Tag results

Micromanagement

WMF is occasionally, although rarely, accused of micromanaging the communities. (This would be something like: inappropriately detailed interference in the management of the projects’ development or processes.) But it occurs to me that the community is having incredible trouble letting go of micromanaging the Foundation.

I suppose slowly, eventually, people will let go – or more to the point, realise they have been made obsolete.

Either that, or the claims of the Foundation being “out of touch” will increase.

27 March, 2008 • ,

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Blog memes in translation

I discovered today that my post Templatology, an essay was partially translated, commented-on and adapted to the situation of the Spanish Wikipedia, by Drini: Templatología (versión eswiki). Even the screenshots are of the Spanish Wikipedia! Now that’s nice. :)

That we can have this kind of “cross-stream” communication between the different flavours of Planet Wikimedia (currently ar, en, de, pl, pt, ru and zh) is really lovely. (…eh! there is no Spanish one yet. Is there only Drini, then?)

The idea of learning from one another (as in the various wiki communities), while widely agreed to be a good one, is not often seen in practice. It has not worked well on meta or mailing lists. I wonder if it has a chance in the blogosphere? It will likely suffer from the same problem as in other venues – bilingual people have better things to do than constantly translate for lazy bloody monolinguals! :)

Wiki borrowing, on the other hand, is widespread (userboxes are like a virulent virus — Template:Userbox lists no less than eight interwiki links (and likely more that are unlinked exist). The concept gets borrowed, but I wonder if fall-out from the original conflict is absorbed, dully repeated, or not even an issue. Probably all three situations exist, for different kinds of borrowing.

Translation is such a fascinating practice. I wonder if sometimes skilled bilingual speakers get tired of being treated as translation engines. I suppose they can stick to a monolingual community if it is too annoying.

At its worst, the task of translation can be dull and mechanical — I have seen known mistakes faithfully transcribed, rather than corrected in the original (and yes, on a wiki!) — but at its best it is a seamless, creative and thoughtful work of art, no less effort than creating the original and sometimes, maybe more effort. For functional type text that I usually deal with (help texts), it tends closer to the mechanical than creative.

One of my favourite things about Wikimedia Commons is that it is multilingual — or rather, tries to be. It is really a joyful thing when you create a help text, for example, and notice translations spring up from unknown souls, unbidden. It is a small thing that usually no one asked the writer to do, and usually no one thanked them when it was complete. To see such a red link turn blue reminds me that I am part of a diverse world-wide community committed to the Wikimedia mission. Such reminders are heartening and make it easier to assess petty and unimportant issues for what they are.

If you are bilingual and are interested in regularly, or irregularly, summarising or translating content from one of the non-English Wikimedia planets, please leave a comment or contact me – I would love to help set up a blog for that, or have such posts on my own blog.

26 March, 2008 • , ,

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The myth of the 'big enough' volunteer community

Large communities naturally require people with skills that small communities do not. There are leaders and managers of various kinds required, and if a formal structure is developed alongside the volunteer community then it has a host of special skills that were not previously needed.

If no one from the community comes forward, but these positions still need to be filled, you may contemplate paying someone for their skills. At this stage it is common to hear someone something like, “But we have so many volunteers, surely one of them has this skill.”

It is true that if a community is large enough, there will more likely than not be someone with the desired skill. The fallacy is in assuming that person will be happy to volunteer their time for that particular skill.

People typically volunteer in what interests them, not in what the project needs. If they become particularly devoted, they may choose to spend some time working on things that they find less interesting but the project deems more needed. While that is commendable, it can’t be relied upon.

Therefore, you may well have to pay for people with finance skills, legal skills, PR skills, management skills, translation skills, documentation skills, who knows what else.

As for leaders — you better hope your community will actually allow someone to become, and then to be, a leader.

06 March, 2008 •

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The role of administrators

What are the possible roles of an administrator in a Wikimedia project? These are the roles I came up with.




