needs continuous efforts and some parts are still not working perfectly (see mw:Internationalisation wishlist 2017); worse, we have a growing jungle of non-MediaWiki and non-wiki places where non-English users are completely neglected (like Wikimedia Foundation microsites, Wikimedia Shop and so on).

Internationalisation across the board should be perceived as a shared responsibility everyone has to work towards, with some permanently dedicated resources which should be empowered to do all that is needed, and translation/localisation by the speakers of the various hundreds of languages needs to be promoted (perhaps with specific cultural partners) because it's more important and impactful than translating some specific Wikipedia article here and there. --Nemo 08:48, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Absolutely true. We are already pretty good at localization, but need to continuing getting even better in this ourselves. But another thing that we have to do is not just to improve ourselves, but to actually bring it to the world proactively. See my comments above (sorry, they are super-long). --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:03, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Get rid of discrimination based on location

In the past strategy, the world was more or less arbitrarely divided into North and South and the WMF pledged to positively discriminate the Global South. While this approach has been toned down during the years, it is still visible in scholarships to Wikimania, for instance. This is incredibly frustrating for small communities in the Global North, that have less chances to be supported than an equivalent community from the Global South.

Instead of this approach, the help should be provided to less experienced Wikimedians based on personal merits and regardless of their geographical location. That is, if 2 people apply for some kind of support, the one that has not been supported before (e.g. has not received a grant or scholarship for a similar activity) should be favored.--Strainu (talk) 11:40, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Central Eastern European Wikimedia Community

In a Facebook poll, 6 people from the CEE group rated this theme as the third *most* important to our movement's future, after community health and engaging the knowledge ecosystem. This statement got the same votes as theme #2, the Augmented age. Shani Evenstein 20:12, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Wikipedia & Medicine Community

In a Facebook poll, only 1 person chose this theme as the most important, making it the least important theme for the group. Shani Evenstein 20:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the GLAM-Wiki community

In a Facebook poll, 2 people from the GLAM-Wiki global group rated this theme as most important to our movement's future, making it the 3rd most important themes to this group, after a healthy inclusive community, and engaging with the knowledge ecosystem. Shani Evenstein 20:31, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

The most respected source of knowledge

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

People would get more knowledge about things. - Tarvmandava, 20 May 2017

@Tarvmandava: 'things' is an extremely broad and abstract word. This question means 'what impact would we have on the world if we follow this particular theme?' Ultimately, each theme leads to more knowledge for people, but that's because of our very mission, not strategy. So, could you please write more about your vision of our future with this theme implemented? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

The only historical evidence available dictates that verifiable information should be the "only" end result of any form of public media remotely resembling known and trusted entities supplying accurate information. Inaccurate information will inevitably destroy any form of media know to distribute false, or incorrect data. All information should be verified to divert liability for false information to the source. Firepack21 (talk) 01:44, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Correction: All information should be verified, so to re-direct liability of incorrect information back to the source. Firepack21 (talk) 01:49, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

-- Would this theme suit Wikipedia well? The excessive sourcing was discussed at English Wikipedia. The discussion revolves around the freely-editable encyclopedia vs. paper/print encyclopedia. In summary, without enough experts contributing to Wikipedia, adding references and citing sentences with every source are all the skills we have, yet that doesn't make a good- or high-quality article. How reliable are the footnoted references without help from experts? Also, how well written and reliable are articles about current events? Speaking of current events, we end up using mostly news articles as sources to prove Wikipedia as "respectable" source. To be honest, not following the theme well would illustrate how lacking our expertise is and how we may be driving out experts who are very knowledgeable at topics.

Would this theme also suit sister projects well, which are also editable? Commons has various range of pictures, and interpretations of pictures may be more reliable than Wikipedia itself. Wikisource is... mostly all-text and requires text reproduction of published materials. It's reliable, but time-consuming. Wikinews... I don't know how reliable it is, even with its original reporting. Most of original reporting consists of just interviews. Other news articles resemble old newspaper articles. Wikiversity has aging, out-of-date content, even with original research. Not sure whether Wikivoyage would follow the same path as Wikiversity, but in the future, Wikivoyage should be updated, or it will grow outdated. I don't have much to say about other sister projects, but I grew to browse through Wiktionary, which is fun to use.

