User talk:LilaTretikov (WMF)

If you watched the last metric meeting you saw me talk about the synthesis of strategy research we have done over the last nine months. The team recommended and I agreed with them that we would benefit from a more collaborative approach to building out the strategic goals. An internal team of volunteers took over preparing to do this work publicly on-wiki.

As we think about setting new goals we need to establish a new baseline (vs. previous strategy). Before we start, it would be helpful to hear what in the past process worked for you and what you found frustrating. What did you think of the goals? Anything else you'd like to share to inform and improve our upcoming consultation? LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 07:50, 18 November 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Lila, thanks for asking.[1] Let me ask a question too. Which knowledge does the staff of WMF have what motivates the international Community of individual volunteers (iCIV) to contribute? Is there a diversity of contributors that picked up the idea of a „Free" Encyclopia to reach out for even more freedom? Wikipedia is very successful promoting „free" (by the means of freedom) but new and old editors experience something different.

Wikipedia shall be an organization of freedom by structural cooperation and support (structural could be a Charter of United WikiMedia-Movement (CUWMM) within the next decade).

What is wrong? Wikipedia and WMF is too techno and not anthro enough. Every contributor has a right to persue happiness and to be supported by the staff of WMF and the members of iCIV. WMF is a role model of the future for my motivation as an editor. Lila, go „anthro" by advanced structures of cooperation – otherwise the wikipedia-idea will get even more Meidung (engl. shunning)!

Lila, make me happy - please. I am one of a million Wikipedians and even much more in future to come. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:04, 3 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Please report about WMF's structured Editor-Relation-Management (Customer Relation Management / CRM) that has been suggested one year ago. (comp. Human to human) --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:17, 3 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Getting older – being more free! I try not to be a second-order freerider (dtsch. Trittbrettfahrer zweiter Ordnung) being under the influence of demography and its OINCs (Old Industrial Nations and Cities (and their establishes organizations) – so far. My advice: Be bold, Lila! --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:44, 3 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Wikipedia (anthro + techno) shall be Lattice-Wikipedia of cooperation and the Leitende Grundsätze der Wikimedia-Stiftung (WMF) (english: Wikimedia Foundation Guiding Principles) shall get a new design. This could be my future motivation and WMF has to pay its costs for cooperation. --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:16, 3 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Wikipedia goes anthro.

Step 1: WMM promotes real vis-à-vis meetings at the village pump – topic orientated.

Step 2: WMM developes anthro-based online-cooperation appling the methode of Community Organizing with empowerment of groups at the village pump. --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:23, 4 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Lila, is techno the Shield of Homo Clausus as a Monad avoiding anthro ? Techno cannot substitute real anthro. Techno is a free-ride but not a ride towards freedom with a Free Eycyclopedia. Cooperation can be supported by techno but has to be based on anthro. What is the ammount in US$ WMF has spent its bugdet in anthro? --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:51, 6 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

anthro is tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight, the designated ceo ́s of WMF have to transpond to iCIV. WMF shall be a real supporter of WMM, the global movement of free volunteers. After my lesson of how to forgive I have got, here is my offer of how to make love by structured cooperation (Anthro-Wikipedia). This is realy something new. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:10, 6 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Lila, losing editors is a disaster. Could you and your staff read Patrick Hudson ́s paper, please? For Wikipedia as a major global it might be useful to keep up with the developement of major multi-nationals: bottom-up ‘pull’ rather than top-down ‘push’. Please have a summary written as a "struggle to overcome the [negatives of the] past" commenting on superprotect. "Managers have to learn to disperse their control." --Edward Steintain (talk) 17:35, 16 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Patrick Hudson: Implementing a safety culture in a major multi-national. In: Safety Science. 45, Nr. 6, July 2007, S. 697–722, doi:10.1016/j.ssci.200704005. (PDF 832 kB, read online)

I remember 2015年1月10日 04:25:04 +0100 (CET): „I just wanted to let you know that I received your emails and will get back to you as soon as I can review them." WMF, are you ok? --Edward Steintain (talk) 22:57, 17 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Could WMF please explain its strategy of everyone can contribute to Collaborative Strategy: „Damit kann ja jedeR ankommen!" (engl. So that each can indeed contribute! – bottom-up ‘kick’) --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:27, 18 December 2015 (UTC) – Lila, please explain your concept as a global of bottom-up ‘pull’.Reply

