Let's consider one of my pet bugbears: Chinese wikipedia. Our readership numbers are way below what we'd like, and as I understand it, total # of editors and articles is low as well. So obviously a problem for the reading team, right?
However, a solution needs to grapple with the problem of creating content for zhwiki, which would involve language engineering and the editing team. Handling language variants better for reading would be good, too, but (AFAIK) we don't have a single active member of zhwiki on staff (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_engagement/Staff_involvement), and just a single engineer fluent in Mandarin (according to https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/HR_Corner/Languages). [My numbers could be slightly off here, forgive me if so. But clearly we don't have a *huge presence* from zhwiki on-staff, the way we do for, say, enwiki.] So maybe we need to involve HR? There are politics involved, too: perhaps the solution would involve the Community Engagement team, to try to build up the local wikipedia community and navigate the politics? My point is that even a narrow focus on increasing page views fails to address the more fundamental issues responsible, which spill outside of the team silo. So a strategy session isolated to the reading team risks either missing the forest for the trees (concentrating only on problems solvable locally), or else generating a lot of problems and discussion on issues which can't be addressed without involving the wider organization. (I rather expected to see the former, but most of the issues currently on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process seem to be the latter.) I think a strategy process probably needs a mix of both near- and far-sightedness. Identifying issues which can be solved by the team itself (better engagement with users, for example), but also having a process for escalating issues that require a more organizational response. The latter seems especially important for a team composed mostly of remote workers, since there aren't the same informal watercooler-talk mechanisms available for building awareness of broader needs. --scott -- (http://cscott.net) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