The above is a link to a three question survey. [The Javascript seems temperamental. If you don’t see anything then just go directly here.] The first asks which of the above roles are accurate in theory and in reality. (Plus the option “something else”, in which case you should leave a comment here saying what.)

The other two questions are:

Are you an administrator on your project(s) of choice?

What is the Requests for Adminship (RfA) process like on your project(s)?

The survey is open for two weeks. I will put up some results when it’s done if a few people answer it.

26 February, 2008 •

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The need for a self-documenting community

So I was about to make a reference to the recent Kaltura brouhaha, and I went looking for an appropriate summary blog post to link to, but I couldn’t find one. Ben Yates hadn’t written on it, nor Geoffrey Burling, nor Milos Rancic, nor Wikipedia Weekly discussed it. Wikizine seems to have gone on an unexpected hiatus (and en.wikizine.org suddenly makes my browser die :( ) and the Signpost only mentioned it in passing. So there’s all my usual suspects. The only blogger to give it non-cursory treatment was Kelly Martin.

Kelly does not really write with any pretence to balance, so I had to write it myself. Tch.

To the point: Why do we need a self-documenting community? To learn from our own history is an obvious one. I have been around Wikimedia for a while now and I still step in it because I am accidentally rehashing a debate that has been had many times in the past. But guess what? New community members won’t read mailing list archives no matter how much you plead. Even if you do do the nice summarising, plenty of times people still don’t read it. At least they have a chance, though. Saying “go read the foundation-l archives sometime in early 2003” is not quite an acceptable suggestion.

There is a second reason, more immediately of interest. Wikipedia has enemies. I don’t say this because I like getting my cult on, but because their unreserved and unmediated hostility towards Wikipedia could earn them no other title.

Sadly, these people frequently target individual Wikimedia editors. This is really troubling. It creates fear and pain in the experience of people who are otherwise enjoying a fun and rewarding hobby. I don’t know any other internet community where contributing in an enjoyable and positive way could lead to such targeted personal hostility. Being aware and cautious of that possibility is not something that is generally going to lead to a more open and healthy community, I think.

The work of these people thrives not because of the personal attacks (I hope), but because Wikimedia usually fails at sensible self-criticism, before the fact.

Wikipedia has many processes that have significant failings. Wikipedians know this. No Wikipedian thinks the processes of Wikipedia are perfect. (Other Wikimedia projects are the same, but they are less pressing as they have less visibility.)

If there is nowhere to turn within the community for seriously critical analysis, we cannot be surprised when enemies of Wikimedia thrive. A lack of internal mechanisms of criticism is like oxygen for them.

I don’t think the lack of internal criticism is intentional. As Wikimedians know, criticism is at times all-too-forthcoming: mailing lists, endless talk pages…However these things are particularly opaque, not easily accessed, and transient. (There is now also the WikBack forums, but I will wait a bit longer to see how the troll:insightful ratio ends up before judging its utility.)

I am not sure that blogs are that much more permanent, but I hope so. Mailing lists and wiki discussions are also the points of criticism themselves, rather than sensible summaries.

So this is a call out to the Wikimedia community, to write about your experiences — critically, but without cynicism. Do it so we can start to fix our own flaws without waiting for crises flagged by external parties.
If you want to write a guest post on my blog as a prelude to the real thing, just drop me a line.

13 February, 2008 •

Comment [7]

A side note on selling Wikipedia

I find the claims of Wikipedia ever “selling out” to Google or whoever quite hilarious because it would fail so spectacularly. Whoever “bought” Wikipedia would almost certainly get a bum deal, because ours is not a community that goes along quietly. The only thing that would be likely to be achieved with any certainty would be the destruction of the Wikipedia community.

