Strategic Planning

Key questions/question list

< Key questions

Leave suggested questions (in your language) here

  • Instead of serving our present by making available knowledge about and from the past, how can we make Wikipedia serve humanity's future by providing knowledge relevant to the future? More details at Proposal:Future-driven_Wikipedia. #effectiveness #quality #empowerment #education Paranoid 10:53, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Ich habe den Eindruck, dass die Wikipedia fortschreitend komplizierter wird. Immer mehr Artikel ufern zu wissenschaftlichen Abhandlungen gespickt mit Unmengen an Fachvokabular und komplexem Formelwerk aus. Das mag auf der einen Seite sinnvoll sein, wenn zum Beispiel Studenten nach dem Begriff "Gravitation" oder "Schwerkraft" suchen. Aber in dem Fall das ein Dritt- oder Viertklässler wissen will, was Schwerkraft ist, hat das keinerlei Wert. Daher stellt sich mir die Frage: Wäre es nicht möglich, besonders Artikel, welche für unterschiedliche Altersgruppen gleichermaßen relevante Themen behandeln auch in auf die einzelnen Altersgruppen abgestimmten Versionen anzubieten? Beispielsweise zum Thema Schwerkraft eine Version streng wissenschaftlicher Natur für Studenten, mit Formelwerk und Co, einer "umgangssprachlichen" für Leute die Allgemeinwissen über Schwerkraft suchen und zum Beispiel einer Grundschüler-verständlichen Version. Wäre das möglich? Und wäre das nicht auch sinnvoll? DBQ424 22:29 UTC, 29. September 2009
    • Translation (a bit loose) by Jmabel: I have the impression that Wikipedia is becoming progressively more complicated. More and more articles verge on becoming scientific treatises, peppered with tons of jargon and complex formulas. On the one hand, this may be useful when for example students are looking up the concept of "gravitation". But when a third-or fourth-grader wants to know what gravity is, this is worthless. Therefore, for me, this raises the question: would not it be possible to offer distinct articles that treat relevant issues, in versions targeted for different age groups? For example, a "gravity" of a strictly scientific nature for students with the formulas, etc., a popularization for people who seek general knowledge about gravity, and for example, a version at a level to be understood by elementary school students. Would that be possible? And would not that make sense?
    • I can confirm this point. The present status of the nature-science-article-world in Wikipedia is, that it is only useable for people with academic status. And that means only for a minority part of the population. Wikipedia is dominated by students. People who learned a profession (in German called "Berufsausbildung") are not allowed by the others to describe an article that way, they learned it at school. Often this is marked as "wrong". The students cannot accept, that there are different "truth'(s)" in nature science, i.e. if the knowledges are based on "Axioms" that are not as exactly described, as in the university. Nevertheless the result of the work of the not graduated people performs in the daily life. Thus their "Axioms" cannot be wrong. --- Another problem is the Lost in Blue-Links-syndrome. Every article is based on others. And nowhere you can find a basic entrance. If you do not have previous knowledge you cannot enter a new knowledge area with the help of Wikipedia. If you are clicking through the links you often come back to the links you already searched an explanation for. Thus there should be a structure-reform: Some articles should be basic articles as an introduction. -- 84.132.122.143 04:14, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Meiner Meinung nach ist das ein wichtiger Vorschlag, den Berücksichtigung verdient und den ich unterstützen möchte - sowohl aufgrund meiner Erfahrung als enttäuschter Leser von Artikeln, die durch ihr Diplomniveau den Leser überfordern, als auch als Autor, der bei Themen seines Fachgebiets gerne Exaktheit und hohes Niveau einbringen möchte.
  1. Die Wikipedia braucht die Mitarbeit von Fachleuten, gerade auch von Studenten, da nur mit Hilfe von Experten eine sehr hohe Qualität und Aktualität der Artikel sichergestellt werden kann. #quality
  2. Fachleute werden bereitwillig und in größerer Zahl nur dann bei Wikipedia bleiben, wenn sie dort auch auf hohem Niveau beitragen dürfen, wenn sie nicht immer gezwungen werden, für Nichtfachleute zu schreiben (auf "Omaniveau"), und wenn sie dort auch Informationen finden können, die über Schulwissen hinausgeht. Andernfalls werden sie wohl konkurrierende Wiki- oder andere Systeme aufbauen und vorziehen. #participation
  3. Wenn der Anspruch der Wikipedia erhalten werden soll, wirklich Wissen für viele oder gar möglichst für Alle bereitzustellen, folgt auch aus diesem Ziel, dass sie gleichzeitig für Fachleute, aber auch für Schüler und Neueinsteiger geeignet werden soll. #reach
  4. Die Wikipedia hat im Gegensatz zu einem Fachverlag, der wahlweise ein Schulbuch oder ein Fachbuch herausbringen kann, die Herausforderung, dass das Zielpublikum kaum festgelegt oder eingegrenzt ist, und dass der Leserkreis nicht genau bekannt ist.
  5. Manchmal benötigt man eine kurze Definition oder Zusammenfassung über eine Sache, manchmal wünscht man ausführliche Information. Auch das spricht für mehrere Artikelversionen zu einem Lemma.
  6. Wenn man innerhalb eines Artikels auf eine einfachere Version wechseln kann, kann das oben erwähnte Problem, dass man im Artikel verwendete Begriffe nachschlagen muss und sich dabei verliert (Lost in blue links), auf optimale Weise umgangen werden.
  7. Der Versuch der englischsprachigen Wikipedia, eine einfachere Artikelversion anzubieten, ist ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung. Dass dies allerdings über den Weg einer "anderen Sprache", nämlich "simple englisch" gemacht wird, ist eine auf Dauer nicht geeignete Notlösung, nicht nur weil das zum Ausufern der Zahl der Sprachen führen würde ("Einfaches Deutsch", "Deutsch" "Deutsch für Experten"), sondern weil hier auch zwei verschiedene Ebenen, Sprache und Anspruch/Niveau/Komplexität vermischt werden, was die Übersicht und Handhabung sehr erschwert. #quality
Meine Folgerung aus diesen Punkten:
  • Die Software sollte die Möglichkeit bieten, unter einem Lemma mehrere Versionen, sowohl Material für Experten als auch eine Zusammenfassung für Einsteiger, eventuell mit mehreren Zwischenstufen, unterzubringen.
Das wäre ein echter Fortschritt und ein attraktives Unterscheidungsmerkmal zu herkömmlichen Medien, z.B. üblichen Lexika.
Die Herkulesaufgabe, mehrere Versionen eines Lemmas zu pflegen, kann nur von einem großen Autoren- und Mitarbeiterkreis bewältigt werden. Wer könnte das sonst leisten, wenn nicht wir, die große Gemeinschaft der Wikipedianer? Nick B. 19:49, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Wie kann man erreichen, dass mehr Personen freien Zugang zum Internet haben und diesen auch nutzen möchten?
    • Translation (a bit loose) by Jmabel: What can we do to give more people free access to the Internet and also to use this?
  • My major interest is to make Wikipedia a more active participant in the Semantic Web. Yes, there exist the "gateways" to content through Freebase and DBpedia. However, adding more ability for a contributor to make annotation (semantically-intended markup) can increase vastly the usefulness. The contributor is the best person to provide structured metadata for semantic access. What is already happening in this arena? How can I contribute? Proposal:Semantic_Wikipedia Deeptext 27 August 2009
  • How do we move our focus away from western culture and encourage cultural contributions from non-wired (or less-wired) places? #reach2, #participation4
      • Why? Wired people read this and wired people want the knowledge and opinion of wired people.
    • Let us first concentrate on supporting the contributions of non western cultures that are wired. Let us first ensure that languages are technically properly supported.
      • Why? I trust that the point of this strategy session is to work out ideas rather than define in advance what problems should be solved. Lkcl 13:42, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
