Task force/Strategy/What we agree on

China

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about China. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

1. Promote the Wikimedia movement and involve the public at large
   1. Re-invigorate the community (using meetups and a group blog, which can be found at http://www.bloki.org )
      1. Before 2006, Wikimedians in many cities of China often held meet-ups. But after the government blocked Wikipedia, these meetings were not organized any more. We need to re-invigorate the community both online and offline.
   2. Increase public relations activities
      1. Hold annual conferences for Chinese Wikimedia in Mainland China
      2. Increase media coverage on Wikipedia via news, interviews, reviews, etc
      3. Wikipedians reach out and give talks in universities and IT/education-related conferences/gatherings
      4. Form partnership with popular websites in China
   3. Improve the SEO result in Google.cn and Baidu.com
2. Lift the obstacles for participation
   1. Help students and teachers in universities to access Wikipedia
      1. Chinese universities and academic institutions use the CERNET (wikipedia:China Education and Research Network) to connect to Internet and have limited data allowance for international traffic. Setting up a mirror inside China for Wikipedia would be a solution but it must deal with the censorship problem.
   2. Improve usability of the user interface, especially on the editing interface
   3. Improve the mobile version of Wikimedia
   4. Be more friendly to newcomers; encourage and help them participating
   5. Maintain and expand the link with the Chinese government for better communication and mutual understanding
3. Improve content quality and expand coverage on local topics
   1. Using the high-quality content from English Wikipedia and other languages is an opportunity.
   2. Expand coverage on topics more relevant to Chinese users, such as Chinese people, Chinese culture, Chinese geographic, etc
      1. Lots of works in public domain may be used to expand the coverage in a systematic way
      2. Project to enhance geographic entries with semantic format support
4. Build online and offline partnerships
   1. Build partnerships with relevant websites and online communities
      1. For example: Songshu Hui(松鼠会, http://songshuhui.net/), OOPS (http://www.myOOPS.org), TEDtoChina (http://www.tedtochina.com/), etc.
   2. Build partnerships offline with groups such as teachers
   3. Supporting facts:
      1. Hudong partners with teachers from primary and secondary schools
      2. Hudong partners with websites of various museums

# A project focused on reviewing the social and other tools that Hudong and Baidu provide (in addition to their outreach efforts mentioned above), and assessing which ones should be tried out on Wikipedia

Advocacy

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about advocacy. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here. There's some disagreement about whether the WMF should pursue an advocacy agenda at all.

1. Need to Be Prudently Cautious with Wikimedia Foundation Advocacy In General.
2. Proposed Wikimedia Foundation Advocacy Position: For Net Neutrality
3. The Voice of Wikimedia
4. If Wikimedia chooses to engage in advocacy, we should take on issues that are critical to our long-term growth, since this is where we will have the most passion, insight, and leverage.
5. Pursuing environmental strategies and tactics
6. Advocacy against extension of copyright and in favour of a strong public domain.

Community Health

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about community health. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