Again, this theme seems to be too focused on Wikipedia. Probably a revised or changed theme is needed/desired to reflect how the projects operate differently. --George Ho (talk) 01:33, 8 June 2017 (UTC); edited, 01:47, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Almost forgot, unlike other projects, older articles at Wikinews get locked and stay locked permanently. Well, minor edits are allowed and can be requested, but major edits can't be accepted there once published and then locked. --George Ho (talk) 01:47, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

Respect and quality is most important because a despised Wikipedia would not be read and would be quite useless. Unfortunately, there are different opinions about quality. Some people think, the more facts and details are written in Wikipedia, the better it is. They think, deleting of bad articles is bad because having a bad article is better than having no article at all. Other people think, the more irrelevant and boring details are written in Wikipedia, the worse it is. They think, deleting of bad articles is good because bad articles destroy the respect of Wikipedia. It has to be discussed what quality means. --Plenz (talk) 15:09, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

As we all know that Wikimedia Foundation is an information intensive business,Wikipedia is of no doubt as is it is one of the most popular information intensive social medias around the world.Wikipedia gives broad definitions and only important things are read by the viewers.Yes but when we compare with other sites,Wikipedia is giving plenty of quite reliable information as it is a free encyclopedia.Unnecessary facts may be omitted from the articles and the wikipedians may think about writing the facts in pointwise format rather than writing paragraphs.Large articles may be merged into different sections and we can also raise the attention of viewers by also designing flowcharts,tabular forms etc which are also used as key weapons in the educational level.Presently most of the wikipedians also provide info by using tables,charts. Abishe (talk) 03:11, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

-- Without including and tolerating other different people as part of any communities (i.e. Theme "A"), content would be affected. Without building good relationships (i.e. Theme "E") as well, content would be affected. I read about Croatian Wikipedia, which was raised back in 2013. I discovered the controversy last year, and I kept thinking about it. Because of more abuse cases (e.g. ones at Requests for comment) and exclusion of others who are very skilled on using reliable sources, the Croatian Wikipedia is now or was considered distorted, unreliable, and poorly written. Then again, even editors using poor references would be also excluded without being given one or another chance to succeed skillfully and/or socially. Maybe the slow development of online communications via wiki is related to the quality of content. Without adequate communication (part of Theme "A" or "E"), quality would suffer. Of course, high quality is possible via solo work, but that lowers chances of improving communication skills. If communication is concentrated too much, how would we improve quality of content? It's not just Wikipedia, but the comparison of this theme and other themes, especially Theme "A" and "E", also applies to sister projects of Wikipedia.

Wikinews has journalists using decent offline communications, leading to successfully published and decent-quality original reporting. Uncertain about Wikiversity as its courses still age poorly, but English Wikiversity has Wikijournal, which is very nifty. However, improving courses and spinning Wikijournal off also take a lot of off-wiki effort and communications to make high-quality original content. Somehow, if Wikijournal is spun off, which I already voted "support", without adequate off-wiki communications, how else can Wikiversity survive by 2030? Wikivoyage still needs more offline research to improve quality as the project is just a travel guide.

Commons still needs more resources, including original photographers, because it is the central free multimedia project for all other projects. Its OTRS service is stagnating and suffering from backlog due to understaffing, affecting the relationships between OTRS volunteers and clients. Also, verifying offline permissions to use any content of any fixed medium, e.g. image, is harder than it looks. Email is fastest method, yet obtaining permission is still hard. Not sure what to say about Wikidata as I don't think much about it other than considering it the "free knowledgeable base" as what people say. I don't know what else to say about other projects, especially Wikisource. They exist because they were created to balance Wikipedia.

Cross-project communication is very essential and important because it helps improve quality of projects. Without such communication, and without enough sister projects, Wikipedia would suffer from imbalance. Of course, what would happen to Wikipedia if Wikinews and Wikiversity cease to exist by 2030? --George Ho (talk) 14:59, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Almost forgot, I read that WMF proposed improvement of the search engine by including search results of terms from Wikimedia projects, meaning that possibilities of cross-project communications and improving quality of sister projects are (slightly) likely. --George Ho (talk) 15:04, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

Inventing things which are too big and invent small reliable things.- Tarvmandava, 20 May 2017

Stop doing nothing, and start updating everything in all projects. Also, stop letting information go outdated, and start improving information and keep things up to date. Also, stop treating Wikipedia as if it's the only project to invest in, and start getting into other projects. --George Ho (talk) 01:37, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Furthermore, stop relying too much on websites, including ones providing page previews, like Google and Amazon, and start using offline and/or inaccessible sources more often. For Wikinews, stop relying on websites for article synthesis, and start learning how to be a real journalist. Well, I may not follow what I am suggesting here as I often go online, but this is my answer to this question. I haven't done journalism yet, and I might not plan to be one. However, I hope more journalists can do original reporting. BTW, I have done offline browsing solo, and I found it more time-consuming than teamwork browsing. But it's better than doing nothing and letting info stagnate and degrade. Microfilms are less efficient media to browse than online news articles, but they are cheaper and freer to use as online articles require subscriptions. --George Ho (talk) 02:46, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

