[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Tim Moody]

The question of support goes beyond financial.

As the volunteer who wrote and deployed the mirror of Our World in Data
used by WikiProjectMed and deployed the VideoWiki application, I have to
say that, unfortunately, I have not found WMF technical staff very
supportive.

This is all the more surprising given that there is a Developer Advocacy
team that is 'tasked with supporting the technical communities who use
Wikimedia web APIs and software projects to spread and improve free
knowledge' and 'to actively recruit and mentor new technical contributors',
but who seem to perceive their role as protecting the organization from
those very volunteers. I often encounter an attitude that says that we are
incompetent noobs that must be managed by staff, and any error or lack of
familiarity with WMF internal systems can be met with derision and sarcasm.

There is no doubt that WMF applications and infrastructure are an extremely
valuable resource, but it would be nice if volunteers could be similarly
regarded. I have spent much of the last 10 years working on projects that
further WMF goals and core values. I would prefer to do so in a collegial
or even collaborative way.

The staff who manage WMF systems and infrastructure are smart, competent,
and well organized, but they are not very generous. They seem to regard the
rest of us as barbarians at the gate.

I have hesitated to write this, but I think it needs to be said.

Tim Moody
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[James Heilman]

The "decline" was via email, rather than publically. The concern was that
VideoWiki supposedly lacks broad consultation, coordination, and research
to provide an implementation framework. They suggested that rather than
working to update the software to the new operating environment and adding
improvements, that we conduct consultations within communities and gather
further learnings from community members. They mention that there may
also be other channels of funding.

Anyway instead we updated the software and moved it to new servers, plus
made a number of improvements with the small amount of internal funds we
raise directly ourselves. And then the programmer moved on as we were
unable to offer him the amount of work they were looking for. The software
still works and we are using it to make videos for MDWiki...
https://mdwiki.org/wiki/Video:Abdominal_thrusts

James

On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 8:54 PM Benjamin Lees  wrote:

> Is there no public notice or rationale given when grant applications are
> declined?  The only update on the status of your grant that I can see was
> by you: <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoWiki=23125476=23110705
> >.
>
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 6:37 PM James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> I have not found getting funding from the WMF for projects easy.
>> VideoWiki for example has mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally
>> funded. Our first grant application since fully taking on the effort was
>> declined
>>  and
>> our programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has
>> been similar regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have
>> gotten the interactive graphs working on our own site
>>  and offered to work on
>> doing the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping
>> through hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD.
>> WikiProjectMed has never received funding from the WMF and as a much much
>> smaller NGO cannot cover these programming expenses for the movement.
>>
>> James
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 3:49 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:
>>
>>> We face the paradox 
>>> of choice , the lull of
>>> peace, and the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
>>> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
>>> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
>>> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
>>> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
>>> an end.
>>> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
>>> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
>>> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>>>
>>> Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration
>>> at scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
>>> world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
>>> experience, and budget.
>>>   [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could
>>> support + spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every
>>> year.]
>>>
>>> Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
>>> can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
>>> aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
>>> almost as well.
>>>
>>> SJ
>>>
>>> *^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
>>> otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
>>> one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
>>> comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
>>> little result.
>>> 
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
>>> galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
 Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure
 the money can go to that effort.
 --
 *From:* Felipe Schenone 
 *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
 *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
 *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff

 I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If
 Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with
 it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a
 community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding
 efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or
 even desirable, considering the alternatives.

 Here are some ideas:

 * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
 * Funding of 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Benjamin Lees]

Is there no public notice or rationale given when grant applications are
declined?  The only update on the status of your grant that I can see was
by you: <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Project/Rapid/WPM:VideoWiki=23125476=23110705
>.

On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 6:37 PM James Heilman  wrote:

