Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: Another problem is that forking of a large Wikipedia edition has proven to be extremely difficult, regardless of the availability of image dumps, so the threat is very weak. The Chinese experience should tell us how hard it is: Baidu Baike and Hudong were able to thrive only with the Chinese Wikipedia completely blocked in Mainland China. -- Tim Starling There is a relevant anecdote to go with this. A physics teacher was telling his students how compared to the other fundamental forces, gravity was comparatively very very weak. Just as he said that, a wall attached speaker failed its mountings and came crashing down behind him. Without missing a beat he continued. Weak, but non-neglible. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
2011/8/17 David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com: You say that we exclude significant material on the basis of notability? Notability is not an absolute criteria. There are thousands of subjects/articles which could be notable with different criterias. Regards, Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
2011/8/17 David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com: You say that we exclude significant material on the basis of notability? Notability is not an absolute criteria. There are thousands of subjects/articles which could be notable with different criterias. Regards, Yann What is happening is not one big fork, but many specialized forks based on just such changes in emphasis. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: 2011/8/17 David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com: Notability is not an absolute criteria. There are thousands of subjects/articles which could be notable with different criterias. What is happening is not one big fork, but many specialized forks based on just such changes in emphasis. This is what I wanted to address with my proposal in StrategyWiki... 2 years ago: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Recognize_that_Wikipedia_is_more_than_an_encyclopedia_and_fork_it -- Fajro ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On 09/11/11 5:13 AM, Fred Bauder wrote: 2011/8/17 David Richfielddavidrichfi...@gmail.com: You say that we exclude significant material on the basis of notability? Notability is not an absolute criteria. There are thousands of subjects/articles which could be notable with different criterias. What is happening is not one big fork, but many specialized forks based on just such changes in emphasis. Sounds like the right direction. Ray ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 22:43, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: On 08/15/11 12:25 PM, Gustavo Carrancio wrote: Fred: easy to fork vs hard to understand other cultures. Think a minute. ¿Are we making an Encyclopedia? Must we struggle to split or to get togeather? At some point we need to ask ourselves: Is our mission to make the sum of all human knowledge freely available, or is it to create a monopoly on knowledge. While I agree with necessity of being able to make a fork easily, there is important message which Gustavo wanted to say, but didn't express well. Under the present circumstance, any attempt to create English Wikipedia fork could be successful just if WMF makes very-ultra-serious shit and it is not likely that it would happen. We also know how the case Encyclopedia Libre vs. Spanish Wikipedia finished. That's, again, thanks to the fact that Spanish is multinational language and if someone wants to get significant official support, it would require significant time. However, the opposite example is Hudong encyclopedia. It is obviously that Hudong is much more relevant to Chinese people just because of the fact that we still have more Taiwanese Wikipedians than Mainland China ones. A couple of months ago three admins of Aceh Wikipedia decided that it is not acceptable that they participate in the project which holds Muhammad depictions. By the project, they mean Wikimedia in general, including Wikimedia Commons. It was just a matter of time when they would create their own wiki. And they created that moth or two after leaving Wikimedia. And what do you think which project has more chances for success: the one without editors or the other with three editors? So, while the reason for leaving couldn't be counted among reasonable ones, the product is the same as if they had a valid reason. And there are plenty of valid reasons, among them almost universal problem of highly bureaucratic structures on Wikimedia projects. I can imagine even very successful fork of Wikipedia in any Balkan language. We are also more or less on the edge of successful fork of any language whose community has any kind of problem with the rest of the movement. And at some point we could have serious problem. Projects could even start without license compatibility with Wikimedia content. Yes, as I don't think that anyone would bother -- which would be the right decision because of a number of reasons -- with GFDL and CC-BY-SA violations of the encyclopedia in a language with not so much speakers. That leads us to the serious dead end: We want forkability because of our principles. We could potentially lose parts of our movement. According to our principles, the only way to protect the movement is to be attractive to editors more than potential forks could be. And that's our structural problem: we are losing that battle since ~2007 and changes which we are making are too slow and too small. And that opens the space for even worse scenario. The last hope for societies in such decline is to impose martial law and try to fix things by not so pleasant methods. The only problem is that we are not society. Nobody would be killed because of Wikimedia fall and no economy would be destructed. More importantly, when people see harsh methods imposed (and one of them would be forbidding [easy] forkability), they