For starters, stop making too many local wikis, especially ones using very obscure languages, and start revising the closing projects policy to make closures easier. --George Ho (talk) 11:25, 10 June 2017 (UTC); Moved from Theme C subpage by SGrabarczuk. --George Ho (talk) 17:12, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

How will this contribute to becoming a truly global movement? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 07:19, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

You're right, Amir. I think this should be moved to another theme page. If that's not possible, then feel free to strike the above suggestion out if I can't. --George Ho (talk) 10:00, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

@George Ho: what theme should it be moved to? What strategic problem does it resolve? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 12:34, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

I'm thinking question 3 of Theme D, Szymon. There, it can suggest reducing poorly-run wikis and/or poor-quality wikis. Or it can suggest improving such wikis. --George Ho (talk) 16:16, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

I think if we are truly to become "the most respected source of knowledge" then we need to develop a strategy where it is no longer acceptable for there to be a sub standard article on Wikipedia and to start providing consistent, high quality articles for everything. At present the encyclopedia is severely lacking in consistency and readability and tends to have better articles on popular culture/trivia or minor topics which are easier to research and lacking overall on the Vital Articles.

I think Contests if given the support long term could become an excellent method towards getting articles up to scratch and improving consistency. With contests I've run for Wales and Africa in particular, I've seen a staggering level of improvement in a short space of time to articles which otherwise might not get expanded in 10 years. With well-designed contests you can start to reshape the encyclopedia and get work done that needs to be done. I'd love to see a Contest framework in place on Wikipedia and way to start getting all of our Vital Articles up to minimum GA quality and articles which might have featured in the last publication of Encyclopedia Britannica. It's an enormous task but development of every article and a way of peer reviewing the work will be necessary if we're to achieve this. Start at the core of Wikipedia, get those articles all up to minimum GA level first, and let contests be a way of driving us to reach that target and gradually overhaul the entire encyclopedia. We'd be respected a lot more if we made sure that the vital stuff is consistent and of high quality first.Dr. Blofeld (talk) 09:42, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

There are new ways of propaganda these days, which involve mass disinformation, disruptive editing, and ad hominem attacks to wear out bona fide editors. The rules need to guard against such, rather than bind the admins’ hands unnecessarily. Kaihsu (talk) 07:56, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Nothing new about those methods, they are traditional in propaganda. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:55, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Who else will be working in this area and how might we partner with them?

I am part of the WikiJournal User Group, and I think the continued activity of this group is very beneficial for this purpose. WikiJournal consists of scholarly journals in wiki space. Works that are submitted to these journals are peer reviewed before publication, by experts in that particular field. So far, there is one journal in medicine, which is the most developed one so far, as well as one in science. This project thereby attracts quality-controlled knowledge, which can subsequently be used across Wikimedia projects. For example, review articles are based on reliable sources for their content, so the material may be used in corresponding Wikipedia articles. The nature of this publication process is somewhere between that of Wikipedia editing and publication to traditional scholarly journals. It is therefore likely to attract scholars by offering a method of contribution that they are more familiar with. WikiJournal of Medicine runs on a relatively low budget of currently a few hundred dollars per year, which is relatively low compared to both traditional journals as well as its impact on the amount of reliable knowledge across Wikimedia. Mikael Häggström (talk) 10:50, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Other topics

It's just about Wikipedia

It is clear that whoever formulated this theme thought about Wikipedia and not about other Wikimedia projects. Not all of them have to be neutral. Not all of them use secondary sources, and some of them discourage usage of sources. And so on.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:50, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

@Ymblanter: Which projects discourage the usage of sources? ChristianKl (talk) 12:40, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

@ChristianKl: Wikivoyage, for example.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:29, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, too much focus on Wikipedia. For billions of uneducated internet users, the one-stop shop for information (not necessarily knowledge) is Google or even Facebook. To compete with that, we need for instance to improve Wiktionary so that people find definitions of words (just to simplify). --Nemo 08:36, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

The point of respect

I think "respected" is a dangerous term. Respect easily translates to passive acceptance and reliance ("Wikipedia said so", "I donate to Wikipedia because it gives me something important and I don't give it anything"). We need "respect" of the free culture and wiki process, as in acceptance and engagement, so that more and more people use the wikis and their content actively (critical reading and studying, editing, external reuse, off-wiki publishing under free licenses etc.).