    • Once we support our existing languages, we should look on how to find support for non-wired or less-wired people and places.
    • When we focus on other cultures, the first priority is to ensure that other cultures are represented in our projects, in this way we remove systemic bias. Systemic bias is essentially indicative of a non neutral point of view.
  • Where will the world, particularly technical and online world, be in 5 years? #organizational_environment1 (short answer: orbiting the sun)
  • It seems increasingly clear that the future of news will include a significant "citizen journalism" component, especially in the form of professional-amateur collaboration. However, English Wikinews and most other Wikinews projects have failed to reach a critical mass of participation, and many Wikimedians see the current Wikinews model as inadequate and unlikely to succeed-in part because the Publication system of Wikinews prevents the kind of feedback cycle of Wikipedia, where readers are shown incomplete content and given a chance to improve it and write more. How could Wikinews or another Wikimedia project be reworked to provide a compelling way for people to participate in the production and consumption of journalism on a large scale? #projectissue1
    • Old news is no news. What is old news good for?
  • Ditto for the future of textbooks and the Wikibooks model. #projectissue1
  • Ditto for the future of educational courses, learning objects, and the Wikiversity model. #projectissue1
  • How should MediaWiki look like five years from now? Is en:Google Wave the next MediaWiki? #meta
  • What is key, our content projects or our contentprojects using MediaWiki.
    • If MediaWiki is not essential to our projects, what aspects of MediaWiki are ?
  • Maybe en:distributed databases like CouchDB (our database is MySQL) would be better in countries where data transfer to the United States is expensive and unreliable (technically and politically). #meta #reach
  • What do you think about a text-to-speech system or a speech-to-text system as a front-end for MediaWiki? (A lot of people can´t read or write and even more don´t have computers but telephones) #reach (Proposals/Audio offerings)
    • It should be easy to run up a very basic java based java/swing/freetts based wiki reader (I've already done a Project Gutenberg reader for a friend of mine which will be heading into the PD at some point when I get round to cleaning it up a tad). It becomes problematic the moment you need anything more sophisticated. Alink to my blog where I expose the engine is here:[1] The problems I have so far identified are as follows: 1. availability per user of a java JRE (so maybe we need to use java webstart + a browser client or something similar in a full blown one); 2. availability of a workable voice per language (most of the PD voices e.g. kevin are frankly horrible) and because the voices are language dependant you will need one for every language to be supported, constructing (or even locating these in the first place) is not a trivial matter; 3. speech recognition or some other context appropriate mechanism to allow the reader to change flow and follow a link or a hyperlink; 4. speech recognition or other mechanism to allow searches; 5. the reader will need to understand wiki page layout in order to handle tags and miscellaneous directives; 6. other as yet to be identified issues... Sjc 07:45, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Most of the available speech-to-text systems are specific to a given language, and even to an individual speaker (The software needs to be trained before use. I doubt that even in five years time there will be sufficient technological advances to make this possible in an automated fashion. Maybe users could record speech and others could transribe, and still others translate where necessary. It is certainly a great idea to look into as many input methods as possible to increase the possibility of participation.
    • AT&T has a good online text-to-speech reader with several languages (http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php), someone from Wikipedia should contact them and see how much they would charge for using it.
  • I have been looking into Special:Log for doing some statistics. I was interested in what happens after creating a new user account. I found out, after login some editors start editing within five minutes, most editors need between five minutes and one hour, but there were also some who start editing the next day. Editing immediately means they don´t read the welcome text with much attention. Remembering that most editors do less than 5 or 10 edits at all, investing more than a few minutes in reading the help text might be to time consuming for some minor edits. Maybe we should think how to increase the number of edits of these short time editors. Which information do they need to edit MediaWiki? #participation
  • From our common life experience it follows that no project can be in an uncontested leadership position in the information and communication field for more than 10 years. Are we ready to face serious competition in 5 years?--Yaroslav Blanter 18:31, 29 July 2009 (UTC) #quality #participation
    • Competition is growing now, what with all the people we've jilted and all. Look at Tropeswiki for a project that is growing fast --Kim Bruning 19:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Are we ready to repel possible organizer efforts, say by governments, to recruit editors in order to establish NPOV in certain topics?--Yaroslav Blanter 18:31, 29 July 2009 (UTC) #meta #reach #quality
    • We've already been doing that for a while now. --Kim Bruning 19:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Is developing "professional" articles like science topics our priority? How are we going to attract highly skilled editors able to write such articles? --Yaroslav Blanter 18:32, 29 July 2009 (UTC) #quality #meta #participation
    • That would be hard. At one point, scientists did occaisionally write a wikipedia article first, just to establish priority. With the advent of vastly over-the-top Original Research policies, we are now no longer as attractive. --Kim Bruning 10:48, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
    • First: Yes. Second: I think science people live from getting quotes. If a scientiest writes an exceptional article, maybe it should be possible to quote him (you have to take sure that this article is not edited after that too much then, too).
    • Another Idee: What do you think of different levels of information about a topic. Often the "normal user" needs only some plain informations about the topic. This could be done in an encyclopedia entry. But for more interested users oder experts in this topic, this is not enough. In my profession there is a serious difference between what amateurs want (and have) to know an what experts want and have to know.
  • Can we find a way for every publisher of any sort that does basic data mining and research into primary sources were to share that work directly on WP and sister projects. Publishers using free media and spending time and effort vetting their licenses should update the license info (with any high-fidelity assurances they tracked down) directly on Commons. Librarians curating an exhibit, even in cases where they are not willing to or cannot make their digital works available under the right license, can share their curatorial comments and bibliographies. As long as professional publishers and curators feel unwelcome on the projects, they won't discover the ways in which they have already-free knowledge to contribute. - question by SJ on foundation-l. Added by -- Philippe 00:05, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
  • Are we willing to increase effort and spendings to reach out to underdeveloped/developing countries, and thus make Jimmy Wales' often repeated statement on interviews almost from the beginning a less empty promise? #reach