would start to leave the project, which would just catalyze the fall. Fortunate moment is that we are driving on organizational expansion and that we bought some time. There are a couple of other methods for buying time. But, if we don't use that time to fix things, at some point we would deplete available options. We would eventually have the same problems in India which we have in US; we would have the same problems on a project which would be opened in 2012 as we have today with many other projects. Note that Wikipedia wasn't a hype because it is free and open online encyclopedia. It was a hype because such thing didn't exist before. It exists now all over the Internet. And without qualitative breakthroughs, we have to do things regularly. And models exist: IBM lives, Microsoft lives, Apple lives; Sinclair is dead, SGI is dead, Sun is dead; Netscape lives as Mozilla, Amsword lives as Libre Office, Ingres lives as PostgreSQL. Hi-tech organizations -- and we are hi-tech organization -- which survived were able to catch the technological development of their competitors. And our competitors are not millions of MediaWiki installations; our competitor is Hudong (note the features [1]), but also Google and Facebook. I am not saying that they are against us, but that we have to catch their technological development if we want to survive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong#Features ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
Our competitors are not millions of MediaWiki installations; our competitor is Hudong (note the features [1]), but also Google and Facebook. I am not saying that they are against us, but that we have to catch their technological development if we want to survive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong#Features The system has some social networking-like interactive features, such as user profile, friends and groups. A no-brainer Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On 16 August 2011 10:59, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote: That leads us to the serious dead end: We want forkability because of our principles. We could potentially lose parts of our movement. According to our principles, the only way to protect the movement is to be attractive to editors more than potential forks could be. And that's our structural problem: we are losing that battle since ~2007 and changes which we are making are too slow and too small. And that opens the space for even worse scenario. The last hope for societies in such decline is to impose martial law and try to fix things by not so pleasant methods. The only problem is that we are not society. Nobody would be killed because of Wikimedia fall and no economy would be destructed. More importantly, when people see harsh methods imposed (and one of them would be forbidding [easy] forkability), they would start to leave the project, which would just catalyze the fall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29 Precis: annoy a subcommunity sufficiently, they leave in a group. Try to stop them from leaving (as opposed to trying to attract them back), they leave faster and take others with them. This is what I mean when I say forkability will keep us honest. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
Here is a bigger problem. Wikimedia Foundation wants to increase the participation and readers numbers just because the capitalist mind of forcing steady growing. They don't know how to reach that, just want to do it, and the participation growing is flat since 2007. They tried to improve usability, and nothing happened. Now, they are working in the gender issue. Tomorrow in the Global South. All them are great news headlines for the politically correct western world, but, as the Internet meme, they are doing it wrong. Wikipedia grew exponentially in the first years, and no Wikimedia Foundation was needed. Why? Because people easily saw which pages were needed. The encyclopedia was a blank page. Today, Wikipedia is showed as the most complete encyclopedia ever written. That is possible true, but that doesn't mean it is complete. We don't have to ask for new users, we have to show which stuff need to be written, and people will come. Really, users are coming, in hordes, visiting numbers are growing but they don't know where their help is needed. Furthermore, offering trustworthy text and image dumps is not seductive. Making forks easy is not seductive. That means re-using content but also losing contributors which go to other communities. Don't expect much effort in that. 2011/8/16 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 22:43, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: On 08/15/11 12:25 PM, Gustavo Carrancio wrote: Fred: easy to fork vs hard to understand other cultures. Think a minute. ¿Are we making an Encyclopedia? Must we struggle to split or to get togeather? At some point we need to ask ourselves: Is our mission to make the sum of all human knowledge freely available, or is it to create a monopoly on knowledge. While I agree with necessity of being able to make a fork easily, there is important message which Gustavo wanted to say, but didn't express well. Under the present circumstance, any attempt to create English Wikipedia fork could be successful just if WMF makes very-ultra-serious shit and it is not likely that it would happen. We also know how the case Encyclopedia Libre vs. Spanish Wikipedia finished. That's, again, thanks to the fact that Spanish is multinational language and if someone wants to get significant official support, it would require significant time. However, the opposite example is Hudong encyclopedia. It is obviously that Hudong is much more relevant to Chinese people just because of the fact that we still have more Taiwanese Wikipedians than Mainland China ones. A couple of months ago three admins of Aceh Wikipedia decided that it is not acceptable that they