I would prefer more "respect" i.e. compliance with our licenses. :-) --Nemo 08:30, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

For a long time I've disagreed with this site's rule about "Weight" where mere bodycount plays a role on what makes it onto the page. The fact that all Wikipedia wants ideologically is "For the most amount of people to bow down to these articles" is equally disturbing. Lumbering in thought (talk) 01:20, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, it's not our goal for people to take for granted what Wikipedia articles say. Quite the opposite! Nemo 19:57, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

Respect for Wikipedia should be balanced by a healthy skepticism for all unverified information. Wikipedia makes a good start by providing sources. Let the world get into the habit of thinking "{{Citation needed}}". If we can reduce the number of people who can be fooled in any given circumstance we are doing well. This can be achieved by providing good information and encouraging enquiry into verifiability and the meaning of truth and facts. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:04, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Source of Knowledge

I must remind that WMF projects are open to changes by anyone. Stating that "is a Respected Source of Knowledge" is like saying to a reader which just "stepped in" a recently abused page which was not yet reversed, that (s)he sees a Respected Source about what (s)he was looking for. We cannot guarantee that everything a reader sees is a real thing. So the "call/legend/logo" should be somehow different. Something that will make people understand that they have to inquire the page before attempting to get as true what is there written.

At the moment, if a reader gets in an abused page (abused in such a way that it seems real, with real and existing references etc.), even if the page is immediately reversed by another user to "good" content, the reader will be still reading the false content, and even he/she will quote that content or keep it in his electronic device (PC, mobile etc.).

Many people, even scientists(!), do not understand how fast-flowing is the content of the articles. I have even see many scientific publications referring to Wikipedia's articles as sources (!!!) of their publications. But NEVER referring which revise was. That sounds to me (as wikipedian) like stating "the God says/states/will/did/..." without stating the religion (is it Christianism?, is it Zoroastrianism?, is it Salafism? etc. should I add?: is it Wikipedianism?).

So my opinion is that the basic issue should be to get "all people"(sic!) understand that what we have here is a reliable source as long as they, by themselves, are "comparison shoppers", "searchers" (can't find the exact word...). Unless, of course, we must not care about those unwary, light thinking, fast searching people and we must not take them so seriously. Unless those (outnumbered or not) "light thinking" are not those for which we create this vast database.

Are we just easing the work of researchers? Are we creating a source of knowledge for those who already know or a source of knowledge for those who do not know? That is the main question. And this is might not be answered by strategies concluding that we are "The Source". --Xoristzatziki (talk) 16:42, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Central Eastern European Wikimedia Community

In a Facebook poll, only one person voted for this theme as important, making it the least important theme for the group. Shani Evenstein 20:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Wikipedia & Medicine Community

In a Facebook poll, 4 people rated this theme as important, making it the most important theme for the group. Shani Evenstein 20:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Countering marketing and commercial editing

It surprises me that, during the active phase of this consultation, no one has mentioned the increasingly dominant rôle of deliberate biased editing of the Wikipedia projects. In the past decade en.WP has attempted to address egregious examples, such as the U.S. House of Representatives, and others which became popular media stories, such as CAMERA. But fundamentally Wikimedia has chosen not to adapt available technologies (such as WikiScanner) or to develop socio-legal structures (such as enforced TOS involving financial penalties) to prevent harm to its reputation.

In my sphere, use of Wikipedia is widely discouraged not because it is generically inaccurate or bad, but because it is inconsistently wildly biased. It is viewed as an advertising platform, particularly so by pharmaceutical firms, but also by most political and lobby groups working in the fields of health and public health. No doubt this is also the case in other specific fields of interest, and again it will be inconsistent how severe/obvious the level of spin/advocacy may be.

It is clear this strategy cycle is dominated by "let's create aspirational goals!" mentality, but you need to say why a goal exists. You want to be "the most respected source of knowledge" indicates you are not that source now. Why not? - Amgine/^{meta wikt wnews blog wmf-blog goog news} 13:48, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Engaging the knowledge ecosystem (Participating in the knowledge network)

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

This clearly affects the reputation of the encyclopedia, and how well its regarded as an authoritative and reliable source. Ideally, we can be the integration point between the expert/scholarly/academic/technical communities and the general public. Experts in their respective fields (especially the niche and obscure) are increasingly in need of effective communication to non-experts. Similarly, the public is increasingly in need of accurate portrayal of complex topics. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 14:12, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

-- While many people focused, commented, and centered on mostly Wikipedia, I suspect very few or no people commented on sister projects. How would following this theme make any difference to sister projects? For starters, Wikiversity houses creativity and originality but also needs more attention. More organizations should focus more on Wikiversity to create free courses and other kinds. If that happens, Wikiversity would make a great difference to the world. Otherwise, Wikiversity would sit there collecting bytes of dust, especially when Wikijournal is spun off. Speaking of Wikijournal, if it becomes a full-fledged project, multiple organizations, institutions, and universities would freely create newer, accessible, and free scholarly articles.