    • One way would be to define a set of topics that cover basic human needs (hygiene, health, nutrition, etc) and focus on providing articles within those topics in all major non western languages, then focus on cost effective means of distribution of the content so that as many people as possible can have free and easy access to that content in their language of choice. Added by Erik Zachte 01:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
  • Are any central (WMF) efforts to promote creation of 'essential' content (see previous point) in small wikipedias compatible with the philosophy of empowerment, independence and self-reliance for each individual wikipedia? Added by Erik Zachte 01:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #projectissue2
  • As Wikipedia settles into being a prominent website, more and more businesses are attempting to either create or edit articles for public relations purposes. How can we either reasonably accommodate them or manage their editing? Fred Bauder 02:18, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #quality
  • How about a serious study of error: its origin, detection, correction and control following up on this essay in the English Wikipedia En:User:Fred Bauder/Error management. Fred Bauder 17:06, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #quality, #projectissue3
In addition to Fred's essay, there was an intriguing study of the 100 biographical articles about the U.S. senators, which found them to be deliberately wrong about 6.8% of the time. -- Thekohser 17:34, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
  • To the extent that wikis in a language important to developing world users (Hindi, Urdu, Swahili, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Hausa) are smaller, less active and lower quality than those of European languages with a small number of speakers, is this a "problem" the community needs to address to meet the stated social and development goals of the project?
    • I suspect it's actually somewhat hard to recruit people from different cultures, partially because they are different cultures; that might not put the same value on things like wikipedias ;-) --Kim Bruning 19:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • If there's a need to promote development in certain language communities, what actions are appropriate by the Wikimedia Foundation? Paying contributors? Campaigns to recruit volunteer contributors? Outreach to universities? Ethanz 18:42, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #reach, #participation
  • Should Wikipedia start to take action against the exclusionism of some activities, such as Requests for Admininship, etc? Just because someone doesn't edit a lot, doesn't mean they wouldn't be a good administrator. #participation Iceflow 14:13, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #projectissue4
  • Can Wiki(pedia, versity, etc) survive in the long term with one leader managing ALL the projects? Iceflow #meta 14:13, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #rhetoric
  • Should we look at branching out into other Wiki formats, such as a parenting wiki, and a children's wiki? YaHooligans came out well from having a kids only service. Maybe we need to look at widening the Wikiscope. #reach, #participation, #scope Iceflow 14:13, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Does Wikia fit this bill? --Kim Bruning 10:58, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • What do we do with all the really tiny fiddly wikis which hardly anybody uses? If we close them, we risk robbing people of an opportunity to use their own language. Should we have a Wiki Task Force dedicated to promotion of the tiny wikis, so that we can help maintain their survival? #reach, # participation Iceflow 14:13, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
  • How can we adapt the work of OmegaWiki for Wikisource? Is there any way that we could merge the two? NuclearWarfare 15:55, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Why wikisource? Omegawiki is an online translating dictionary. Wouldn't a merger with wiktionary be more logical? --Kim Bruning 19:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Should we devise a large survey for national populations (ie, one without a free response bias) about the WMF projects? NuclearWarfare 15:55, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
  • Should non-wiki formats be developed to store data that is compatibly licensed but not appropriate for MediaWiki storage? Eg, weather data, USGS history of earthquakes. --Brian McNeil 09:45, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Commons provides mashing ability to external MediaWiki wikis. Would it not make sense for us to mash the data from partners who are happy to procide the data to us?
    • When GLAM make their data available online, would it not make sense to mash their data on Commons and on our projects? It might even make it easier for our community to help with annotations ...
    • Better to retrieve the data (more or less) live from external sources (authorities in their domain), for example using the extension | External Data? 84.56.234.228 09:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • What about using IdeaTorrent to track community ideas and proposals? from foundation-l, through -- Philippe 21:05, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
  • For Google-news the English wikipedia is a news source. What are the consequences? #reach
  • How do we strengthen the credibility of Wikipedia articles (academic / social / political credibility?) Is it even an issue? Will increased credibility allow Wikipedia articles be used more often as formal reference? Such as in academic discussions? #reach
    • What about a Wikipedia trust-metrics system? See De Alfaro and Massa works.
  • How do you use the content of the wikimedia projects? #meta #participation
  • How should Wikimedia engage with organizations or groups with shared mission, such as health educators, cultural sector with education and outreach mandates, formal education, out-of-school time education, cultural heritage preservationists etc.?#reach #participation #quality
  • Caffeine, Google's new search engine is in beta. Apparently, trials of the new algorithm are dropping Wikipedia results lower down results pages. Thoughts? Insights? User:Serita Aug 13, 2009
  • What makes an encyclopaedia useful? What makes this encyclopaedia more useful than that one? (I would suggest when you look something up, that there is an article on it. Deletionists please think about this.)
  • What are Wikimedia Embassies for? #meta
  • How do we weed out experts using Wikipedia to promote their POV from experts using Wikipedia to promote human knowledge? And how do we do it without driving away the very people we want to keep?
  • How can one discover and benefit from Wikipedia articles when blind, driving, or with eyes closed?
    • How useful are text-to-speech engines atm? --Kim Bruning 10:58, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • How can we handle references better, since the actual way of referencing sources in the MW software is rather poor?
  • How we can update external data more easily into articles?
  • Is wikisource just another Project Gutenberg? --88.102.101.245 08:50, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
    • This might be a possibility for articles that have proven overly contentious or where trivia keeps crowding out more important material. - Jmabel 16:27, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Can we come up with a more active way to let some large number of people know about articles we are missing and should have? #participation - Jmabel 16:32, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Can we work with academia so that writing for a wiki is more of an academically taught skill? #participation #quality - Jmabel 16:35, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
  • What can we do to get academics to release more of their own writing under free licenses? #participation #quality - Jmabel 16:35, 22 September 2009 (UTC)