If a character written to stop superprotect is worth 0.01 Cent and its motivation to contribute to the Wiki-idea would only be half of it (0.005 Cent) how many millions free-riding WMF has burnt (money and editors) – to recover only after a very long time? - if going on like this. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:12, 16 December 2015 (UTC) Lila, spend money on the developement of structured (internet-based) cooperation. I recommend 300 k€ for the German chapter.Reply

Lila, you and WMF are excused. Contributors to Superprotect did not set a Nomark (dtsch Neinzeichen). Otherwise it would have been made easy on you and WMF to be alert: WMF has a problem of motivation. Lila, you and WMF as alphas are forgiven by a minor omega piper (as done before) who wants to grow up to be a real Wikipedian whistleblower. Love, --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:34, 16 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Stop WMF's Kraut-management. iCIV is the global crowd.

Happy Thanksgiving, Lila.

A couple of videos which are appropriate for the occasion and which I hope you enjoy (you may have seen them already):

• Wikipedia, an introduction - Erasmus Prize 2015
• English Wikipedia 5 million articles milestone video

Have a good holiday, --Pine ^✉ 19:38, 26 November 2015 (UTC) Reply

Thank you, Pine. These are wonderful and are good as repeat views as well. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 28 November 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Lila, there have been a lot of WMF surveys and consultations (in both the technical and social domains) in the past couple of months. Another one launched today for IEG, and an additional survey is coming for Wikimania. Much as I appreciate WMF consulting the community, I am concerned about the sheer number of surveys leading to survey fatigue. Can WMF work on consolidating surveys, targeting surveys using sampling, calendaring surveys to have fewer of them within narrow time ranges, and/or using other tools like talk pages and Phabricator tasks instead of surveys? Thanks, --Pine ^✉ 00:03, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Pine thanks for the suggestion, I will discuss with my team. I believe the surveys are meant to be targeted and small (that is why there are a lot of them vs. a few long ones). Surveys are really effective for prioritizing work, much more definitive than talk pages, make it easier to reach non-English communities and usually less time consuming for the volunteers. Just want to explain the the reasoning behind them.LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Thank you. I understand that there are tradeoffs involved. For some of us on mailing lists, we get lots of survey requests, while I wonder if some of us who subscribe to few or no mailing lists are missing out on surveys. I think that use of sampling and targeting techniques might be helpful. Have a nice weekend, --Pine ^✉ 01:26, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Mailing lists are inside jobs, they don't reach normal editors. Meta here is just a wee bit better, for real input you have to leave these in-groups and go to the places, where the action is happening, the projects. A survey without a message in at least the top 20 projects in the right language and the right place(s) there is no real survey. Perhaps even make them there, so that the users don't have to leave their home environment. Shouldn't be that problem now, you have grown that huge and have enormous amounts of money to use for such worthy purposes. This should nearly always be bottom->up projects, top-down should be the tiny exception. This is after all a community project, nit a centralized one. The central entity is just for the convenience of the communities, it's their servant. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(Reden) 09:40, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Sänger ♫ - thanks for bringing up these issues - I've grouped them in my answers below:

* Using mailing lists for surveys: As one best practice that I'm trying to promote as survey specialist, is the use of sending out surveys to a random sample of talk pages, rather than always relying on banners or mailing lists. This is not the only or the best solution in all cases, but its a great one that has been working. As with any project, how you reach your users depends heavily on what the goal is. For example, if your goal is to learn how much people are learning from a mailing list, then a mailing list would be the place to post a survey!

* Surveys & projects (& languages): Not all surveys should be done across many languages; some surveys must align to specific goals. I agree with you - as a global organization we should be much better at getting things into many languages as possible. However, as an organization, we are learning to get better at translating. It's quite the process to translate and get a survey together in the right form. One example of a survey that was done across many languages and using talk page messages in the recent community tech satisfaction poll. Another is the recent Research:Harassment_survey_2015

<squeeze> As long as you don't use the highly selective meta, and only use enWP in less then half of the cases, just because English is such a convenient language for you, it's fine. But if you do too many of these surveys in meta or the lazy solution enWP, you got no corre3ct input. You should at least use all of the biggest projects (big in number of editors, not bot-generated articles). Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(Reden) 05:35, 8 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