Commons can suit this theme very well because it is the central project hosting multimedia content for all other projects, like Wikipedia. If more visual arts organizations can follow this theme, then Commons can have more free multimedia content. However, OTRS service is still in shambles and needs to be reformed or something; I see the small community of Commons working on those issues.

How can Wikinews successfully team up with organizations interested in news? Wikinews is still struggling (immensely), yet it's still surviving. To survive by 2030, Wikinews community can pick up organizations not wanting to do anything with mainstream media. How about team of journalists who want to publish articles for free? Of course, it's harder because most journalists nowadays earn money as desired.

Wikidata, the free data-collecting project, still needs more organizations specializing in technology, which would further improve if it happens. Wikivoyage needs more organizations specialized in travel and/or history. Wikisource... boy, organizations would have difficulties trying to convert print material into text. No comment about other projects.

In summary, this theme would be futile and ineffective if most organizations center on Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata and give sister projects very little attention. Rather the theme should be revised to suit sister projects well, so organizations would give other sister projects greater chances and more attention than they have earned over the years. --George Ho (talk) 22:11, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

-- Re-thinking about this theme, universities can still exist, while Wikiversity either survives or flounders by 2030. Dictionaries can exist, while Wiktionary can still exist. Quote collectors can exist, while Wikiquote... I don't know, but it has fair use issues. Archive collectors can exist, while Wikisource... boy, technologically not as advanced as Internet Archive. Travel guides can exist, while Wikivoyage can exist. Wikinews won't compete with existing news organizations well obviously, but I hope it still exists... or transformed into a better project with similar goals but with wider scope. Look what happened to Wikitravel, which became Wikivoyage. Print textbooks exist and compete better, while Wikibooks... its growth is... well, not picking up to the level of other textbooks. Nevertheless, I hope it survives by 2030. --George Ho (talk) 22:44, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

Although it is one of my passions, I suspect that its priority is below being a Respected Source of Knowledge (ultimate goal) and ensuring Healthy, Inclusive Communities (necessary foundation). In my opinion though, it is one of the most effective ways of achieving the Respected Knowledge goal. The project would fundamentally survive (though be impoverished) even if it failed to improve its global reach, and if it never improved its technology and augmentation. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 14:20, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

Overall this requires some re-prioritisation towards attracting expert contributors (as opposed to amateur) and collaborating with established knowledge groups (even though those groups may not fully share open access values). The greatest tradeoff with this priority is global reach. The majority of the established knowledge ecosystem is already heavily biased towards white male northern, anglophone dominated societies, so greater engagement with them makes the movement affected by their own bias problems as well as our own. It also risks tradeoffs with community health, in that it is important not to accidentally alienate the core of dedicated, but amateur contributors. Similarly we will have to be careful not to make some pages seem discourage improvements (i.e. even Features articles and externally reviewed can still be improved and and need to be kept in date) I think that some tradeoff is worth it however for the benefits that this would bring. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 15:01, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

-- As rewritten version of my answer to question 1, most business, institutions, organizations, and universities should stop treating Wikipedia as the central prize, possession, and network. Instead, they should refocus and restructure their own goals and then instead shift to other existing projects that suit their own needs. Journalists should stop treating Wikipedia like a news ticker and start creating more free original reporting for Wikinews, especially if they're unsatisfied with money, greed, and sensationalism of mainstream media. Universities and institutions should stop repressing their own original research skills for Wikipedia and start expressing original thought for Wikiversity and Wikijournal. Don't know what else to say about other projects in this question.

However, this answer should not encourage treating the Foundation like a monopoly. Speaking of monopoly, I hope the Foundation's projects don't monopolize their own competitors. ...Actually, if editors found their own interests not well-treated in Wikipedia, they should stop editing Wikipedia, stop treating Wikipedia like the only encyclopedic resource, and start creating their own encyclopedias, print or online. --George Ho (talk) 22:35, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

-- Forgot Wikibooks... To follow this theme, more companies and organizations should stop killing trees to produce textbooks and start conserving and saving them. Therefore, they can shift to Wikibooks to create free online textbooks and all that more collaboratively. --George Ho (talk) 22:46, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

In my opinion the primacy is funnelling contributions to the encyclopedia and other central projects without accidentally making the relevant sections too diffuse to maintain critical mass. This is an obvious place to suggest developing protocols, tech, support, and possibly grants for making it easier to interface with other ecosystem communities.