Questions regarding this strategy process itself

  1. Is there a way for people to "check out" these questions and come back with proposals? Or should it just be informally done? -- Philippe 17:52, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
  2. How do we make this a productive use of time, and not just a long-winded exercise in vacuous corporate-speak? Ideas like "strategic planning" and "mission statements" and "vision papers" are the death of productivity, as they take time away from actually solving real problems. I have no problem working through problems as long as that's what we do, and not just develop empty meaningless documents filled with the latest corporate-babble culled from some management textbook. This should be productive, and not just a Franklin/Covey conference. --Jayron32 22:45, 29 July 2009 (UTC) #process
    • Each of us can try to find problems that look interesting, and we can BOLDly start taking steps to work on solving them right away. There's no need to wait. {{sofixit}}

Questions regarding Wikimedia Foundation as an entity (including finances)

  1. How do we more effectively communicate that the WMF is a charity? #basics1
    • By making it easy to donate. In Europe for instance most people do not use paypal and only pay into accounts within their country.
      • On the contrary, plenty of Europeans use Paypal. What part of Europe are you from? Certainly here in Western and Northern Europe Paypal is common.
        • Yes paypal is common in Europe, but I doubt that the majority of people use Paypal, where as the majority do have a bank account.
    • Are there other ways of getting that message across, allowing donations doesn't necessarily indicate that WMF is a charititable organization.
      • Why not tell people WMF is a charity? Telling people even an obvious truth can go along way.
      • Are donations tax-deductible? If so, say so!
      • Publicize your contributors, large and small. "WMF is supported in part by the Mickey and Minnie Moneybags Charitable Trust, an educational grant from Burger Bell, the Save The Blibbet Foundation ... and by [web] viewers like you."
        • How about like gmail's web clips?
      • Suggest people ask about employer matching gift programs. This is an quck way to double the sizes of some donations.
  2. Who are the Wikimedia stakeholders? #organizationalenvironment2
    • How can we make sure their interests are represented? #organizationalstructure1
    • How are their efforts supported and possibly funded? #organizationalstructure1
  3. As increased work goes into branding Wikimedia, how will that brand be conveyed consistently across all languages? #quality0
    • For example, one of the above points is "effectively communicate that the WMF is a charity" - how can you make this happen globally, beyond simple translations of US press releases?
      • You have to understand that the American concept of "charity" is not the same in other countries. Even if it is clearer that it is a charity, it will not help. In Europe we do not show patronage the same way, we help organizations through our taxes. We contribute less directly on an individual basis. The American charity patronage system exists because of your history, economy and tax system.
  4. What are Wikimedia chapters for? (meta:Wikimedia chapters/Reports) #meta, #organizationalstructure
  5. Do we have an effective process for the creation of new large-scale projects, such as wikifamily or wikikids? (Question by SJ, transcribed by philippe) -- Philippe 04:58, 29 July 2009 (UTC) Answer: Yes. See m:Proposals_for_new_projects, so there is a process. Please clarify which part isn't effective in that process.
  6. Can we ensure a long-term financial stability, matching (exponentially) increasing costs with donations?--Yaroslav Blanter 18:19, 29 July 2009 (UTC) #reach
    • How can we ensure long-term financial stability? Government grants, non-profit/NGO sponsorship, endowment? 98.226.198.121 05:53, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
    • The internet archive has found that while the amount of data they need to archive is growing exponentially, the cost of storage is decreasing exponentially, both coincidentally (or not-so-incidentally) at the rate predicted by Moore's law. So it's quite possible that our costs will remain fairly stable. --Kim Bruning 11:01, 3 September 2009 (UTC)


Questions of Funding

Talk of a Future Strategy, even a continuing presence, is incomplete without a Funding Strategy.

Wikimedia Foundation needs real money to pay real bills. Currently this is provided for through donations. Is this the best strategy, the only strategy ? Is it even an acceptable strategy ? Is it adequate.

Discussion on A Funding Strategy is needed.