1. Volunteer recognition
   1. "Working on Wikipedia is hard, and it does not offer many rewards. Editors have intrinsic motivation not extrinsic, but even so, not much is done to affirm or thank or recognize them." - Sue Gardner, Executive Director, WMF.
   2. Successful Charities/Nonprofits Take Volunteer Recognition Seriously
      1. The strategy should be supported by several assertions that explain why you believe the strategy will work. The assertions are broad statements that lay out the key points that support your strategy.
      2. "Give recognition to the person, not (just) the work"
         1. Volunteering should give you something to put on your resume/CV
         2. Many Volunteers Want Certificates of Recognition
         3. Volunteers v editors: If we think of contributors as "volunteers" it immediately suggests a more than subtle shift in approach; there are many ways to help the WMF.
      3. Appendix A: Jayne Cravens' recommendations for Wikimedia
      4. Appendix B: Current awards, rewards and recognition
   3. Problems of implementation
      1. Extend the recognition initiatives only to projects that have a certain number of regular contributors or have surpassed a certain milestone (articles for Wikipedias, 'good' books for Wikibooks etc).
      2. Make substantial use of the volunteer community. Due to the potentially large number of languages involved it is likely that even a dedicated 'Volunteer Recognition' hire for the WMF would need substantial input from the project's community when making any sort of gesture.
2. Improve consensus-building processes
   1. More effective decision-making and dispute resolution processes can resolve conflicts over conduct, content, and policy.
   2. Implementation
      1. Create a "binding mediation" process as a "last resort" for content-related disputes
      2. Create "representative consensus-building" processes, to manage the scale of disputes with too many parties
      3. Encourage consensus-building by taking power away from filibusters and "spoilers"
   3. The community is experiencing increased conflict, which is causing the community to stagnate
      1. There is increasing conflict in the community
      2. Conflict prevents a consensus from forming on issues, resulting in community stagnation
   4. Barriers to consensus-building can be reduced by improving our decision-making processes
      1. Wikimedia projects need a binding "last step dispute resolution" for disputes about content (and content policy)
      2. multi-party negotiations are more effective on a smaller scale, but the few negotiators must still represent all stakeholders
      3. The current consensus-building process includes disincentives to negotiate, which must be corrected or rebalanced
3. Demarcate and strengthen volunteer roles
   1. Make it easier to recognize editors who have a reputation of helping the project, and make it easier to recognize new volunteers in need of help.
   2. Implementation
      1. Create a "senior editor" role for volunteers who have a record of good judgment, reasonableness, understanding of policy, and constructive behavior.
      2. Protect new users by demarcating them, and help them find assistance from experienced editors (such as mentors, administrators, and "senior editors")
   3. The community is experiencing increased conflict, which is causing volunteers to leave
      1. There is increasing conflict in the community
      2. Volunteers are leaving
   4. Community roles should be strengthened, while striving to maintain openness
      1. Roles can have stronger recognition without stronger authority
      2. Wikimedia is committed to openness, but gives special status to users where practical and necessary
      3. When volunteers recognize each others' reputations, collaboration improves
   5. In addition to administrative roles, Wikimedia should formally recognize mentors and "senior editors"
      1. Writing a featured article demonstrates an understanding of content and collaboration, and is difficult to "game"
      2. many reputable editors are not being formally recognized for their contributions
      3. encouraging editors to write featured articles will benefit community health (and incidentally contribute to quality)
      4. New users would benefit if experienced "senior editors" were clearly demarcated
   6. New users and helpful volunteers need to be able to recognize each other
      1. there is a powerful cultural norm on Wikipedia that can be navigated with experience
      2. New users would benefit if they could distinguish average editors from administrators, mentors, and "senior editors"
      3. New users are sometimes treated roughly, partially because it is not obvious to others that they are new
4. Tools for community health
   1. Better tools can support experienced editors, and reduce the learning curve for new users.
   2. Implementation
      1. Create "What You See Is What You Get" editing interface
      2. Make research easier to do
      3. Improve support and feedback by facilitating requests and responses
      4. Simplify and facilitate discussion
      5. Make It Easier to Monitor and Maintain Changes
   3. better tools can support both new and experienced editors
      1. experienced editors are experiencing burnout
      2. new volunteers take a significant time to integrate with a project
      3. there are barriers to contribution that can be reduced
   4. Tools should simplify editing, research, discussion, and maintenance
      1. "What You See Is What You Get" should be standard for most editing
      2. Tools should simplify research, reducing the learning curve for new editors, and providing support to experienced editors
      3. Tools should improve how Wikipedians request and respond to requests for help and discussion
      4. Sub assertion: Tools should simplify and encourage discussion
5. Social networking features
   1. Add social networking features.
   2. Social networking sites are tremendously successful: Wikipedia can share in this success
   3. (There is a number of particular ideas about social networking features.)

Outlook

Volunteer recognition

• Implementation: only by communities themselves with encouragement from WMF. Does basically not need to be put on vote etc. Two tracks: bottom-up and top-down.
• Resources: some criteria needed for each project plus a small group per project; may be can be kept Wikimedia-wide, then only one group is needed and some effort to count edits etc (via toolserver?).
• Opportunities: to prevent/postpone the leave and disappointment of volunteers.
• Risks: do not see any. In the worst case, it will be a dead initiative.
• Duration: presumably the effect will be steady, for both short-term and long-term after the initial phase to establish the rules.
• Time-frame: couple of months to establish the guidelines and form the initiative groups.
• Necessity: we assume that without this strategy the volunteers would leave sooner, but they would leave anyway, with or without the strategy.