> I have not found getting funding from the WMF for projects easy. VideoWiki
> for example has mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally funded.
> Our first grant application since fully taking on the effort was declined
>  and
> our programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has
> been similar regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have
> gotten the interactive graphs working on our own site
>  and offered to work on
> doing the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping
> through hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD.
> WikiProjectMed has never received funding from the WMF and as a much much
> smaller NGO cannot cover these programming expenses for the movement.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 3:49 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>> We face the paradox 
>> of choice , the lull of peace,
>> and the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
>> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
>> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
>> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
>> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
>> an end.
>> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
>> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
>> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>>
>> Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration
>> at scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
>> world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
>> experience, and budget.
>>   [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could
>> support + spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every
>> year.]
>>
>> Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
>> can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
>> aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
>> almost as well.
>>
>> SJ
>>
>> *^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
>> otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
>> one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
>> comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
>> little result.
>> 
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
>> galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure
>>> the money can go to that effort.
>>> --
>>> *From:* Felipe Schenone 
>>> *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
>>> *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
>>> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
>>>
>>> I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If
>>> Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with
>>> it, there's probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a
>>> community process to decide it, because as you say, reducing funding
>>> efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or
>>> even desirable, considering the alternatives.
>>>
>>> Here are some ideas:
>>>
>>> * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
>>> * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
>>> depends.
>>> * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
>>> far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
>>> * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
>>> for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and
>>> generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM  wrote:
>>>
>>> The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot
>>> of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output.
>>> It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas
>>> at the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency
>>> that needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs
>>> then a lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure.
>>> With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This
>>> is an usual 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Nathan]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 3:22 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Samuel and James for the constructive approach in your messages.
>
> I know that I have said this before, but there's a huge problem with
> accountability here. We have money to become a great platform and we have
> staff to do it, but there's no way to go forward, and that problem is seen
> clearly at every opportunity: migrating to Discourse because we don't have
> "good enough" discussing software, not having centralized templates or the
> completely broken wishlist survey (where only 1/4 of the projects voted by
> the community are done, and some of them in a sub-optimal and non-usable
> way).
>
> James points out the integration of data from OurWorldInData. This is so
> impressive and useful that is hard to think how the WMF can't afford to
> expend staff time (or give 1.000 USD to someone) to do that. Instead, Wiki
> Project Med has to ask for it outside. The Basque Wikimedians User Group is
> funding this effort, and is doing it with its own funds. Do you know how we
> get these funds? Well, sometimes they call us for a lecture somewhere about
> free knowledge, copyright or whatever, and the money they usually give the
> speaker goes to a fund. Whenever we have a good amount of money there (like
> 1.000USD), we invest in free knowledge projects. So, at the end of the day,
> is volunteer's time, expressed as money, and re-invested in things that
> will make our experience better. Of course, we are happy to help with this
> project, but the question is why the WMF, with 400.000.000 USD a year,
> can't afford to do this. And the answer is that no one cares, and those who
> should care about that are not accountable.
>
> Indeed, there's quite a big group of workers thinking in design, and they
> work to do some things, like the new Vector (but not only, they have a
> bunch of projects open). But every time they get a critic about the
> approach by a volunteer, there's an attack to the volunteer. Let's take
> some examples: here's a Phab ticket (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T293405) with a proposal to build a
> Main Page that will easily be copied by every project. You can read the
> answers and the attitude towards the proposal. Or this one, when they
> decided to move the interwiki links to the bottom of the main page because
> they didn't think that Main Pages where relevant (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290480). Or here, when a bug report is
> closed because someone thinks that breaking things is not a bug:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289212.
>
> And I could continue, but the reality shows us that sub-optimal solutions
> are our way of finishing projects. The same teams that are moving things
> around in the Vector-2022, for example, decided to break the PDF creator
> (still has many issues) and decided that creating books wasn't relevant, so
> they broke it on purpose. No one cares, and if you do, you shouldn't: no
> one is going to fix it. No accountability. The same team has decided that
> hiding our sister projects from the main page, something that goes against
> the Strategic Direction, is a good idea at all (
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287609). And there we are, some
> volunteers, trying to make any sense of all of this, and trying to point
> that the Strategic Direction is something that should be granted at every
> decision. But, again, if there's no accountability, then every team will
> make what they think is better, they won't accept any proposal from
> volunteers, and our years-long strategy discussions will be a completely
> loss of time and donor's money, because no one is implementing what it was
> decided there.
>
> Things are broken, and we could still be here discussing about that for
> ages. We have money and staff to fix this. Who is going to fix it? This is
> the great question.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Galder
>
>
>
Galder - I wish I was optimistic that the WMF's strategy and actual
performance will be responsive to your points. The consequences of the
disconnect you describe (between the people whose labor feeds the
organizations, and the paid staff of the various orgs) have been clear and
tragic for many years.

The WMF spent half a billion in donor funds in the last five years (not
including endowment contributions). Was it money well spent? What enormous
accomplishments match that figure?
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Andreas Kolbe]

Hi WSC,

For some time now, the edit window has included the following phrase: "You
agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative
Commons license."

This has no bearing on the "share alike" part of your argument, but as far
as the "attribution" part of CC BY-SA is concerned, there is now much less
to enforce.