For now, see Funding ideas

Questions regarding Reach

  1. How can we reach the people who currently have access to our projects, but don't use them? #reach
  2. What should we do to ensure our materials are available to people who don't yet have internet access, or who may never have internet access? Should we support dial-up differently? #reach
    1. We should first ensure that our software supports that language. There are still major issues with language support for many languages.
  3. What should we do to ensure our materials are available to people whose governments impede access to them? #reach
    1. Best thing to do would try to make Wikipedia accessible even if bans are in place.
    2. Wikimedia should begin negotiations with the governing party for free access to knowledge for its citizens. Failing that, Wikimedia should plan and execute an overthrow of said government, and install a Western democracy, so that the citizens may access the full range of Wikipedia's content. #square
  4. What should we do to ensure our materials are available to the growing number of people who access the internet only through mobile devices? #reach
  5. How do we ensure our materials are protected and preserved in usable form, so they continue to be available forever? #reach
  6. What should we do to ensure our materials are available in developing countries, where many languages with a million or more speakers still have no flourishing wikipedia community? # reach
    • I think that we should ask aid-agencys and/or institutions in Africa if they are willing to finance with us some wikipedia-offices in Africa, where young people can work with wiki-projects in their own language and at the same time get some small amounts of salary. The money is needed for the rent, for computers, and for some kind of wage. If there are not many new articles in the language after one or two years the funding - coming from voluntary sources on our part - could end. Mats33 10:23, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
    • How do the projects remain relevant in a web that is increasingly geared toward mobile devices? #reach4
      • By having a JSONRPC or other web-based RPC API, through which pages can be obtained and edited, thus allowing developers to write customised front-ends for specific devices. sorry, that's more of an answer than a question, but i couldn't help it :) Lkcl 13:46, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
    • Commons is effectively useless to people who do not speak English. The big problem is how do you find your picture among the almost 5 million media files? #quality
      • I once wrote a small prototype to hook up omegawiki to commons, so that one could search via omegawiki's "defined meanings" instead of terms in a particular language; aka. you could search for stuff in your own language, and actually get results. The prototype worked pretty well. :-) --Kim Bruning 10:58, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  7. Would adding a content rating system increase the reach of the WikiMedia project? While moderation alone works for Wikipedia, smaller wikis need more automated moderation tools as they grow.
  8. How do we increase participation and awareness of projects other than Wikipedia itself? How do we encourage the participation in and use of non-English Wikipedia projects?

Questions regarding Participation

  1. What can we do to retain, support and encourage the core volunteers who work on the projects today?
  2. How can we encourage the participation of new people who share our values and can make a strong contribution?
    1. How can these values spread? #participation
  3. How can we make MediaWiki transformatively easier to use, and keep it easy to use?
    1. Should we suggest yet another separation of content from presentation, as Mediawiki source has become incomprehensible to non-initiates/non-MW-professionals?
  4. How can we support participation by people who don't have easy Internet access?
  5. What motivates a professional teacher or writer to contribute to Wikipedia?
  6. What mechanisms do we have to recognize or reward participation? Are they adequate? Do they encourage further participation?
    1. How does recognition compare for different kinds of contributors? For editors? For people who produce media files (images, audio, video)? For donors?
    2. We've always been super-restrictive on recognition of donors, partly due to legitimate concerns about advertising and independence of the projects. What ways can we think of to recognize donors without triggering those concerns? Continue your present policy - don't go the way of public radio - where acknowledgments are little more than advertisements - this is open source publishing.--75.248.13.193 20:27, 1 October 2009 (UTC)jgard5000
  7. How can we make participation fun?
  8. How can we get more diverse contributors?
    • How to identify possibly untapped sources of contribution?
      • Why are they untapped?
      • How do we create incentive || lower the barrier?
  9. Maybe the number of edits per user, correlated with article categorizations could allow some insights? I.e. which kinds of topics are edited by what user profile? (We currently do these things on database dumps, is that right?)
  10. Have you already edited one of the Wikimedia projects? Will you come back and edit again? #participation (Proposals/Alumni)
  11. How do we attract more female contributors? Our reach statistics show a predominance (overwhelming) of men. How can we be diverse and leave out that large chunk of the population? -- Philippe 04:04, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
  12. How do we encourage "casual" editors in an environment that is increasingly rules-based? How do we best guide new editors without exposing them to too much?
    • Can we do something in order to formulate a wiki-text with tables, parameters, references to separate whatever seems incomprehensible to the casual user, so that he/she can edit without fear?
    • What kinds of edits do we need from casual editors? What kinds of edits do we need from more experienced and educated editors? Is there a way to get both, without creating conflict or quality issues?
  13. How much is the rising proportion of reverting of newbie edits due to our increased efficiency in spotting vandalism, and how much is due to increased spamming of wikipedia due to its high profile and openness to editing. Also once we've filtered out spam and vandalism, are we seeing a fall of good minor edits by newbies? And if so is this due to our increasing quality resulting in there being far fewer typos for newbies to fix? I'm reasonably confident from anecdotal evidence of users who've logged out and done the odd IP edit, and from my own observations of newbie editors that good IP and newbie edits are rarely reverted. But statistical info would be useful. Also I'd be interested in info from other wikis, as I suspect that EN wiki may be atypical, or further down the same growth path. WereSpielChequers

