User:DRanville (WMF)/Rapports Mensuels/Août/EN

This page gathers observations and suggestions from the french-speaking community about strategy thematic areas of the Wikimedia 2030 process. This list is a summary of discussions that happened in August 2019 (and until September 12th) and that I was informed of as strategy liaison for the french community.

Number of people involved in the discussions

~20 people took part in discussions + 35 answered a short survey (more people also participated during Wikimania or WikiConvention Francophone, their feedback has been reported separately)

Discussion Channels

On-wiki

• Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource (village pumps + project talk pages)
• Meta talk page

Twitter

• reactions to threads I made
• Survey

Emails and videocalls

• 1:1 contacts with specific people about specific themes

Key points by themes

General comments

• One of WMF and affiliates' priority should be quality interaction with the editing community (currently there is disconnection)

Product et technology

Survey

Result from a short survey on Twitter : « Do you feel involved in the development of Wikimedia technologies (MediaWiki &cie)?" (35 votes)

• 6% Yes, totally!
• 17% Yes, pretty much.
• 37% No, not really.
• 40% No, not at all.

Feedback

• our interfaces should be adapted to web standards (UX and UI are currently unappealing, especially for non-technical people)
• associate editors and non-editors users in design thinking, co-creation, co-design...
• teach non-technical people how to interact with technical teams (qualify bugs, report issues, ask for features...)

Partnerships

Community feedback

• strongly include editing communities in partnership projects

Feedback from GLAMs

• partners currently appreciate :
  • personalized training in immersion with competent people
  • discovering the possibilities offered by the galaxy of Wikimedia projects
• to be improved :
  • tools are complex
  • licence issues
  • difficult to include contribution in work time (already many tasks to do)
• needs:
  • ideally, have one person from staff, nay an entire team, to contribute on a regular basis

Feedback from WMCH

• training GLAM staff for Wikimedia projects works better when done within the broader scope of "digital" issues
• GLAMs need to be able to measure their contributions' impact (to justify why they do it) so we need tools to measure this (WMCH is currently testing a tool for this)
• for volunteers:
  • all their expenses need to be covered, including babysitting
  • offer volunteers easy access to training about wikimedia projects and tools
• We need to fund more staff in affiliates in order to:
  • ensure training of GLAM staff (training of professionals cannot rely of volunteers only)
  • write reports to help GLAMs justify their investment in Wikimedia projects when talking to public authorities (who fund them) - these reports can afterwards be used to convince new partners.
  • build partnerships on the long term so that we have lasting projects and not one-shots
• The WMF should better inform its affiliates of its GLAM (and other) activities in their countries ("we sometimes learn from our partners that Jimmy Wales or some other figure from the Foundation is coming to Berne/Zurich because they have been invited to his conference...while we haven't - to our partners's astonishment") - similar case in Canada.

Diversity

Recommendation 13

• very much needed in Africa
• oral sources and primary sources are already accepted in many areas
• oral sources should be collected systematically and uploaded on WikiSource
• don't lower standards, but make them more relevant for all topics (otherwise, it will open the door to undesired content : e.g. extremists, complotists, pseudo-sciences, sects...)
• a diversity of sources are already accepted about non-polemical subjects (cities, geography... versus topics related to human issues like politics, advertising, personal prestige, etc.)
• focus on supporting the production of (or access to) reliable sources on minorized subjects (rather than changing admissibility criteria)

Recommendation 9

• ND/NC are problematic and against our principles of free knowledge
• ND/NC will not solve the problem the recommendation is trying to adress

Additional thoughts

• Biases : make people aware of their own biases is a huge task, and goes way beyond the scope of Wikimedia projects : it is about sociology, psychology... As we cannot change people, we should focus on recruiting people from various backgrounds (targeted editathons, non-mixity...), plus working on awareness raising for the others (gaps, social biases).
• Paid editing : it already exists for Wikimedians in Residence and could be replicated with GLAMs specialized in minority knowledge (e.g. Activist libraries). In other cases, further studies should be conducted about existing cases and potential modalities.

Capacity Building

• What about open badges ?