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Discuss this story
She's an Aquarius ten years older than me! Wikipedia is young! --violetnese 23:08, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Your own opinions, but not your own facts
Dear William,
so, I realize that the tongue-in-cheek headline indicates (at least to those who get the cultural reference or click through twice from the image) that these ideas and thoughts are not entirely serious. And to your credit you are candid ("won’t let that stop me") about a lack of expertise in the matters for which you are positing these solutions. Plus I happen to think that such a lack of expertise can be mitigated by keen observation and a good memory. Unfortunately though, the sheer amount of factual errors, distortions, omissions and misquotes in this piece makes me think that these mitigating factors are absent here, leaving these sweeping opinions and proposals on a very shaky basis. To highlight just a few examples:
With all that said, I agree that WMF should not be doing all possible work on its own. This has actually long been recognized, see the "Narrowing focus" strategy change implemented under the previous ED (a change which BTW has not been uncontroversial in the community, many felt that the Foundation should direct more attention to e.g. supporting GLAM work instead of just funding chapters to do so). The spinoff of the US and Canada education program in form of Wiki Ed is consistent with that, and they are doing excellent work. And the German chapter's success with Wikidata proved that some software development areas can be handled well by separate organizations. But cooperation between organizations comes with challenges of its own. Speaking of Dunbar's number (which BTW does not actually imply that successful organizations can't have 300 or more employees), it's worth being aware that successful cooperation between organizations in the movement has relied a lot on personal contacts too, facilitated by conferences, hackathons, site visits etc. E.g. I guess the Wikidata team would confirm that a good working relationship with WMF engineers - who operate the site their software runs on - has been quite important for Wikidata's success.
Disclaimer: My views here, while personal, are of course informed by my perspective as WMF employee, but also as a longtime Signpost author and former editor-in-chief who covered WMF activities from the outside (as main writer for "News and notes") for an extensive amount of time before joining the organization myself. Having written from a similar perspective, this make me appreciate that you are reading a lot of information, and processing it - which is actually not too easy a task. I have been reading your "The Wikipedian" blog at least since then, and linked to it myself repeatedly. That said, this is also not the first time that it contains glaring misconceptions that would have been evident to anyone familiar with the matter - such as when you informed your readers in 2013 that Jimmy Wales would leave the Board of Trustees by the end of the year (an error you graciously corrected after being notified, but I can't help seeing a similar pattern here of reading things into your sources that just aren't there. It makes me itch for the edit button to add lots of [failed verification] templates ;)
And speaking of the Signpost: I anticipate that the decision to syndicate this piece here will be defended with arguments like "but it was just meant to stimulate discussion" etc., and of course the Signpost should not shy away from publishing strong opinions and well-argued thought-provoking pieces. But even with op-eds, a certain minimum standard of factual correctness should be maintained. These topics are too important for the future of our movement to be covered at an accuracy level resembling that of a supermarket tabloid.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
PS, I could go on and on, but just one more example of hyperbolic catastrophizing combined with an apparent misinterpretation of sources:
Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:34, 14 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Spin-offs
The reasoning sound fine. As the WMF has more roles, it could be wise to have small organizations focused on a specific task.
However, this design can also have negative effects. It could be hard to know which activity corresponds to which organization. If power is too divided, the constellation could lack strength.
Also, if we have more organizations, who controls each? Currently the WMF is controlled by the Board of Trustees, a few of which are community-selected. With more organizations, would we have more Boards of Trustees? Would they report to the WMF? Would they be controlled directly of the Wikimedia community?
I'm not opposed to the proposal, I just want to prevent issues.
I agree. The technological requirements of the Wikimedia movement can be managed independently of the other tasks. Although, as we saw with the VisualEditor and Flow, the team must respond to the community.
That model is interesting, as the decision of which organizations to support is kept at the WMF, whereas any organization can apply to funds. It's not unlike the affiliates network.
I disagree: there is too little focus on "geographic concerns". Thematic organizations are great, but having only them would risk the worldwide coverage. Without Wikimedia Uruguay, nobody would care about the promotion of Wikimeida projects in my country.
For example, Wiki Ed covers Untied States and Canada only. Wiki Med does highlight the importance of multiple languages, and has members from multiple countries. But that seems more like an exception.
--NaBUru38 (talk) 20:33, 15 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Provost
I like the idea of a provost or Chief Educational Officer. Bearian (talk) 19:23, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]