Questions regarding Quality

  1. How can we effectively and scalably work with institutions that control the copyright for educational/informational materials, to encourage them to release those materials under a free license? #quality
  2. How can we effectively and scalably work with academic institutions and other organizations with subject-matter-expertise, to encourage them to help improve the quality of the material we provide? #quality
  3. How can we better prevent editing that hurts quality (e.g., vandalism and malicious edits), and fix it when it occurs? #quality
    Why not ban anonymous edits (almost all of the increasingly bothersome vandalism is from such)?
    Because you might also lose some good editors who just don't want to create an account, especially first time users and proof-readers. German wikipedia uses a system which allowes everyone to edit, but edits done by anonymous users must be approved by an registered user before shown in the article. You can read the edits if you click on "zur aktuellen version" (show current version). This system might be useful in Other wikis too (even if you feel a little discriminated as an anonymous user...)
  • "might" is far too weak here. If anonymity is banned, we *will* lose most of the people that built Wikipedia and made it great. If accounts are required, Wikipedia is just like any other forum. I would not have created an account, nor would I contribute if I did not believe that this was a place where everyone was welcome to contribute, without fear of receiving significant backlash. If we lose anonymity, we lose points of view from people in repressive nations, we lose contributions from experts whose employers are tight about intellectual property and trade secrets, and most significantly we lose all the little people who have just a little to contribute and are hesitant to do so.--Headlessplatter 17:18, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
  1. How can we encourage readers to help us identify poor quality material, and once it is reported, how can we best get it assessed and fixed? #quality
  2. How can we give credit for good contributions?
  3. How can we prioritize professional views and contributions without too much limiting openness?
  • This should not be done. The content can and should speak for itself. It is becoming increasingly apparent that openness has more influence for establishing correct ideas than prioritizing experts. Prioritizing experts inherently introduces a centralized power in the people who get to decide who is an expert. This always results in a bias, no matter what steps are taken to mitigate the effect. Further, it discourages non-experts from making small incremental improvements which are desperately needed and have a significant positive effect when accumulated in the long-term. Since established experts are often too busy to make small and menial improvements, this can make articles stagnate. No one starts out as an expert. If we make the environment hostile to those who are not established as experts, we set ourselves up to have no editors in the future. It is impossible to prioritize experts without inherently suppressing non-experts. The right solution is to let the content speak for itself.--Headlessplatter 17:18, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
  1. Should the Wikimedia Foundation support a project (along the lines of Citizendium or Veropedia) in which a less open environment is used to boost certain types of articles to a quality they are not achieving in an open editing environment? #quality - Jmabel 16:27, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
  2. How can we prevent opinion cartels (driven by political or economic interest, for example) from hijacking pages through the domination of discussions and moderator boards? How can we detect them and distinguish them from experts of the field? #quality
  3. How do we prioritize which articles should receive attention? What areas of coverage most disparately need improvement, and how do we channel editors to those areas?
  • We cannot and should not do this. Ideas should be pushed from the people to Wikipedia. This automatically creates the right priorities. If ideas are pulled, an inherent bias is created by whoever sets the agenda. Further, in a pulling system, people will fill the void with whatever garbage comes to mind. It reduces the incentive to produce good and useful content.--Headlessplatter 17:18, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
  1. Should we (whoever that may be) prioritize what needs the attention of other peolple? JaapB 21:29, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  2. How can we improve the mechanism for quality control across different language versions of wikipedia? Can we encourage other language versions of wikipedia to implant the best quality control process from others instead of reinvent the whole process? #quality - (Xiaowei) 小為 16:32, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
  3. How can we strike a better balance between objectivity/NPOV and first party contributions? Current practice/policy discouraging or excluding first party participants shrinks the pool of subject matter experts. Paul C. Lasewicz 13:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  4. Ist sich das Wikipedia-Projekt bewußt, daß sein Grundansatz über Wissensdarstellung defizient ist und sich das Problem mit zunehmender Expansion (Themenabdeckung) verschärft? - Im Grundsatz "Keine Theoriefindung" steht Zitat: "Wikipedia bildet bekanntes Wissen ab. Sie dient der Theoriedarstellung, nicht der Theoriefindung (TF) oder Theorieetablierung." Erkenntnisphilosophisch ist das nicht haltbar. Die Vorstellung, es gäbe "da draußen" eine endliche Menge Wissen, wie anderswo Semmeln und Brezen, die in Büchern ruht und von beliebigen Leuten eingefangen werden muß bzw. kann, ist falsch! Was "Wissen" ist, und was demgemäß wert ist, dargestellt zu werden, ist schon das Ergebnis von politischen und irgendwie idealistischen Vorstellungen und Absichten. Es findet in den Gesellschaften eine ständige Auseinandersetzung (auch Kampf) darüber statt, was "Fakten" sind und was davon in den Wissenskanon gehört. Je "pluraler" und vielschichtiger sich unser Werteverständnis insgesamt entwickelt, umso schwieriger wird es, diese Fragen zu beantworten. Wie kann sich die Wikipedia verantwortlicher zu dieser Problematik verhalten, als sie es derzeit tut? Wie kann sie verhindern, daß "Korrektoren" in einem Zustand naiver und ungebildeter Wissenschaftsgläubigkeit rückschrittliche Inhaltszensuren ausüben? - Aurelis 14:11, 03 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Translation (very loose, and I'm not sure I followed all of this, feel free to edit me and reflect that more accurately - Jmabel): Is the Wikipedia project aware that its basic approach is deficient on knowledge representation and that it has a problem with increasing expansion (covered topics)? - The principle of "no original research is" Quote: "Wikipedia reflects known knowledge. It is represents [prior] theories, and not original research, or attempts to establish theories." Epistemologically, this is not tenable. The idea that there is is a finite amount of knowledge "out there"—as elsewhere there are rolls and pretzels—which rests in books and must or can be captured by any people, is wrong! What "knowledge" is, and what therefore is worthy of being shown, is already the result of political and somewhat idealistic ideas and intentions. There is, rather. an ongoing debate (including struggle) in the societies on what are "facts" and what belongs in the canon of knowledge. The more "plural" and complex our overall understanding of values developed, the more difficult it becomes to answer these questions. How can the Wikimedia behave responsibly on this issue than they are currently doing? How they can prevent the "correctors" (?) marked by a state of naive and uneducated reactionary belief in scientific content?
  5. Kann sich die Wikipedia in Teilbereichen persönlichen Ansichten öffnen? - In den Wissenbereichen, in denen bloße "Fakten" das Wesen des Gegenstandes nicht hinreichend begreifbar machen, wäre es vorteilhaft, persönliche Ansichten von Autoren zuzulassen, insofern sie geeignet sind, wesentliche Teile des Gegenstands zu erschließen. Dies ist z.B. in den Themenbereichen der Kunst, der Spiritualität, der Grenzwissenschaften etc. der Fall. Es ergibt sich dabei ein Problem der Qualifizierung, das aber möglicherweise auch nicht unlösbar ist. Ein Problembewußtsein wäre schon ein Fortschritt! - Aurelis 14:25, 03 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Translation (very loose, and I'm not sure I followed all of this, feel free to edit me and reflect that more accurately - Jmabel): Can Wikipedia be open in some areas to personal views? - In the the areas of knowledge in which mere "facts" are not the sufficiently understandable essence of the subject, it would be advantageous to allow personal views of authors in so far as they are likely to open up substantial parts of the matter. This is, for example, in the areas of art, spirituality, science, etc. This gives rise to a problem of qualification, but possibly is not insoluble. An awareness of the problem would be an improvement!
    • I hope I've understood that correctly. Aurelis seems to be saying that opinions of (somehow qualified) contributors would be more useful than (or as useful as) those of citable, published authors on these matters. I've done my best to translate the remark, but I just want to make it clear that if I have understood it correctly, I disagree. - Jmabel 02:23, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
  6. Since as many as 50% of the medical doctors in the United States at least occasionally consult Wikipedia, and about 10% of those at least occasionally edit;[2] [3] how can we improve both the quality of our medical articles and improve the quality of the editing of doctors? Fred Bauder 02:18, 30 July 2009 (UTC) #quality
    • Digital Signatures, backed up by "Web of Trust", on contributions. look up the Debian Keyring. Any edits going into "medical" category could be required to use a desktop application (which has convenient and secure access to the GPG key) or ... to go via an IP address that is known to be a Medical Establishment, or... something. any contributions NOT made by people with GPG or other Digital Certificates should be automatically highlighted in "red", with a big warning at the top of the page. There should be several different categories of "medical" - "western medical" as well as "homeopathic", ayurvedic etc. so as to avoid lock-in. there's enough problems with western medicine as it is, without spreading its reach and insane costs over to the rest of the world (look up cuba's preventative medicine practices as a counter-example, and also look up how the victorians used to cut the fingers off of ayurvedic doctors, in india) Lkcl 13:58, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
  7. Where should we focus efforts to improve articles for maximum visibility and utility to our readers, and how do we determine those areas?