Best,
Andreas


On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 4:22 PM WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi SJ,
>
> Re " Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to
> enclose derivatives of our work." Not an easy task when work is licenced
> Share Alike and By Attribution. But yes it is a real threat, and should be
> one that both the WMF and the volunteer community can agree to combat. For
> the WMF unattributed reuse reduces clickthroughs and thereby potential
> donations. For some volunteers not being credited for the work you
> contribute reduces motivation, for others it increases the difficulty of
> avoiding circular referencing. Especially when Wikipedia winds up citing as
> a source an article copied from a page on Wikipedia that has itself been
> deleted.
>
> Attribution and share alike are at times a pain to comply with, and I fear
> that there are those in the movement who see this feature as a bug, and
> that this contributed to the use of CC0 on Wikidata.
>
> But the opportunity is still there. The WMF could employ some legal staff,
> or fund a legal charity, that would strongly encourage reusers to respect
> the CC-BY-SA licence. This would protect the work people have done from
> being  used to derive works that are neither attributed nor shared alike.
> It would protect WMF revenue, maintain volunteer motivation and make it
> difficult to "enclose derivatives of our work.
>
> Employing a few dozen legals and paralegals in a country such as India
> could make a real difference to this, and at least partially address the
> issues others have raised about the lack of WMF spending in developing
> countries.
>
> WSC
>
>>
>>
>> Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:48:12 -0400
>> From: Samuel Klein 
>> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?
>> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
>> Message-ID:
>> > q...@mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>> boundary="b566b205e1bfd4c3"
>>
>> We face the paradox <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox>
>> of
>> choice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>, the lull of peace, and
>> the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
>> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
>> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
>> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
>> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
>> an end.
>> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
>> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
>> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>>
>> Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
>> scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
>> world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our
>> remit,
>> experience, and budget.
>>   [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support
>> +
>> spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
>>
>> Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
>> can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
>> aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
>> almost as well.
>>
>> SJ
>>
>> *^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
>> otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
>> one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
>> comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
>> little result.
>> 
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
>> galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure
>> the
>> > money can go to that effort.
>> > --
>> > *From:* Felipe Schenone 
>> > *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
>> > *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi SJ,

Re " Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to
enclose derivatives of our work." Not an easy task when work is licenced
Share Alike and By Attribution. But yes it is a real threat, and should be
one that both the WMF and the volunteer community can agree to combat. For
the WMF unattributed reuse reduces clickthroughs and thereby potential
donations. For some volunteers not being credited for the work you
contribute reduces motivation, for others it increases the difficulty of
avoiding circular referencing. Especially when Wikipedia winds up citing as
a source an article copied from a page on Wikipedia that has itself been
deleted.

Attribution and share alike are at times a pain to comply with, and I fear
that there are those in the movement who see this feature as a bug, and
that this contributed to the use of CC0 on Wikidata.

But the opportunity is still there. The WMF could employ some legal staff,
or fund a legal charity, that would strongly encourage reusers to respect
the CC-BY-SA licence. This would protect the work people have done from
being  used to derive works that are neither attributed nor shared alike.
It would protect WMF revenue, maintain volunteer motivation and make it
difficult to "enclose derivatives of our work.

Employing a few dozen legals and paralegals in a country such as India
could make a real difference to this, and at least partially address the
issues others have raised about the lack of WMF spending in developing
countries.

WSC

>
>
> Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:48:12 -0400
> From: Samuel Klein 
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
> Message-ID:
>  q...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
> boundary="b566b205e1bfd4c3"
>
> We face the paradox <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox> of
> choice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>, the lull of peace, and
> the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
> an end.
> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>
> Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
> scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
> world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
> experience, and budget.
>   [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support +
> spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
>
> Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
> can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
> aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
> almost as well.
>
> SJ
>
> *^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
> otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
> one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
> comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
> little result.
> 
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
> galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the
> > money can go to that effort.
> > --
> > *From:* Felipe Schenone 
> > *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
> > *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
> > *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
> >
> > I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia
> > is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it,
> there's
> > probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process
> to
> > decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
> > indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
> > considering the alternatives.
> >
> > Here are some ideas:
> >
> > * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
> > * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
> depends.
> > * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
> > far the original intentions o

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga]

Thanks Samuel and James for the constructive approach in your messages.

I know that I have said this before, but there's a huge problem with 
accountability here. We have money to become a great platform and we have staff 
to do it, but there's no way to go forward, and that problem is seen clearly at 
every opportunity: migrating to Discourse because we don't have "good enough" 
discussing software, not having centralized templates or the completely broken 
wishlist survey (where only 1/4 of the projects voted by the community are 
done, and some of them in a sub-optimal and non-usable way).

