Dear Leila
Le 02/12/2017 à 21:48, Leila Zia a écrit :
[I apologize for the longish response, and I will do what I can to
take the rest of this offlist as needed. I just see a couple of places
where I need to add more explanation.]
Then I feel somewhat bond to respond too. But too make it shorts, I
don't think I add in this email says anything that wasn't already said
before. So anyone already fed up with this thread can just skip this
message with no fear to miss any revelation. And to make it clear, I
don't expect any answer to this message on the list, but will diligently
reply in private if you are looking for more information from my part.
(Side-note. We should take this part offline but for the record: I
couldn't find a place where transparency was listed as an agreed upon
and shared value of our movement as a whole. There are subgroups that
consider it a core value or one of the guiding principles, and it's of
course built in in many of the things we do in Wikimedia, but I'm
hesitant to call it /a core value of our movement/ given that it's not
listed somewhere as such. btw, for the record, it's high on my
personal and professional list of values.)
Here is an official Wikimedia Foundation presentation support of 2017
related to leadership where /being transparent/ is explicitely stated in
a silde titled "Staying true to our values":
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWhat_is_Leadership%3F.pdf&page=25
While I agree that transparency is a value for many of us, it is not
very clear, to at least me, how we as a whole define transparency to
the level that can be used in practice. In the absence of a shared
practical definition for transparency, each of us (or groups of us)
define a process as transparent as a function of how big/impactful the
result of a process is at each point in time, our
backgrounds/cultures/countries-we're-from, how much personal trust we
have in the process or the people involved in the process, etc. If
this is correct, this means that in practice we as individuals or
groups define what transparency means for us and we will demand
specific things based on our own definition. So, while in theory you
are requesting/demanding something that is likely a shared value for
many of us, in practice, you are entering your own checklist (that may
be shared with some other people's view on transparency in a specific
case) that once met, you will call the process transparent. That's why
I interpreted what I heard from you as "I" demand transparency, versus
"we, as a movement" demand transparency in this case.
I completely agree with you with the lake of clear definition of some
crucial core notions we use all the time. This is also a feedback I red
in several comments in the 2017 strategy consultation. Staying vague
brings both pros and cons of flexibility. An other example is "free
license", which is for example used in the foundation bylaws
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws>, but not defined it it.
One might argue that "free license" has a clear cultural meaning in the
free/libre culture movement, with the four famous freedom inherited from
free software. But this is a legal document, what is not clearly
explicitly stated is subject to large interpretation variations. But at
list the foundation has "free license" in its bylaws, I know that the
equivalent is not even mentioned in the French chapter similar document
<https://www.wikimedia.fr/documents-officiels/statuts-de-lassociation/>.
To give you a more specific example: as an Iranian involved in
Wikimedia movement who knows Markus through his contributions to
Wikidata and at a professional/work level, I trusted Markus' words
when he said that those in early stages of the project didn't think of
Wikidata as a project that one day becomes as big as it is today. I
believe it that this was a fun project that they wanted to see
succeed, but they were not sure at all if it gets somewhere, so the
natural thing to do for them was to spend time to see if they can help
it take off at all as opposed to spending time on documenting
decisions in case it takes off and they need to show to people how
they have done things. If trust between Markus and I were broken,
however, I would likely not be content with that level of response and
I would ask/demand for more explanation. In case (ii), and in the
absence of a shared practical definition of transparency, my personal
priors and understandings of the case would define when I call the
process transparent.
The issue has nothing to do with Markus or anyone else being an honest
sympathetic person, and just by "assuming good faith" surely we can
grant that, even without any testimony, to every contributors unless
clear proof of the contrary should make think otherwise. Also the issue
is not how Wikidata project debuted in some confidential ways with
uncertain results.
One issue remounted here is that publicly available data make apparent
that Wikidata official launch, the choice of the CC0 license, and huge
funding by three actors related to hegemonic corporations are all very
close in time. On the other hand, any reference of a community decision
regarding this license policy if it exits was not yet provided.
Hopefully, that is a formulation that will be judged factual enough to
not be interpreted as a personal attack of anyone while still letting
understand how such a concomitance might raise concerns of potential
conflict of interest. But actually, this first issue seems rather
negligible.
The main issue is "to which future such a license policy is going to
lead our community".
One scenario might be that, thanks to Wikidata large visibility, every
single stakeholders of the knowledge economy get enlightened by the
obviously far more interesting situation of not having any information
monopoly at all, and together start heavy lobbying that leads to global
abolition of all information monopolies. Also everybody become kind
enough to always maintain traceability with references to its sources.
An other scenario is that BraveNewWorld™, which already has a very large
user base in the field of digital answering to people requests by
redirecting to third party services, imports all Wikidata information
along many others data sources and directly generate sufficient relevant
informations so that users never need to consult a document that is out
of control of BraveNewWorld™. BraveNewWorld™ also includes in its
presented answer "improved reality" features. Because, for example,
everybody knows that BraveNewWorld™ is your most trusted source of
information and some answers could inaccurately state otherwise. But
BraveNewWorld™ has made sure that this kind of outrageous reputation
damage attempt was enacted illegal with death penalty. Some legislators
was not completely convinced with that at first, but in total
coincidence most of this objectors lost all credit soon after as people
were revealed how evil this elitists were in their private life. And now
everybody on earth live happy, in great part because of BraveNewWorld™
existence. At least if you believe the Bravepedia autrogenerated prose
article. Some old people venture in pretending that many of Bravepedia
statements come from a thing called Wikipedia. But searching for
"Wikipedia" in BraveNewWorld™ myReality will reassure everybody as it
explains that is just hoaxes and common rambling among old persons with
dementia. In any case, you trust Bravepedia articles, don't you? Don't
mind answer, your unconscious reactions already gave enough data to
BraveNewWorld™ myHappySensors that you wear. It already was computed
that everything is going to be fine.
Of course many other scenarios, with obviously plenty of room for far
less exaggerated ones, can be depicted.
Point taken. Those 3 categories and descriptions are not very
carefully crafted, partly because I wanted to share the general
signals that I've received from your messages (which btw, also touches
on another topic: you may or may not mean certain things when you say
them, but your audience, based on their own priors can understand them
differently.). They are supposed to signal to you how in a broad sense
what you had written had translated in my mind. I acknowledge that
this thread is about one specific topic (not "any topic") and "right"
to transparency can be much stronger than what you had in mind. The
intention was not to exaggerate what you had said. Thanks for calling
it out.
Ok, thank you for your feedback.
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