Questions regarding metrics

  1. How can we find a (tentative) metric that tells us which topic areas are fairly well covered (guessing: physics) and which need more work (guessing: performing arts)?
  1. Which metrics should be considered? For example, how important is number of donors versus number of editors, and are the stats needed to assess this being tracked in a useful way? #fundraising101
  2. What metrics do we use to measure the health of a wikimedia community in a particular language? Number of articles? Contributors? Rates of growth? Article quality?
    • Quantity and quality of localisation, the relative ability of MediaWiki to support that language. The size of the target audience..
    • I think we also need to look at what point the wiki is in the wiki-life cycle, number of people who actually understand how the consensus system works (or whatever else the wiki is using), etc. --Kim Bruning 19:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Questions regarding the editorial process, article consensus, etc.

  • How can we improve the dispute resolution process so that repetitive disputes with no resolution do not distract or discourage contributors? Is there a pattern among content/behavior disputes that seem to go on and on with no end?
  • How do we prevent large organized groups of contributors from dominating articles or discussions? Does this require a technical solution (e.g.: new forms of article protection), a policy solution (e.g.: new behavioral limits), or a process solution (e.g.: new dispute resolution methods)?

Questions regarding GLAM technical issues

  1. What does GLAM mean? GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
  2. What is the impetus for GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) to connect with wikimedia?
  3. What does free culture mean to GLAM?
  4. What makes GLAM-WIKI outcomes unique?
    • Clarification requested on the term "GLAM-WIKI"
  5. How does this partnership translate to KPI?
    • Clarification requested on the term "KPI"
  6. Who owns Wikimedia content created in partnership with GLAM?
  7. Who funds new content development?
  8. Who and how is it branded?
  9. What links are established to connect to original content?
  10. Is wikimedia content supplementing, enhancing, subsuming GLAM?
  11. Who participates in the network?
  12. What is the role of content in that network?
  13. How is value generated?
  14. How do communities collaborate with institutions in the construction of knowledge?
  15. How are these networks maintained in the process of assessing, acquiring, collecting and distributing content over time?
  16. How can a blocked user be desblocked?
  17. Wie kann die Teilname an solchen Diskussionen für nicht englisch sprechende Wikipedianer verbessert werden. es sollten mindestens die sprachen der 10 grösten Wikipedias einbezogen werden. So ist z.B. bei der Usability-Initiative nicht möglich in einer anderen Sprache mitziarbeiten. 89.245.225.251 01:57, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
  18. How can we build APIs so that Wikipedia can be contributed to from 3rd Party Website? And also update 3rd Party Website? Is this achievable in real time using something such as XMPP pubsub both to lower the "pollin" load and to move wikipedia to Real Time which seems to be where the web is going (the web is all about compressing time and space)? The way I think APIs could be useful is that "sections" of Wikipedia should be able to be edited from more "expert sites". The expert site could be for instance a semantic extraction of all Medical articles, and integrated into a specific website of a Medical Universities, researchers etc... For APIs to work well I agree that Wikipedia must first excel in web semantics (so that semantic sections such as "all medical articles in English" can be extracted by an API). API are also a great way to attract financial contributions (above a certain number of API calls by a commercial entity these API queries can be charged for while remaining free from non-commercial entities). If we look into the future, I think there are lessons also to be learned from technological advances such as Google Wave. I think that the first lesson is that one of the component of the future of the web is to move to Real Time (using things such as XMPP) at least would be very nice for WikiNews. The XMPP "PubSub" mechanism is especially interesting overall (this is what the Facebook NewsFeed is built on I would assume). I also think that Wikipedia ought to be much more customizable and social. For this my suggestion is to enable to allow not only to "watch" an article but a Semantic theme such as: "Medical", "article containing events between 1900-1950", "Common Law", "criminal law", "any article linking to Descartes"; "any article linked from Descartes", etc....) and so that the user can get a customized feed for these. #participation