James points out the integration of data from OurWorldInData. This is so 
impressive and useful that is hard to think how the WMF can't afford to expend 
staff time (or give 1.000 USD to someone) to do that. Instead, Wiki Project Med 
has to ask for it outside. The Basque Wikimedians User Group is funding this 
effort, and is doing it with its own funds. Do you know how we get these funds? 
Well, sometimes they call us for a lecture somewhere about free knowledge, 
copyright or whatever, and the money they usually give the speaker goes to a 
fund. Whenever we have a good amount of money there (like 1.000USD), we invest 
in free knowledge projects. So, at the end of the day, is volunteer's time, 
expressed as money, and re-invested in things that will make our experience 
better. Of course, we are happy to help with this project, but the question is 
why the WMF, with 400.000.000 USD a year, can't afford to do this. And the 
answer is that no one cares, and those who should care about that are not 
accountable.

Indeed, there's quite a big group of workers thinking in design, and they work 
to do some things, like the new Vector (but not only, they have a bunch of 
projects open). But every time they get a critic about the approach by a 
volunteer, there's an attack to the volunteer. Let's take some examples: here's 
a Phab ticket (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T293405) with a proposal to 
build a Main Page that will easily be copied by every project. You can read the 
answers and the attitude towards the proposal. Or this one, when they decided 
to move the interwiki links to the bottom of the main page because they didn't 
think that Main Pages where relevant 
(https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290480). Or here, when a bug report is 
closed because someone thinks that breaking things is not a bug: 
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289212.

And I could continue, but the reality shows us that sub-optimal solutions are 
our way of finishing projects. The same teams that are moving things around in 
the Vector-2022, for example, decided to break the PDF creator (still has many 
issues) and decided that creating books wasn't relevant, so they broke it on 
purpose. No one cares, and if you do, you shouldn't: no one is going to fix it. 
No accountability. The same team has decided that hiding our sister projects 
from the main page, something that goes against the Strategic Direction, is a 
good idea at all (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287609). And there we are, 
some volunteers, trying to make any sense of all of this, and trying to point 
that the Strategic Direction is something that should be granted at every 
decision. But, again, if there's no accountability, then every team will make 
what they think is better, they won't accept any proposal from volunteers, and 
our years-long strategy discussions will be a completely loss of time and 
donor's money, because no one is implementing what it was decided there.

Things are broken, and we could still be here discussing about that for ages. 
We have money and staff to fix this. Who is going to fix it? This is the great 
question.

Sincerely,

Galder



From: Samuel Klein 
Sent: Sunday, June 19, 2022 1:42 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List 
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

James! Thanks for this case in point.

The free knowledge ecosystem includes hundreds of  thousands of devs around the 
world. Most don't think to collaborate with us or through our codebases, most 
who do bounce off of current systems, and those who stay still have a hard time 
getting code reviewed or fit into a roadmap, or small grants.

But W also have more genuine, unqualified goodwill than any technical project I 
know.  Few doors for technical collaboration or future-creation would be closed 
if we only learn how to ask and welcome the result.

So instead of asking "which tools should we try to test + implement, if we can 
figure out how to configure it" or "which of these independent proposals seems 
worthy of a one-time grant" (like any startup or website or grantor out there, 
limited by the time of the few people setting it up), we should Be Bolder.
Sketch in broad strokes what we need and want to see, commit to working 
together to make it so, look for partners who want to collabora

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Samuel Klein]

James! Thanks for this case in point.

The free knowledge ecosystem includes hundreds of  thousands of devs around
the world. Most don't think to collaborate with us or through our
codebases, most who do bounce off of current systems, and those who stay
still have a hard time getting code reviewed or fit into a roadmap, or
small grants.

But W also have more genuine, unqualified goodwill than any technical
project I know.  Few doors for technical collaboration or future-creation
would be closed if we only learn how to ask and welcome the result.

So instead of asking "which tools should we try to test + implement, if we
can figure out how to configure it" or "which of these independent
proposals seems worthy of a one-time grant" (like any startup or website or
grantor out there, limited by the time of the few people setting it up), we
should Be Bolder.
Sketch in broad strokes what we need and want to see, commit to working
together to make it so, look for partners who want to collaborate with us
in making the best ecosystem on the planet. E.g.

 — what open graph database will scale to support general knowledge graphs
10 and 100x our current size? The whole planet needs one. Whatever we
migrate to next should be  a community that joins us to
reach that goal.

 — what discourse tools can support our wide ranging and intense
discussions, constantly tested by our active (once rare, but increasingly
possible and important in a networked world) collabs and consensus-building
across language divides?

