Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-28/News and notes

← Back to News and notes

Discuss this story

• "At the time of writing, most chapters appear to have not yet submitted an English-language activity report since the beginning of the year" - note that the table says "This table is a work in progress" above it, so isn't complete. E.g. I know that WMUK posted a report back in January, and we'll be putting out another report soon. Mike Peel (talk) 05:16, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I linked to the table for the convenience of the reader, but the "most" had been verified by a quick look through the Wikimediaannounce-l archives. The list of "exceptions" wasn't meant to be complete (there was also one report by the Estonian chapter on January 4, and one by the Czech chapter - mentioning as inspiration a posting by Erik Möller on Internal-l titled "Chapters Reporting--Sustainability"), but it seems safe to say that more than 20 of the (until last week) 30 chapters have not yet submitted an English-language activity report since the beginning of the year, and even the majority of the "exceptions" don't produce monthly reports regularly.

It would be quite unfair to single out Wikimedia UK, which as far as I am aware is generally doing a great job in getting information out (and by the way thanks for your tip about the April 2 deadline for submissions for the WikiConference UK 2011, unfortunately no one got to write this news item up for this issue). Nevertheless, since you bring the example up, it should also be noted that this January 9 announcement contained "catch-up" in its title, and that the issue of the "monthly Wikimedia UK newsletter" announced there has so far been the last one to appear. As the editor of the Signpost, I'm of course fully aware of, and sympathetic to, the struggles of keeping up a regular publication schedule over a longer period of time. And I'm in fact grateful that we have readers who will nag and complain when we have fallen behind our schedule, they help keep us on track.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

There is a simple way to get chapters to comply with reporting requirements: an annual allotment of (say) $10,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation to each chapter, conditional on meeting those reporting requirements. That would remove any problems with this being an "unfunded mandate" from above. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:41, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

• WMF Annual Report: that makes 41 occurrences of "Wikipedia". There are 3 of "Wikimedia Commons" ; "Wikibooks", Wiktionary", "Wikisource" & al can be found on the last page. Ah well. Jean-Fred (talk) 08:14, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
• Thanks for the nice write up of the Wikimedia Conference! All sessions' documentation is now linked from the schedule page, and during the week pictures will also start appearing on Commons, including the nice drawings made by the visual documenter of the meeting. (A nice fact that I like about this meeting is that for the first time, we had chapters from all six continents, and no volcano, allowing every chapter to participate.) --Dami (talk) 12:34, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Right. So, I intended initially to not insist, but I do not really see how we can seriously discuss this on Twitter. So, here is my opinion:

In my view, this is a biaised report of the past 3 days. I am not saying that this report is reporting false things (though I object on some points, see below), however, I regret that it chose to report on only one aspect of a three days long work and in the same time, cast a light which is seriously unfavorable to chapters which participates to the negative light already shed by two people.

Essentially, this report allocates 2/3 of the space on statements made by 2 people from one organization, whilst this meeting was attended by 30 organizations. It only provides opinions of these two people, essentially to criticize and questions the other organizations present at the meeting. Some of the accusations are poorly supported, with no actual data or references being provided (such as Moller outlining that chapters are increasingly questionned by communities. Where does that come from ? What is this "increasing" all about ? Any such statements on wikipedia would be either supported by facts and studies or the statement would be carefully balanced with other opinions. In this case, the statement is carefully balanced with the same opinion).

Also, it only outlines the problems related to chapters inability to handle everything perfectly and on time. This is seriously forgetting that chapters are still essentially volunteer based. Even less than a year ago, WMF was MONTHS late in providing its reports, even though it had over 50 staff members. So the criticism is easy to make but not very fair.

What about the "warning of the so-far hypothetical case that "a chapter [could] set for itself goals that were fundamentally out of alignment with the goals of the Wikimedia movement". This is a very hypothetical case to say the least, given that no chapter is declared a chapter without the chapcom having reviewed the bylaws and without the board of WMF approved them. It is so hypothetical that whilst I understand that Sue may be worried about such a situation where chapters do not respect their own bylaws, I fail to understand how such an hypothetical situation should be given more light than any of the very cool and exciting conversations we had together such as in the "accountability workshop". Also, reading that the situation where a chapter would decide to put its energy towards housing homeless people would create a "quite serious risk to the mouvement" is a bit funny to me. I fear that the case that WMF would decide to put its energy toward housing homeless people would actually create a MUCH larger risk to the mouvement. How more or less likely is that to happen ? Also, why "not providing a report in English" automatically means "not being transparent" ?

