Hard email to read, but Galder's are quite of indisputable thoughts and the
harsh reality of Wikimedia's technological state of the art.
Yet this incontestability is, at the same time, the very profound problem: the
WMF will not refute it, nor structurally change it, besides silences and
inspiring words in progress and strategic reports. Such a change requires
millions of dollars that the projects are actually able to annually fundraise
for the institution, but that the institution prioritizes to maintain its own
(questionable) corporative structure and not the digital one of the projects.
Hopefully someone else prove us wrong with data, factual progress and optimism.
Xavier Dengra
El dimarts, 23 de gener 2024 a les 12:02, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
<[email protected]> va escriure:
> Dear wikimedians,
> Nearly one year ago, the Graphs extension was disabled from all wikis,
> because there was a security issue that should be solved
> (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334940). A wide team from the WMF worked
> on a solution for some weeks, but after Northern Hemisphere spring ended,
> summer came, then the monsoon season, and now it is again summer in the
> Southern Hemisphere... and Graphs are still disabled. All the solutions
> proposed have been dismissed, but every two months there's a proposal to make
> a new roadmap to solve the issue. We have plenty of roadmaps, but no vehicle
> to reach our destination.
>
> Seven years ago, we were discussing our Strategy for 2030. We used thousands
> of volunteer hours, thousands of staff hours and millions of dollars to build
> a really well-balanced strategy. There we concluded that "By 2030, Wikimedia
> will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge".
> We also made some recommendations to improve the User Experience
> (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Improve_User_Experience)
> and claimed that we wanted to Innovate in Free Knowledge
> (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Recommendations/Innovate_in_Free_Knowledge).
> Well, the situation is now worse than it was seven years ago, let me give
> some examples:
>
> - Graph extension is used in thousands of pages, some of them highly
> relevant, as COVID or Climate Change information. There are thousands of
> graphs broken now, and the only partial solution give is loading these graphs
> as images, instead of promoting an interactive solution.
> - Meanwhile, a place like Our World in Data has been publishing data and
> interactive content with a compatible license for years. (Remember, "By 2030,
> Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free
> knowledge"). Trying to add this data and graphs to Wikimedia projects has
> been done by WikiMed, and it is technically possible, but still blocked to
> deploy (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T303853).
> - Wolfram Alpha is like a light year ahead us on giving interactive
> solutions to knowledge questions, even the silliest ones
> (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=how+many+oranges+fit+in+the+Earth%3F).
> We have good technical articles about a lot of things, but sometimes
> "becoming the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge"
> needs to provide solutions to exact problems, like the answer to an equation,
> and how to solve it. That's also "free knowledge".
> - Brilliant (https://brilliant.org/) is brilliant if you want to learn lots
> of things, like geometry or programming. Way better than Wikipedia. But...
> you need to pay for it. How could we even try if we can't add anything
> interactive to our platforms?
> - We can build interactive timelines using Wikidata, but we can't embed them
> at Wikipedia. Weird, because I can do it in any external page.
> Hopefully,[Histropedia will do it better.
> http://histropedia.com/](http://histropedia.com/)
> - We could have something very special: inline links in video and audio
> subtitles. We used to have them, but the new video infrastructure doesn't
> allow it. Imagine a world where you can watch a video and link a link in the
> subtitles just to know more about that.
> - ...
>
> The list can go on an on ("which phase the moon is today?"), but I think that
> the idea is clear. We could have interactive content, but we are going in the
> opposite direction, and every year we are further from our goal, because
> other platforms are doing it better, way better. And this seems like some
> wild ideas, but then I read the 2023-2024 annual plan section called "Wiki
> Experiences"
> (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Goals/Infrastructure#Bucket:_Wiki_Experiences)
> and it looks like we should be going there. But we aren't.
>
> I'm sorry if this e-mail feels bitter. My experience in the last years is
> that we are now further of what we need that we were before, even if many
> chapters and volunteers are trying to overturn it.
>
> Thank to everyone who have been trying.
>
> Galder_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/5T35IITCRQBIYLLJG56UCLO6XDXPOCWS/
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