Consensus-building processes

• Implementation: community decisions with possiblle WMF encouragement.
• Resources: continuous efforts from mediators and arbitrators.
• Opportunities: to prevent/postpone the leave and disappointment of volunteers.
• Risks: can create conflicts; trolls will not like this and will try to kill the initiative.
• Duration: continuous.
• Time-frame: after the decision has been taken, a month to form the arbitration/mediation groups and adopt the policy
• Necessity: seems to be high and urgent.

Volunteer roles

• Implementation: community decisions with possiblle WMF encouragement.
• Resources: once the policy has been established, does not really take much of the resources
• Opportunities: to prevent early exit of volunteers and to increase the content quality
• Risks: can create conflicts; also can become formal, in which case makes no sense. The policy has to be adopted very carefully.
• Duration: continuous.
• Time-frame: after the decision has been taken, a month adopt the policy. Must have an immediate effect.
• Necessity: the only proposal recommended by two Task forces.

Local Languages

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about local languages projects. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

1. Outreach
   1. Videos are an excellent outreach tool that can replace the role of casual conversation and also trigger casual conversation on ideas connected to Wikimedia.
   2. Wikimedia projects cannot attract readers and contributors if the projects and their purpose are unknown
2. Stimulate creation of local content
   1. Automatically collect data from the wikimedia projects taffic logs, search engines, alexa and so on about what people in different regions want to read about. Then present the regional data easily accessible from the same regions main pages of the different wikimedia projects, in a format that is easy to read and understand.
   2. The major Wikipedias lacks content that are of interest to people in many regions.
3. Localization and internationalization of the MediaWiki software
   1. Run a campaign to get a higher number of volunteering translators to translatewiki.net.
   2. When the number of translated messages starts to plateau, put money into bounty rallies and pay-per-message solutions. (Estimated cost: $100,000 to get all messages translated with these methods alone)
   3. Finally, when neither of these solutions are sufficient to translate the remaining messages. Consider whether it is worth to hire professional translator to get the last messages translated. (Estimated cost: $1 million to get all messages translated with this method alone)
   4. The MediaWiki software could be fully localized for all languages with one millon or more native speakers for $1 million, $100,000, or cheaper.
   5. There are many languages that have character sets that differ from the latin characters.
   6. To solve character set issues it would be a good idea to cooperate with already established open source communities that try to solve the same issues for other systems.
4. Minimize the bandwidth that is required to load pages
   1. Give visitor the oportunity to turn of automatic loading of media. A highly visible button labeled "Turn off media" or even something more explaining "Does Wikipedia load slowly? Click here to turn of media and decrease loading times." could be displayed.
   2. The local projects could be hosted localy to take advantage of the higher "within country" trafic speeds. (Be sure to catch medias attention in case of such an action. If handled right, this could be an essential outreach move as well.)
   3. Local mirrors or caches can in the same way as local hosting decrease the loading times.
   4. The amount of data that on average needs to be loaded when a new article is loaded is estimated to be around 200kb, in some cases more than 1Mb of data has to be loaded.
   5. On 50kbps connections the average time it takes to load an article is estimated to be about 30 seconds.
   6. It is likely that many internet connections in the near future will be 50kbps or slower. Also "within country" speeds are significantly higher than "outside country" speeds.