13 February, 2008 •

Comment [3]

Links for 2007-02-04

04 February, 2008 • , , ,

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Commons POTY Finals voting begins

Well. After 31,000 votes were cast by over 650 users, I’m sure glad we didn’t count by hand this year. :)

The votes are in, the sockpuppets are discounted, and the finalists are decided. Twenty-eight worthy finalists await your consideration.

Voters cast, on average, about 48 votes. Over a third of voters chose each the tower, the squirrel and the turtle. Water strikes me as a strong theme, being present in 13 (nearly half) of the finalists.

Works by Wikimedians also dominate. Only four of the works are by non-Wikimedians: two from Flickr (the car and the NYC night shot), one (the mosquitoes) is from a Public Library of Science biology article, and one (the firefighting) is from our old friends at the US Air Force. So the odds seem good that this year’s winner wil be by a Wikimedian.

Of the 14 images created by Wikimedians, no less than three photographers have two entries:

It is no coincidence that seven of the Wikimedian photographers are featured on the Commons Meet our photographers page!

As with Round 1, eligible Wikimedians can get a voting token at the Voting page. Unlike Round 1, in the final you can only cast one vote. You can also optionally leave a comment about the image you vote for. The comments are collated for the presentation of the final winner, as seen in the 2006 results.

20 January, 2008 • ,

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Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition now open

I am happy to announce that the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition for 2007 is now open!

There are a huge 514 images in contention, all of which became Featured Pictures (FP) during 2007. This is the second year the competition has run. The 2006 competition had around 350 images, so there has been a very impressive growth in the FP process during 2007.

When the competition was first proposed in late 2006 I was quite sceptical. But when I saw how much everyone enjoyed it, and what a good opportunity it was to demonstrate some things that Commons is doing really well, I was converted. It sounds shallow to say that it is a feelgood exercise for Commons but if people from other wikis come and spend some time looking at our images, and feel impressed or enjoy the experience, it can only be a good thing that they will take that good feeling about Commons back to their wiki.

So, I put a lot of effort into organising this one. As a result I am a core committee member and have dealed myself out of the right to vote. And we have complete translations and committee members in a dozen or so languages, and I am so indescribably happy that Japanese is one of them. I really hope it will encourage more Japanese speaking Wikimedians to participate at Commons.

So anyway, the point is that I CAN’T VOTE and therefore YOU MUST TAKE PART ON MY BEHALF so I can experience vicarious joy. :)

Round 1 is open for a week. Any Wikimedian with > 200 edits in a single account is eligible to vote. I will probably post a couple more times about it before it is over, so for now, all I can say is please vote and please enjoy it. :)

10 January, 2008 • ,

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Institutional change


WWII poster, public domain.

Something has seemed different for the past month or so. I don’t think it’s community change, but institutional change, or maybe relationship-between-community-and-institution change. The institution being the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

What has materially happened?

Foundation-l was starting to become a lame duck but the last few weeks have certainly changed that.

About leaks. They are so viciously harmful. For people who knew the information beforehand, they become distrustful of one another. For people who didn’t know, it is a terrible way to find something out (if you actually care about the organisation), because it says “we didn’t trust you enough to tell you before”, and look, here you are knowing something, and the sky is not falling in. To find out something from hostile sources, that they actually knew before you, really destroys your ability to dismiss them as obsessed jerks. It is like your worst enemy telling you you are adopted, and then it actually being true. Wikipedia generally prides itself on knowing its own flaws better than its critics (although acting on that knowledge is always more difficult), but I think the same cannot be said of WMF.

So, first there was the “secret mailing lists” saga. This is really an en.wp drama that spiralled into unbelievable proportions, not helped by a mailing list hosted on Wikia and having Board members as subscribers. I don’t think that drama was actually about anything meaningful but it did not, in a general sense, speak well for cultural openness.