participate in the project which holds Muhammad depictions. By the project, they mean Wikimedia in general, including Wikimedia Commons. It was just a matter of time when they would create their own wiki. And they created that moth or two after leaving Wikimedia. And what do you think which project has more chances for success: the one without editors or the other with three editors? So, while the reason for leaving couldn't be counted among reasonable ones, the product is the same as if they had a valid reason. And there are plenty of valid reasons, among them almost universal problem of highly bureaucratic structures on Wikimedia projects. I can imagine even very successful fork of Wikipedia in any Balkan language. We are also more or less on the edge of successful fork of any language whose community has any kind of problem with the rest of the movement. And at some point we could have serious problem. Projects could even start without license compatibility with Wikimedia content. Yes, as I don't think that anyone would bother -- which would be the right decision because of a number of reasons -- with GFDL and CC-BY-SA violations of the encyclopedia in a language with not so much speakers. That leads us to the serious dead end: We want forkability because of our principles. We could potentially lose parts of our movement. According to our principles, the only way to protect the movement is to be attractive to editors more than potential forks could be. And that's our structural problem: we are losing that battle since ~2007 and changes which we are making are too slow and too small. And that opens the space for even worse scenario. The last hope for societies in such decline is to impose martial law and try to fix things by not so pleasant methods. The only problem is that we are not society. Nobody would be killed because of Wikimedia fall and no economy would be destructed. More importantly, when people see harsh methods imposed (and one of them would be forbidding [easy] forkability), they would start to leave the project, which would just catalyze the fall. Fortunate moment is that we are driving on organizational expansion and that we bought some time. There are a couple of other methods for buying time. But, if we
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
Furthermore, offering trustworthy text and image dumps is not seductive. Making forks easy is not seductive. That means re-using content but also losing contributors which go to other communities. Don't expect much effort in that. Forking is hard nasty work. I'd much rather the Wikimedia projects got up to speed. However there are a lot of countervailing factors at work. On the one hand we exclude interesting and significant material, on the other we include childish and trivial material whose only purpose seems to be to offend. In wiki speak notability and no censorship. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On 16/08/11 20:11, David Gerard wrote: Precis: annoy a subcommunity sufficiently, they leave in a group. Try to stop them from leaving (as opposed to trying to attract them back), they leave faster and take others with them. This is what I mean when I say forkability will keep us honest. I think that we should have some other reason for being attractive to our editors apart from fear of forking. Say, some sort of goal or mission statement, which is helped by having a strong WMF. One problem with using fear of forking as your primary motivation for doing things well is that forking is not as bad as some other scenarios. For example, our editor community could go back to playing computer games and watching TV, instead of doing something useful, and people could pay for their encyclopedias. Indeed, it's hard to understand why you want us to simultaneously be afraid of it and to make it easier. Another problem is that forking of a large Wikipedia edition has proven to be extremely difficult, regardless of the availability of image dumps, so the threat is very weak. The Chinese experience should tell us how hard it is: Baidu Baike and Hudong were able to thrive only with the Chinese Wikipedia completely blocked in Mainland China. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On 16 August 2011 14:37, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote: I think that we should have some other reason for being attractive to our editors apart from fear of forking. Say, some sort of goal or mission statement, which is helped by having a strong WMF. One problem with using fear of forking as your primary motivation for I didn't say or mean primary. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On 8/16/2011 5:00 AM, foundation-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote: A couple of months ago three admins of Aceh Wikipedia decided that it is not acceptable that they participate in the project which holds Muhammad depictions. By the project, they mean Wikimedia in general, including Wikimedia Commons. It was just a matter of time when they would create their own wiki. And they created that moth or two after leaving Wikimedia. And what do you think which project has more chances for success: the one without editors or the other with three editors? So, while the reason for leaving couldn't be counted among reasonable ones, the product is the same as if they had a valid reason. And there are plenty of valid reasons, among them almost universal problem of highly bureaucratic structures on Wikimedia projects. Politics and religion are the two areas where this problem usually occurs. It is perfectly acceptable to present differing POVs if the parties involved can find no common ground. They must be respected for their differences as much for their similarities. That means that a neutral platform such as Wikipedia must be able to host differing opinions. This problem was popped up long ago when people of differing opinions began altering pages and deleting the work of others. It was addressed with implementation of the edit lock and frequent monitoring. An Encyclopedia must be free to present all sides of this kind of issue so third parties can come to understand the reasons behind the differences. Refusal to do so moves the platform away from the mission statement of neutrality. Anyone who cannot support this commitment to neutrality is free to leave and present their own POV - but they lose that neutral credibility in the process of doing so. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:55, emijrp emi...@gmail.com wrote: Wikimedia Foundation wants to increase the participation and readers numbers just because the capitalist mind of forcing steady growing. They don't know how to reach that, just want to do it, and the participation growing is flat since 2007. They tried to improve usability, and nothing happened. Now, they are working in the gender issue. Tomorrow in the Global South. All them are great news headlines for the politically correct western world, but, as the Internet meme, they are doing it wrong. Wikipedia grew exponentially in the first years, and no Wikimedia Foundation was needed. Why? Because people easily saw which pages were needed. The encyclopedia was a blank page. Today, Wikipedia is showed as the most complete encyclopedia ever written. That is possible true, but that doesn't mean it is complete. We don't have to ask for new users, we have to show which stuff need to be written, and people will come. Really, users are coming, in hordes, visiting numbers are growing but they don't know where their help is needed. After the revolution we will abandon capitalism and Wikimedia projects would be able to flourish without rushing anywhere. Until then, we are living in capitalism and we have to compete for attention with other internet entities in capitalist world. In such circumstances, keeping attention at some level is much harder task than increasing attention. Simply, losing attention is natural. People come and leave after some moment. So, you have to be able to get new people and you need a strategy for getting that in wild. Scaling it not to have growth is much harder task than working simply on getting attention. Against us are very large and very professional entities which want to get more attention for their products. So, every new Facebook, Google, Twitter or even Zynga feature is going directly against our ability to keep attention. Fred, say whatever you want about dumbness of forums, groups and games, but although I have no games in my Facebook stream -- as I've blocked all of them and just once in a couple of weeks I see one -- I am there because many people in my surroundings are there and many of them because of games, forums and similar, for sure. If I have them on Wikimedia projects, I would probably edit and wouldn't limit my activity on bureaucratic and strategic tasks. In other words, thanks to those features, they took my attention from Wikimedia projects. In ideal society editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia and other free knowledge projects would be a part of any scientific and educational position. But, we are far from such society. We have to fight for every attention aspect. And we are doing that badly. Participation is just approximately flat since 2007 just because our core is consisted of geeks, which are stubborn by default. Their retention is easier, but influx of new editors is lowering at that scale from month to month that it is just a matter of time when active and very active editors would start to shrink at more obvious rates. Here are some statistics for English Wikipedia [1]. June 2011 was: * The worst June since 2005 by very active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~5%. * The worst June since 2005 by active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~1.5% * The worst June since 2005 by new editors. Shrink since 2010: ~8%. And similar for all Wikipedias [2]. June 2011 was: * The worst June since 2006 by very active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~0.9%. * The worst June since 2006 by active editors. Shrink since 2010: ~1.2% * The worst June since 2006 by new editors. Shrink since 2010: ~8%. Good thing is that changes from 2009 to 2010 were two times worse. In other words, we are still shrinking, but not so quickly. Furthermore, offering trustworthy text and image dumps is not seductive. Making forks easy is not seductive. That means re-using content but also losing contributors which go to other communities. Don't expect much effort in that. I object, actually, on the line that too little has been done to seduce people to edit Wikimedia projects. Mobile Wikipedia is necessary, but it is not possible to edit from that interface. The only structural thing which would allow more seductive features is ongoing rewriting of Parser. Everything else is too insignificant. And while engaging more women and going to developing countries are noble causes, from the point of general trends, they are just [not so successful] tries to buy some time. [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm [2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaZZ.htm ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Forkability, its problems and our problems
You say that we exclude significant material on the basis of notability? That seems almost contradictory. If it has been the subject of non-trivial, reliable, 3rd party coverage, it's notable. If it hasn't, how 'significant' is it really? As for childish, trivial, offensive stuff: is it an encyclopedic topic and notable? If so, it's hardly trivial. If not, it should go. If we chuck out everything which offends some significant group, we lose NPOV and balanced coverage. That doesn't mean I don't believe we have non-notable offensive articles, just that we should use our policies effectively to get rid of them. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