Offline

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about offline distribution. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

1. Content reuse from WMF projects
   1. Provide parsed semantically annotated XML of article text.
   2. Create and maintain article xml DTD standard and documentation, plus stylesheet, per-project
   3. Write/publish a Mediawiki parser specification.
   4. A reference parser implemention should be written, and companion writer, to output HTML with media to assist other formats.
   5. Low accessibility of WMF content hinders widespread reuse
      1. In many countries, access to the Internet is limited
      2. Working with the current dumps is hard
      3. Structured data is valuable to content readers AND data re-users
      4. Matching our content to standard library systems would help
2. Use of cellphones
   1. Convince network providers and/or manufacturers to have WP content pre-installed on new cellphones
   2. Support third party developers/providers of open offline storage standards (such as OpenZim), readers which use them (such as Linterweb), and proprietary offline solutions (such as WikiPock).
   3. Encourage development of non-internet distribution systems, eg. SMS article requests.
   4. Main assertion: Cellphones provide the most cost efficient and far reaching delivery mechanism. E.i. even if it takes an investment of 30 million USD to implement this goal, this would still be no more than one cent per person.
3. Schools
   1. Work through schools. Provide the necessary data and infrastructure to organizations that aim to bring WMF content to schools.
   2. Schools need to consider national curricula, scholarly topics. We need to support targeted selection for them, including kids topics.
   3. Small, specialist article collections, like chemistry or Mathematics, would be open content for book publishers.
   4. Content should include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks and possibly WikiNews
   5. Distribution would be via USB stick or download, and as books.
   6. Schools are a natural distribution point for knowledge
      1. Schools share a common purpose with us
      2. Schools already use similar materials
      3. Content should include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks and possibly WikiNews
      4. Content should be provided in an electronic format
      5. Content should also be provided in book format
   7. We should improve and encourage content aimed at kids
4. Article selection
   1. The community is needed to flag articles for Importance and Quality.
   2. Hit statistics and other metadata are required to gauge article popularity and significance.
   3. Bots are needed to collect this information into tables.
   4. Article history, in conjunction with Flagged Revisions and WikiTrust are needed to pick unvandalised versions.
   5. An online selection tool usable by publishers and other users is needed to use the information above, categories, and other metadata to emit custom dumps, probably as XML.
   6. Such dumps will include templates and, optionally, media to be included in the final output, like HTML or OpenZIM.
   7. We need automatic tools to perform article selection
   8. We need automatic tools to perform 'best-version' selection
      1. Vandalised versions of articles are a problem
   9. Releases of offline selections will need to be carefully structured
      1. We should use a clear system of identifiers for each release and update
      2. We should offer frequent version updates

Wikipedia Quality

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about Wikipedia quality. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

• Global (Wikimedia-wide) thematic projects, projects each focused on a particular topic or field.
  
  • Feedback: Wikiprojects should be considered on a cost/benefit analysis to prevent stagnant/dead wikiprojects. What's the cost of failure?
• Senior editor status: recognition of quality editors as part of the community - a parallel track for users not interested in meta-activity and getting a sysop flag. Based on achievements in improving the content quality.
  • Feedback: Some expressed concerns that a demarcated "senior" status would lead article ownership and elitism. In addition, there were concerns that the process for determination of senior editors was not clearly laid out.
• Re-emphasize core values.
  
  • Feedback: Feedback reflected a suggestion that Wikipedia re-examine whether verifiability or truth was the standard.

Movement Roles

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about movement roles. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

1. Investing in chapter development
2. Establishing a Volunteer Council
3. Establishing a Chapters Network
4. Promoting real life events: [strategy] notices reaching the general readership in a local area
5. Enable nonmembership structures such as university departments to serve in the chapter role
6. Enable volunteers to form Regional Working Groups as a sub-Chapter status

Financial Sustainability

The synthesized recommendations and their associated feedback about financial sustainability. Their recommendation document, providing further background, can be found here.

1. Income: Wikimedia should continue to build upon the proven success of fund raising by soliciting donations of money from individuals and institutions as the primary source of revenue. Community giving has proven to be the most reliable income stream"'
2. Growth: Wikimedia should increase the resources devoted to fund raising from donations in order to generate more income.
3. Additional sources of income: Wikimedia should continue with and/or explore the following types of revenue sources - these could be pursued both so as to diversify revenue sources and to enable Wikimedia to operate at a level (if it so chooses) that could not be sustained by small donations alone.
4. Longer term stability: An endowment fund would seem to have some advantages to the longer term financial stability of the WMF. Lessening the risks of sudden and unpredicted changes in other fund raising activities.
5. Outline: Wikimedia should establish an investment committee to appropriately manage and safeguard its funds.