• Some centralised support for outside contributors (like PLOS's Topic page wiki).
• Development of academic WikiJournals for publishing (and possible co-publishing) of academic articles (WikiJournal of Medicine as a flagship example of possible expansion to other areas)

T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 14:52, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

A bit more focus on other parts of the knowledge ecosystem besides Wikipedia would help too. Encyclopaedias are a small part of the knowledge ecosystem. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:15, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Who else will be working in this area and how might we partner with them?

Editathons and Wikipedians in residence seem to have been quite productive for this. Possibly also support for experiences trainers in editing to train/advise partners. More focussed support may be possible by making hybrid platforms that bridge the gap between Wikipedia projects and possible partners e.g.:

• Better metrics and measurements of work done for people's CVs and KPIs to 'officially' recognise and reward contribution.
• Dual publishing as academic articles and Wikipedia pages, e.g. PLOS Topic pages the scholarly WikiJournal publishing model currently being experimented with by Wiki.J.Med.
• Support systems for easier external peer review (without dual publishing) e.g. by BMJ

Obvious partnership targets include:

• Open access scholarly publishers (e.g. BMC, expanding collaboration with PLOS)
• Possible, careful collaboration with non-open-access scholarly publishers that nevertheless care about knowledge disseminatin (e.g Nature education and Scitable, Evolution: Education and Outreach)
• Other communities of experts (e.g. Cochrane)
• Academic societies (e.g. The Royal Society, Australian Society for Microbiology)

T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 14:31, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

GLAMs, universities and EDU, Academy, TED, Open Street Map, CC network, EDU Groups, GreyNet. -- On behalf of Wikipedians of Prague, --Petra Pejšová (WMCZ) (talk) 18:47, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Impact on happiness and cultural development of people

Quite an open question

• https://medium.com/@Hverwayen/the-impact-of-cultural-heritage-creating-a-common-language-28cba0e1af0b
• https://impkt.tools/
• http://sharecare.nu/aarhus-2017/

(links by Merete Sanderhoff at https://www.unibocconi.it/wps/wcm/connect/ev/eventi/eventi+bocconi/l+open+data+per+gli+obiettivi+di+sviluppo+sostenibile ). --Nemo 10:00, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Other

Feedback from the Central Eastern European Wikimedia Community

In a Facebook poll, 9 people from the CEE group rated this theme as the second *most* important to our movement's future, after community health. Shani Evenstein 20:08, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the Wikipedia & Medicine Community

In a Facebook poll, 2 people rated this theme as important, making it the second most important theme for the group. Shani Evenstein 20:13, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Feedback from the GLAM-Wiki community

In a Facebook poll, 5 people from the GLAM-Wiki global group rated this theme as most important to our movement's future, making it one of the top 2 most important themes to this group. Shani Evenstein 20:29, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

General questions and comments (not specific to a theme)

• The five themes articulate grand visions, but I wonder how realistic it is that progress toward these visions could be provided with the necessary resources.

• There have been many initiatives on growing communities over the years, and it's unclear to me if any of these initiatives have led to significant and sustained increases in content contributors (who are human resources).

• Changing focus to financial resources, I think that there is significant room for improvement in the design and speed of our interfaces but financial resources for design, engineering, and research paid staff have been insufficient to close the gap between Wikipedia and other online destinations such as Facebook and Google. My impression is that Wikipedia is 10 to 15 years behind Facebook and Google in terms of our ease of use.

So, how could we dramatically expand our human and financial resources so that we could have a realistic hope of achieving the goals articulated in the strategy themes?

• It seems to me that the Wikimedia universe has always had some tension between priorities, such as privacy and transparency. I see similar tension in these themes between the goal of having "projects flourish from the healthy community we cultivate together" and the goal of "upholding our standards for verifiable, neutral and comprehensive knowledge." The verifiability and neutrality of content are frequently in dispute, and it seems likely to me that this will always be the case. I am wondering how we reconcile our goals of verifiable and neutral information, supporting the value of freedom of expression, and cultivating healthy communities. I've struggled with these questions myself and I don't think that there are definitive answers, but perhaps someone involved in the strategy process could talk about how to address situations where strategy goals are in tension with each other.

• What should be the roles of the Wikimedia Foundation, affiliates, individual contributors, and others in making progress on the strategy themes?