This report also interpretates quite liberally some statements made during the meeting. For example, it says The French chapter recalled difficulties with the different audiences in French and English, but found a good solution to inform the latter one: "The one place that is most read is the Signpost. So we connect with the Signpost, if we want to spread things. Since I actually said that, I know for a fact that we started publishing in the SignPost not so much to improve our relationship with the English speaking community, but actually to have somewhere an English based report of our activity that would be easily available to everyone and could be linked from other places... in particular to the WMF staff, since we discovered the WMF staff had either no idea what the French chapter was doing, or attributed the work done by the Chapter... to WMF staff or other unrelated people (uh !). As far as I know, we have not had any particular trouble with the English speaking community. I certainly said no such thing. Still, the SignPost report hints at some difficulties due to an interpretation of what I said. In short, it creates an official report on a difficulty that was not ever reported in the first place. The casual reader will now be aware of some problems between the French Chapter and the English and French community.... but without the ability to cite the problems ...
Since this is outlined in a report largely about Chapters legitimacy and accountability, this comes handy. In a few months time, when one will be looking for references where chapters have problems with the communities, one will be able to cite this report....

It looks like the entire report was crafted around this controversy related to the problems met with chapters. I am not saying there are no problems with chapters, there are problems. Obviously there are problems. I am not necessarily happy about all of it myself. But how come there is no or little mention of all the great things done by chapters in the last year ? About all the planned partnerships between chapters for the future ? And of some of the difficulties chapters met with the WMF, due to the WMF still being young, sometimes disorganized or poorly responding to chapters concerns ? Some of this was also heavily discussed in the 3 days in Berlin. Where did it go ? Why is not mentionned ? Why does this report give the feeling that there are two sides, the WMF very successful, legitimate and accountable on one hand and on the other side, the chapters, to be questionned and looked at with suspicion ? Why does it feel that only one side is represented here ? We also tried hard at the meeting to avoid seeing sides amongst ourselves. This is not helping.

Sure enough, the SignPost makes great articles and is keen on regularly reporting regularly about Chapter activities. And I love you guys. I really do. But why is it so that when I read the report about a meeting I spent 3 days attending, I feel like we, somehow, were not at the same meeting ???? Anthere (talk)

• As the title clearly said ("Berlin conference highlights relation between chapters and Foundation"), the report was not just about the Chapters meeting in itself, but also about the whole context of that yearly meeting, which includes longstanding, important problems that haven't been much reported in the Signpost so far. Granted, this article is not a comprehensive summary of all the topics that participants were working on in Berlin, but it is not intended as such - instead, in this kind of reporting we try to highlight some of the most salient aspects, those that are likely to be most interesting or important for our readers. Also, some of the sessions were about topics that we already reported about a lot in other contexts (e.g. GLAMs or the Editor Trends Study). Having said that, there may have been other aspects that might have been worth reporting too, in fact I had several others on my plate when writing (e.g. Toolserver, Education, "Volunteer management"), but only a limited amount of time.
• As far as I know, we have not had any particular trouble with the English speaking community. I certainly said no such thing. - This Signpost story didn't say that either; I don't understand this complaint. From the notes, on which this story was based: "Q (France): We tried to establish one report for all target groups. It didn't work, since the community is French and the other audience is English speaking." This Signpost story paraphrased this as "The French chapter recalled difficulties with the different audiences in French and English". It seems entirely reasonable to conclude from "tried... it didn't work" that there had been difficulties. And from the previous sentences, it was clear that these were communication difficulties, not difficulties of other kinds - also from the use of the word "audiences" (roughly: readers), which you inexplicably changed into "communities" above. If, on the other hand, the notes should have been inaccurate, I kindly request that you take your criticism to the notetakers instead.
• But how come there is no or little mention of all the great things done by chapters in the last year ? About all the planned partnerships between chapters for the future ? - Umm, maybe because we already reported on so many of them in great detail earlier (e.g. [1])? Or will again in the next issue? Strangely, no one was complaining about leaving out movement roles problems when doing so.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:49, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not going to write as much as Anthere did, I promise, but I agree with the thrust of her argument. There was a lot of cool stuff discussed at the meeting. Lots of big ideas, lots of very ambitious ideas. You wouldn't know it from this article though, which concentrates very much on a single topic that was only discussed at a couple of sessions. Yes, it's an important topic, but if this were an article here I'd be screaming WP:UNDUE! Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 12:50, 3 April 2011 (UTC).

I don't always agree with what Erik says (I'm more frequently in agreement with Sue); but his comments make sense to me. And the accountability issue matters. Charles Matthews (talk) 18:29, 4 April 2011 (UTC)