Questions regarding IT and other internal technical issues

  • Will Wikipedia move away from a centralised server? How about distributing server loads across different volunteers? You could cut costs and speed things up, but you'd need a new architecture to get things going and make it work reliably.
  • The text of wikipedia is safe, based on the large number of people who download the dumps. There is no database dump of the image database. How do we ensure long-term survivability in the event of a disaster? #reach5
    • Note that there are off-site backups of the image database, just not publicly accessible ones. See recent tech blog entry.--Eloquence 23:56, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
      • Cool. Budget would be good. "Real men don't make backups. Real men upload their data to FTP, and let the rest of the wolrd download it" --L. Torvalds  ;-) Though... 4T is an issue, that's 4 HD's! Bittorrent might not quite be able to handle that... Perhaps we could sell sets of hard disks or so? --Kim Bruning 22:50, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
      • Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia - a peer-to-peer distributed protocol would make it "unnecessary" - or should it be called "automatic" - to make "separate backups". Lkcl 13:42, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
  • How can we move knowledge from flat text to a structured ontology? This would allow for improved machine responses to questions and assisted automatic translation. RDF?
  • One thing which would radically transform the landscape would be a wiki tools factory. A number of the proposals are already looking at using wikis in a less than traditional client-server fashion, and if this is to be achieved, tooling across a disparity of both programming and natural languages is almost an inevitability. One way forward would be to have a development site not dissimilar in concept to something like Sourceforge, for construction, versioning and distribution of the tooling. Sjc 08:21, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
  • How to make wikipedia a credible resource - it is still not trusted as a valid source of information in the commercial sector

Leave more suggested questions (in your language) here

  • What are effective ways of encouraging authoring pushes in areas that past efforts have not been so effective for?
  • How can the huge achievements of the English wiki help other language projects most effectively i.e. how do we get lots of translators? Might it make sense to ask for help on a governmental level?
How about - when reading an article in one language, highlight that the same article in another language has more content
  • Use machine-translation to translate the section headings (usually you can see which article has more content from the table of contents, though I realize machine-translation will suck in general)
For people who KNOW more than 1 language
  • have them register their 2-3 preferred languages
  • highlight that articles in other languages have more content
  • prompt them to do a quick translation of a section or two (special box could pop up for this, and you'd go to a special editing screen designed for translation)
  • Would it be possible to raise the profile of Wikipedia editing as bona fide voluntary work such that it became plausible to enter it onto a CV when looking for work and for it to be recognised by unemployment organisations as a useful activity that keeps one in touch with the world of work? I feel that this kind of thing may help with #participation since participation in the project would be deemed to have value for potential employers, not to mention amongst friends, family or whoever is yet to appreciate the effort made by editors. This increased status would lead to more participants, more participants would raise the profile and so a virtuous spiral may be created. --Bodnotbod 15:10, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
  • How do we conciliate the "Everybody can edit" model that has proven so successful with the increasing need for reliability and tighter editing? Ad-hoc attempts at the needed changes are probably a major factor in the projects becoming less welcoming (more rules, more process), yet the increased media focus and absolute importance as a major resource of humanity increased (and will continue to increase) the importance of increased controls. (To wit: BLP). Coren 14:03, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Have you considered expanding to allow people to contribute "critical essays" on topics. More like the Dictionary of Music and Musicians?
  • How do you envision the future?
    1. There are some 260 language editions of Wikipedia now. How many will there be over five years? My guess not more than 300, your guess?
    2. We're working on 13 million articles combined over all projects now. How many will that be over fiver years? My guess not more than 17 million, your guess?
    3. There are currently only 24 Chapters of the foundation. How many will that be over five years? My guess at most 40, your guess?
    4. There are now around 30 thousands active editors (at least qualified to elect board members of the WMF). How many will that be over five years? My guess some 40 thousands, your guess?
    5. Nowadays nearly everyone that accesses Wikipedia, and other projects, does so with a computer/laptop over a fixed-line. How will that look like in five years time? My guess is that in five years time the majority will access Wikipedia through a mobile device.
  • As the internet develops into a far more audio-visual medium, should Wikipedia put more emphasis on integrating videos into it's articles? What should the standards for quality of a video on Wikipedia be? --79.254.90.227 09:07, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
  • I'm a programmer and a computer geek. I have always a lot of question about "How to do ...".
    • Wikibooks is becoming a useful repository of that sort of how to question. It probably needs more focus to be gained from the programming community (amongst others) and probably could do with an outreach campaign all of its own... Sjc 09:11, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Does Wikipedia have delusions of grandeur?
    • Wikipedia has no sense of self, being a virtual construct. Therefore your question does not compute... Sjc 11:45, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
    • There is limited group leadership of Wikipedia, there has to be. It is no more virtual than the government of the Peoples Republic of Korea, and that sure has delusions of Grandeur. So the question remains a valid question, to that extent at least.Richardb 03:02, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
    • True, my initial response was somewhat facetious. On reflection I think, though that WP tends to be more self-deprecating, hedged round with ifs, buts and maybes than delusionally grandiose. I don't think we make anywhere any claims to be authoratitive, and our very tentativity in this respect is a rather cuddly and reassuring feature of WP. Sjc 11:37, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
  • How do you implement suggestions for new Wikimedia? Such as: Suggest the creation of a new Wikimedia publication containing Algorithms. This should be a comprehensive compendium containing data and documented process or processes following pre-defined template(s). We should accept it as a given that an algorithm is a step-wise list documenting a problem solution. This would be the "go to" document for people looking for known solutions to problems. An example of the use for this document could be:
    • how does one determine by calculation if the current year is a leap year? Or another -
    • how can I calculate the phase of the moon? Or
    • at the annual rate of 10%, in how many years will my savings double? Or
    • if my speed is 620kps how do I calculate at what point in my trajectory do I fire my retro thrusters to achieve non-decaying orbit of target body?

etc.

  • What are the main reasons that some language communities edit the English language projects (e.g. en Wikipedia) rather than contributing content to the local language projects? Is this a problem if we want to make all human knowledge accessible to everyone? If so, how do we fix it? -- ArielGlenn 03:21, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
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