--Pine^✉ 00:35, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

A couple of thoughts:

• I have seen some successes with respect to growing our communities through collaborations with like minded organizations. We have seen a number of editors making more than 100 edits a month for the last 6 months through collaborations with Health Information For All and Cochrane for example.
• Personally I find Facebook much less user friendly than Wikipedia. As Wikipedia needs to work both as a source of information for our readers and be easily editable for our communities we have a harder task than most other websites. While things could use improvement this needs to be done carefully and incrementally.

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:23, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Doc James there have been some successes, certainly, but at best Wikimedia's overall contributor trend has been sideways for years 1 2. This is particularly concerning when one considers that the population of Internet users is growing, which means that the percentage of Internet users who are Wikimedians is declining. I wish I had more reason to be optimistic.

I agree that UI improvements are needed. Facebook has an advantage in that its typical content contributor workflows are far simpler than those on Wikipedia or Commons. I would like the Visual Editor experience to feel as fast and easy to use as Google Docs or Microsoft Word. (Even if our UI was state of the art, we would still have lots of complicated policies, and I think those are likely to stay complicated for the indefinite future, partly because copyright and privacy laws are so complex and partly because our own content and behavioral policies have evolved to address so many situations). --Pine^✉ 01:18, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Agree editor stagnation is an issue.

The question is how do we make contributing to Wikipedia / Wikimedia projects more enticing?

I think actively portraying what we do in a positive light would help.

Journals get many academics to put in hundreds of hours of work to write a review articles despite multiple rejections of their work. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:27, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Pine. The interpretation on statistics seems exaggerated. Sure, the decline from March 2007 was steep. However, notice that after 2011, the numbers of "active Wikipedians" are steady and in the 70,000~79,999 range. Even the numbers of "very active Wikipedia" have gone around 10,000 or more since 2007, though the numbers went below 11,000 after 2010. Of course, I'm discussing those of all languages. Narrowing down to just English Wikipedia, the highest peak was 53,668 in March 2007. Since 2010, the number range has been 30,000~39,999. However since 2012, the numbers have been below 35,000. More likely steady in English Wikipedia. The numbers of "very active Wikipedians" in En.wikipedia have been 3000~3999 since 2010. However since 2011, the numbers have gone below 3600. Also steady. Most likely the stats counts editors. What about readers who don't edit at all but just read instead? And ones who are doing just research rather than edit?

BTW, I don't use Visual Editor very much. I hear some people had difficulties with current VE. Even I find it a bit annoying. --George Ho (talk) 01:38, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

• I have been contributing to Wikipedia since June 2004, I have over 80 thousand edits and together with another contributor I was named "Wikipedian of the year" for 2016 in Norway. I don't see any relevance at all for me in this. It reads like something from a cult/fringe political movement (been there, so I know) or internal company promotion. Ulflarsen (talk) 12:07, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

• I have been contributing to (German) Wikipedia since 2005. I agree with Ulflarsen: This reads like something from a fringe movement (or else like public relations) and has nothing whatsoever to do with my Wikipedia reality or the experiences made by my colleagues. Moreover, it is wrong that these themes have been developed from community discussions. There were some discussions within the projects but they have been grossly misrepresented on meta (and still are), the fundamental skepticism of many Wikipedians wasn't considered at all. My impression is that these themes are exactly what the WMF wanted to put forward from the beginning. A pseudo-participation game was enacted which had no influence upon the pre-determined themes.--Mautpreller (talk) 09:20, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Themes suitable to the sister projects?

I'm also more concerned about the themes of the movement. All of them seem fitting and well suited for Wikipedia and Commons. However, because info rapidly changes and because people rapidly make the changes, making Wikipedia the "Most Respected Source" is... hard to determine. Also, government censorships would make global achievements and progress slower. Nevertheless, paper encyclopedias would be considered more outdated than Wikipedia.

Their sister projects, whose audiences may differ from each other, would not achieve all five themes at all. Wikinews would not be able to follow all the themes very well for obvious reasons. Wikiversity, which also holds Wikijournal, and Wikiquote would not achieve the "Augmented Age" and "Most Respected Source" themes. Wikiversity has insufficient amount of courses, including Catholicism (most of them empty or not yet created), aging courses, and its original research content. Information should be updated; otherwise, I am worried about the fate of Wikiversity. Wikiquote still relies on human creativity yet also has fair use issues. Wiktionary won't achieve the "Most Respected Source" theme because its dictionary counterparts (e.g. Webster and Oxford) are not severely affected by Wiktionary. Wikisource... well, not as impactful as Internet Archive and not as competitive as other websites publishing public domain works. Wikivoyage... well, rapid changes of the information would make travel guides outdated. However, "Augmented Age" theme would not suit Wikivoyage well because learning machines might not be capable of knowing the world well. Wikispecies might have difficult time attracting general audience due to its taxonomy and scientific information.

