Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Community view

Battle for the soul of the WMF: Liam Wyatt shares his thoughts in "community view"

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This week is Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, the first draft of the long awaited strategic plan of the Wikimedia Foundation will be published for comment, and last week was its annual All Hands employee meeting. Meanwhile, there is a battle going on at the top for its soul.

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Knowledge Engine

It is my supposition that this is not a list of unrelated incidents, but that this is part of a wider theme: That a portion of the Board of Trustees and the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation believe that it should be treated as a technology organisation in the style of a dot-com company, out of step with the staff and without the awareness of the community. By contrast, it’s always been my belief that the Wikimedia Foundation is an education charity that happens to exist primarily in a technology field. Of course software engineering is crucial to the work we do and should represent the major proportion of staff and budget, but that is the means, not the end.

All this background makes the draft Strategic Plan a very important document. For the 2010-15 plan there was a massive community consultation project, but this time around there was only a 2-question survey. As Philippe Beaudette (Philippe), the Community Facilitator on that original strategy process and later the WMF Director of Community Advocacy (who also recently left the organisation), said to me [with permission to publish here]:

The November staff presentation gives a strategy preview that speaks of three priorities (slides 28-30): “1. Engage more people globally (reach) 2. Facilitate communities at-scale (community) 3. Include broader content (knowledge)”; and describes a need to “prioritise core work” (slides 32-33). All laudable goals, but they only include “example objectives” such as “build capacity”, “improve trust”, and “improve tools”.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the major strategic direction has already been privately determined. In short, it appears there will be an attempt to create the internet's Next Big Thing™ at the expense of improving the great thing that we already have.

The "knowledge engine" which is the source of much debate over transparency and the direction of the WMF.

While I agree with the general premise that the search system on the Wikimedia projects can be improved, I don’t know anyone who thinks "an indexed & structured cache" of "Federated Open Data Sources" should be the strategic priority. Starting something entirely new like Federated Searchishard and trying to include external sources (that link also suggests trying to also integrate the US Census, and the Digital Public Library of America) is even harder, especially when there are so many existing technical needs. Quoting Philippe again: "for instance, fixing the inter-relationships between languages and projects, or creating a new admin toolset for mobile, or paying down our technical debt, or establishing a care/command/control operation for critical tools to ensure their sustainability, etc...."

The Funds Dissemination Committee (on which I sit as a community-elected member) declared in November that it is『…appalled by the closed way that the WMF has undertaken both strategic and annual planning, and the WMF's approach to budget transparency (or lack thereof).』In response, the WMF is considering submitting its 2016-17 annual plan, based on the aforementioned strategic plan, to a "process on-par with the standards of transparency and planning detail required of affiliates going through the Annual Plan Grant (APG) process".

We will see over the next weeks to what degree the apparent shift towards a Silicon Valley mindset – whether the staff and community like it or not – is indeed true. As the then-Chair of the Board Jan-Bart de Vreede said in describing Lila Tretikov’s appointment as Executive Director:

Slides presenting the three-year roadmap of the WMF Discovery department.

Meanwhile, you might be interested in the roadmap for the Discovery department or for the more technically minded there is the "Discovery" workboard on Phabricator and associated mailing-list. Finally, for what it's worth, the term "knowledge engine" itself is now deprecated.

This article was originally posted on the author's blog and is reprinted with his permission.

In this issue

13 January 2016 (all comments)

In the media

Community view

I don't want to become a part of a knowledge engine. I want to be a member of a community that makes and shares educational resources.

Wikipedia's search engine isn't very good and should be improved. But building a new project to collect information even less structured than Wikidata is far from our needs and wishes.

I agree that the board should have several members from educational backgrounds. Technology is a tool, the strategic goals are educational. --NaBUru38 (talk) 15:41, 17 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Discovery is actually devoting the lion's share of its resources trying to improve the existing search, and that's reflected in Discovery's quarterly goals. An example of our work towards this is the completion suggester beta feature, which we recently rolled out, which improves the search algorithm used for the type-ahead search. We're also trying to improve search for multi-lingual users with language detection. It's an incredibly common misconception that the "knowledge engine" represents some new and significantly different direction which does not involve significantly improving our core search, and that's why we've now stopped using the term. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 19:08, 18 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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