Second there was the Carolyn Doran story. I truly felt a little bit wounded to find out about this from a hostile source. Which is a stupid, purely selfish reaction but there it is. The puerility of the story itself and the evasiveness with which her leaving was handled at the time did not help I suppose. Mostly I felt sorry that Doran was being subjected to such crazy scrutiny by strangers all over the globe merely because she was unlucky enough to work for WMF. I hope she was and is not aware of it. I don’t think WMF staff should have to have a bulletproof private life just because Wikimedia has earned enough enemies that they will muck-rake through it.
So generally I accept Mike Godwin’s stance that they cannot go into detail about staff issues, and that seems OK.

Next, although not really documented on foundation-l, was a couple of leaks (or rather teasers) through blogs.

Mike Godwin’s latest email says

I do think that reflexive criticism, conspiracy-mongering, and hostility is destructive, and I think we all ought to be as self-aware as possible about whether we’re saying things that promote destructive memes.

D’oh. I have no idea if I am “promoting a destructive meme”. Mike says “long-term recovery from institutional problems that are not unusual in growing organizations” but if that’s what this is, he doesn’t explain how to process it, for those who feel it not like a recovery.

I just love this thing we’re doing, Wikimedia, and I’d hate to see this ship go down because everybody accepted the crack-papering without speaking up.

Lately, the fundraiser ended. Several aspects of the fundraiser caused friction that could so, so easily have been avoided. For example the first banner, that was quickly redesigned after its unveiling, and the idea of representing donors rather than dollars. (Why wasn’t the banner “released” to the community before the fundraiser began? Ditto with the video.) The matching donations that came so late in the campaign. The extension to the fundraiser’s length that came like a day or two before it was due to end. The poor management of translators. Like really. None of that is rocket science. So I am glad that one of the new staff being hired is a fundraiser person.

I haven’t blogged about Florence’s posts, for literally weeks, because they are just sitting in my inbox and they have been rumbling around the back of my head as I try to process them while life continues on. But I have failed to date, so lest they don’t get recorded at all, I will just list some important posts from the last few weeks and encourage all Wikimedians to read them, think about them, talk about them.

I feel there are two paths for the future. Either we keep a board mostly
made of community members (elected or appointed), who may not be
top-notch professionals, who can do mistakes, such as forgetting to do a
background check, such as not being able to do an audit in 1 week, such
as not signing the killer-deal with Google, but who can breath and pee
wikimedia projects, dedicate their full energy to a project they love,
without trying to put their own interest in front. A decentralized
organization where chapters will have more room, authority and leadership.

Or we get a board mostly made of big shots, famous, rich, or very
skilled (all things potentially beneficial), but who just *do not get
it*. A centralized organization, very powerful, but also very top-down.

My heart leans toward the first position of course. But at the same
time, I am aware we are now playing in the big room and current board
members may not be of sufficient strength to resist the huge wave.

I do not share the same optimism than Jimbo with regards to Knol. I
think Knol is probably our biggest threat since the creation of
Wikipedia. I really mean the biggest. Maybe not so much the project
itself, but the competition it will create, the PR consequences, the
financial tsunami, the confusion in people minds (free as in free speech
or as in free of charge). Many parties are trying to influence us, to
buy us, and conflicts of interest are becoming the rule rather than the
exception. There are power struggles on the path.

1. Quality
2. Promotion of lesser known projects
3. Software development
4. License, international laws and compatibility
5. Wikimania, reinventing the wheel, and civility
6. Wikicouncil
7. Chapters and general assembly
8. Board membership, election
9. financial sustainability, controls and independance
10. Organization. Clarification of board role and limits to executive
authority

(see her post for details)

I very much like these goals. But they will only have a chance of succeeding if the community picks them up and pushes them whenever there’s a lull. We need more than “mailing list memory” to succeed with these.

09 January, 2008 • ,

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Of bots and conlangs: the Volapük Wikipedia


“Vükiped”: logo of
the Volapük Wikipedia

If you are after some good wikidrama reading as you settle in for 2008, it’s hard to go past the current Volapük Wikipedia. This tale is a potent combination of machine translation, bots, minor constructed languages, language advocacy and statistics. At heart it is a tussle over the answers to the questions, “What is Wikipedia?” and “Why do we create Wikipedias?”