The themes should be changed to reflect how all existing projects must achieve their survivals by 2030 and how a few new proposals, i.e. ones proposed in Meta-wiki, can exist by 2030. --George Ho (talk) 19:33, 13 May 2017 (UTC); edited. 19:35, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Forgot about Wikidata. It's another central project holding the database and interconnecting all wikis. However, it also has a long way to go as its editing is not as easy as it seems to be. --George Ho (talk) 02:19, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Goals and strategies

The themes chosen appear to articulate goals, but goals are different from strategies. A strategy is a "plan of action intended to accomplish a specific goal". I understand that it would be good for WMF to know what its goals are before developing strategies. Will strategies be developed during this process, or is this process intended only to develop strategic goals for which strategies will be developed in the future? --Pine^✉ 01:29, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Agree brainstorming lists of potential efforts to meet these goals I think would be useful. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:36, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Right now, we are trying to develop a strategic direction that sits right below the vision statement that will help focus the movement for the next 15 years or so. That is where we are trying to get by Wikimania. After Wikimania, we will develop plans for how we (WMF and other other movement orgs.) get there. Right now, we are more focused on why and figuring out which mountain we want to climb together. This process will get into discussing specific plans in a few months, but feel free to think about it now if that helps you. --Lgruwell-WMF (talk) 21:49, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Lgruwell-WMF thanks for the clarification. It seems to me that we do need to think a bit about how in the sense of "how realistic are these aspirations?" I suppose that we could develop ideals and then develop a list of SMART objectives with 2030 as the time boundary with the understanding that the SMART objectives are likely to involve specific and measurable progress toward but not fulfillment of the ideals. --Pine^✉ 02:14, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Sure, right now we're just discussing which of the 5 themes we should put our energies into:

1. Eliminate global warming
2. Eliminate war and hatred between nations and peoples
3. Develop a free, and infinite source of energy
4. Eliminate disease and death
5. Write an accurate, comprehensive and engaging encyclopedia, while minimizing drama in doing so

Once we figure out what we're doing, we'll get around to thinking about how to do it. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:19, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

What's the objective of this stage?

What are we trying to achieve with this stage? Will the views posted on here be used to prioritise these 5 themes against each other, or to refine them, or to combine them? Would be helpful to know before posting! Chris Keating (The Land) (talk) 09:04, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

agree w/ questions asked by Chris Keating--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 22:46, 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the questions, Chris. The objective of this phase is to get more directed feedback on the five main themes that emerged from Cycle 1. It is tough to say what the outcome of Cycle 2 will be before the discussion takes place. It might be a question of refining and/or combining. I don't think we'll know until we hear the feedback. One goal of this cycle is to get people thinking about the impact we could have in the world by going a particular direction. That is the first question that we are asking people to reflect on for each of the themes. Right now, the themes are about what we would do. (Lots of "We will..." statements.) In Cycle 2, we are asking people to consider what impact this could have in the world. The refined theme(s) in the next cycle will likely include language from the answer to that question. --Lgruwell-WMF (talk) 21:41, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Unclear English text

The English text can be improved to be inclusive and translatable, as is the entire strategic exercise's goal. For instance "augmented age" is jargon used in an unnecessarily contracted way. Better would be to avoid the jargon "augmented" or at least use it in unambiguous ways, such as with the full expression "augmented reality". See also Writing clearly for some advice on how to write in good English. (This issue was raised by an Italian translator who had troubles understanding.) --Nemo 10:05, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, we see the problem too. There are more simple versions of the themes coming out shortly that should make translation easier. Thanks for raising this. --Lgruwell-WMF (talk) 16:29, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Negara terisolir

Bagaimana jika ada sebuah negara yang menutup akses internet Warsono sanusi (talk) 19:17, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Themes rewritten

You guys. The themes were copyedited and rewritten into this version. Thoughts? --George Ho (talk) 07:15, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Sort of 4 main themes

1 and 3) People

2) Tech

4) Content

5) Collaboration

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:59, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Hmm... what are your proposed themes specifically, Doc? --George Ho (talk) 05:25, 31 May 2017 (UTC)

I was initially thinking about the combining of 1 and 3. But as I look at it further, even though their is overlap, the extra weight is useful. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:31, 31 May 2017 (UTC)