There are So. Many. Other areas where the ecosystem of open tools is
scattered, loving, and small, and focus by and with us could elevate the
possible into the commonplace.
 — embedded annotation, like Hypothesis
 — simultaneous editing, like Etherpad
 — embedded synchronous discussion, like IRC or Brave Talk
 — content translation flows
 — visualizations w embedded data, like OWID
 — media editing, like videowiki
 — format conversion + transcoding
 — working with file formats of existing and emerging fields of
knowledge-worl
 — book creation
 — course creation
 — script creation
 — data reconciliation, like OpenRefine

Most of these ideas have approaches (open tickets in Phab) with some depth,
with internal and external champions, and with potentially modest
implementations that could be distributed if that ever became a burden. But
these opportunities are sitting unresolved because a) they don't fall under
the goals of any existing initiatives, and b) we've built
anti-infrastructure: a system that makes contribution from the edges hard
or risky. Lots of tickets opened by people offering to do the work note
that they want some sort of confirmation that the result could be adopted
or implemented, before they commit months of effort to it.

Our internal models for priority and focus need to consider the broader
picture of the technical ecosystem we could empower and uplift, and need to
register the value of working with and committing to other entire networks
(including having many times more people solving these issues alongside
us). Otherwise we are not providing the infrastructure needed by our own
editing networks, not to mention the rest of th free knowledge ecosystem.




On Sat., Jun. 18, 2022, 6:37 p.m. James Heilman,  wrote:

> I have not found getting funding from the WMF for projects easy. VideoWiki
> for example has mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally funded.
> Our first grant application since fully taking on the effort was declined
>  and
> our programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has
> been similar regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have
> gotten the interactive graphs working on our own site
>  and offered to work on
> doing the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping
> through hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD.
> WikiProjectMed has never received funding from the WMF and as a much much
> smaller NGO cannot cover these programming expenses for the movement.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 3:49 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:
>
>> We face the paradox 
>> of choice , the lull of peace,
>> and the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
>> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
>> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
>> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
>> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
>> an end.
>> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
>> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
>> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>>
>> 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[James Heilman]

I have not found getting funding from the WMF for projects easy. VideoWiki
for example has mostly been funded by WikiProjectMed / personally funded.
Our first grant application since fully taking on the effort was declined
 and
our programmer working on the project has thus moved on. Our experience has
been similar regarding our collaboration with Our World in Data. We have
gotten the interactive graphs working on our own site
 and offered to work on doing
the same for Wikipedia (plus making them multilingual). Jumping through
hoops to meet WMF requirements will; however, cost about 1,000 USD.
WikiProjectMed has never received funding from the WMF and as a much much
smaller NGO cannot cover these programming expenses for the movement.

James

On Sat, Jun 18, 2022 at 3:49 PM Samuel Klein  wrote:

> We face the paradox 
> of choice , the lull of peace,
> and the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
> ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
> ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
> over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
> companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
> an end.
> ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
> baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
> some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
>
> Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
> scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
> world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
> experience, and budget.
>   [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support
> + spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
>
> Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
> can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
> aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
> almost as well.
>
> SJ
>
> *^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
> otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
> one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
> comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
> little result.
> 
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
> galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the
>> money can go to that effort.
>> --
>> *From:* Felipe Schenone 
>> *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
>> *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
>> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
>>
>> I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia
>> is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's
>> probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to
>> decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
>> indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
>> considering the alternatives.
>>
>> Here are some ideas:
>>
>> * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
>> * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
>> * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
>> far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
>> * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
>> for a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and
>> generalize the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM  wrote:
>>
>> The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of
>> people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It
>> is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at
>> the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that
>> needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a
>> lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With
>> increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an
>> usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and
>> do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the
>> needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia
>> Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in
>> the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do
>> not increase further. The salaries at the 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?

[Samuel Klein]

We face the paradox  of
choice , the lull of peace, and
the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
an end.
~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.

Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
experience, and budget.
  [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support +
spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]

Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
almost as well.

SJ

*^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
little result.


On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the
> money can go to that effort.
> --
> *From:* Felipe Schenone 
> *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
> *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
>
> I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia
> is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's
> probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to
> decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
> indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
> considering the alternatives.
>
> Here are some ideas:
>
> * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
> * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
> * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
> far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
> * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for
> a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize
> the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM  wrote:
>
> The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of
> people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It
> is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at
> the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that
> needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a
> lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With
> increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an
> usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and
> do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the
> needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia
> Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in
> the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do
> not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are
> currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I
> think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the
> Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sessions,_FY2021-22
>
> Hogü-456
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