I first became aware of the Volapük Wikipedia (vo.wp) in October when I was doing some planning for the Commons Picture of the Year competition, deciding which languages I should push as a priority. I looked at the meta page List of Wikipedias and found there was 15 Wikipedias with over 100,000 articles. That seemed like a neat cut-off point, and so I made my list.

Except, the 15th one was “Volapük”, and I felt more than a little embarrassed that I had never heard of this language before, because I love languages and linguistics…looking further along that table revealed vo.wp had only 5 admins and 250 users… that was a tenth or less the size compared to the others in the top 15 (compared proportionally). What were they doing?

At that time, SmeiraBot had made over 3/4 of the total edits on the entire wiki. So the disproportional growth was thanks to bots.

A month or so beforehand, someone had had some similar realisations to me, and made a proposal to close vo.wp. I commented on that proposal in favour of deleting the vast majority of the bot generated articles. In brief, Smeira’s actions offended my feeling of what Wikipedia was, because there would never be a community to maintain 100,000 articles in this language. Is Wikipedia just a free content encyclopedia, or is it an free content encyclopedia written and maintained by a community? That proposal ended up being closed as Keep. Despite all the heat and light, I doubt many of the commenters actually wanted the entire thing deleted.

Then on Christmas Day, Arnomane made a proposal for a Radical cleanup of Volapük Wikipedia. His proposal was not to close the project but just delete the vast majority of the bot articles. That set off a lengthy thread on foundation-l called A dangerous precedent which is still ongoing.

There are two red herrings that have been floating about in this debate. The first, if people are opposed to this bot bomb then they are opposed to all bot-generated articles. Of course not. Bots have a time and place. Seeding new wikis is certainly a very useful function of bots. But “seeding” provokes the idea that people will be around, a community, to tend to the articles after that. This was a seeding for a wiki bigger than the Romanian Wikipedia. Romanian has 28 million first- or second-language speakers. 28 million people to potentially tend to ro.wp’s 98 736 articles. Volapük has 20. Twenty. Total. vo.wp’s bot generated content is hugely out of proportion to the reality of its speakers.

Why do we create Wikipedias? This is where the “language ego” must come in. I don’t know the right term for it but I’m sure there is one… People want to create a Wikipedia, an encyclopedia, when they feel that their language is one worthy of communicating written knowledge. That is part of the reason why people get so hot under the collar when they get even a hint of a suggestion that someone has said a minority language does not deserve some X the same as other, larger languages. Linguistic rights belong to speakers of natural languages, I think, not constructed languages. If you want to disagree on that point, then OK, but they should definitely not just be swept together as “minority languages” of equal cultural and historical importance to the human race.

Is it OK for Wikipedia to be used as a conlang-promotional experiment if it is shaped like an free content encyclopedia, even one that is virtually doomed to permanent poor quality? That’s not a trick question…

31 December, 2007 • , ,

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New page: events

Last night I decided there were enough free culture-ish events happening next year that it would be worth creating a calendar for them. So now there is events.

I pondered for a while the Textpattern plugins for events and calendars, but they were overly complex. So I decided to make a Google Calendar and just embed it.

.. But there doesn’t seem to be a “year” view, so it looks a bit sparse. I decided it needed an event list too. A bit of googling revealed that FeedBurner actually had a point after all: they have some thing called “BuzzBoost”, and it turned my Google calendar feed into some drag and drop code and wala – updates:

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Powered by FeedBurner

So the full list is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/freeculturecalendar. And you can add the calendar to your Google calendar: Let me know if you spot anything missing I should include.

22 December, 2007 • ,

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wikimedia commons • wikipedia • links • community • creative commons • wmf • conferences • wikimania • flickr • linux.conf.au • mediawiki
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free culture

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interesting folk