* Decentralized/bottom-up: I am here to support surveys in the community, based on what your needs and your goals. You can visit the Survey Support Desk to find resources to help you plan out your next survey. While its still a bit a skeleton, I'm working with teams across the foundation to share how the do a survey the right way on the projects. Of course, you are free to reach out to me on my talk page if you'd like to do a survey, or if you have other questions survey-related. Thanks so much! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Pine: I wonder if some of us who subscribe to few or no mailing lists are missing out on surveys - What surveys?? Alsee (talk) 14:40, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

• Alsee thank you for further demonstrating my point about sampling and targeting. Some of us get loads of surveys while others get few, or perhaps in your case, none. --Pine ^✉ 18:22, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Pine - curious to know what you mean by "loads of surveys"? How many have you received? Also, I'm hearing you say that its not just about surveys, but consultations and other requests as well. Do they all come from the WMF? About how many come from other places? In my role, I'm loosely thinking about how to best coordinate events like this across the movement. Its a very difficult thing to do, but still curious about ideas you might have. Feel free to talk more about survey on my talk page. Thanks! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

• @EGalvez (WMF): 100% are from WMF. I am loosely including "consultations" in scope when I say surveys. In principle I appreciate that WMF is consulting the community about lots of different subjects; in practice the methodology could use some further tinkering. Thanks for working on this, --Pine ^✉ 22:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

These are important points Sänger ♫ and Alsee -- I will take this back to our team. I understand the problem: if the target group is already pre-filtered based on the channel this can make the survey data biased. We are trying to do a lot of learning right now to make sure we focus on most important projects; the teams have the right intent for improvement. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 5 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

I just received a survey banner on mediawiki. The survey was irrelevant to me, but at least now I have a clue what's going on. Suggestion: Banner text for surveys aimed at a special group should perhaps begin with "who" rather than "what". That is a much easier way to determine relevance. Alsee (talk) 17:00, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Alsee - what made you think the survey was not for you? Typically banner surveys want to have the most people take them as possible. I am thinking that your idea about clearly stating who should open the survey may help to show this better in the future. If you want to talk more about surveys, happy to discuss on my talk page --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

EGalvez (WMF) the survey was for 3rd party re-users of Wikipedia content. I looked over the questions, there weren't any that I could remotely give any sort of answer. Alsee (talk) 04:22, 11 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Probably this one: Survey: Understanding third-party use of Wikipedia content. It's not on the Calendar of Consultations & Surveys by EGalvez (WMF). Also it is hosted on docs.google.com, which i think is bad. My experience see T111403 Set up Google Form to collect user feedback on Wikidata Query Service:

• "There is some community push for not using google forms."

(indeed, @wikidata "google? You can't be serious?! Why did WMF investigate user feedback surveys/Community input channels this year - so you can completely ignore this effort and use a data-hoarding google service?! Unusable tinyurl and google-forms??")

• "Google Forms require minimal maintenance/overhead for us whilst also making the feedback loop easier for non-Wikimedians, so they're the best option right now. If Wikimedians don't want to use the Google Form for whatever reason, that's absolutely fine. They can email the Discovery list, or me directly."
• "Yeah it is not a deal-breaker from my side. Just be aware that this might give you push-back."
• "Thanks for letting me know. :-)
• "This was done using a wiki page in the end, for legal reasons."

So, never mind community push-back, the minimal maintenance for devs is what counts, they decide. Let them eat cake! Unless "legal reasons" intervene... --Atlasowa (talk) 00:26, 13 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Google? WMF is using Google? The data mining, privacy ignoring, company decent people avoid as much as possible? While there is the whole wikiverse to use and no need exists to go to such unreliable enterprises? If you really go to google, you definitely are not serious. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(Reden) 11:05, 13 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Thanks so much for calling this to my attention Atlasowa and Sänger ♫. I'm checking with the staff member running the mediawiki survey so they can add it to the survey calendar. We do use google from time to time. The foundation does not have reliable open-source survey software that we can use (we tried using Limesurvey a while back but there were severe security issues). Surveys are also very tricky to create, and other companies are experts at surveys which really helps in the quality of the results (like qualtrics, which we also use). Google works well for shorter surveys, but its not the best. We do try to avoid it where possible. We also make sure these services are vetted by the legal department, and all surveys go through legal review at the foundation. Surveys are an essential tool to help gather input from users and we just don't have good wiki tools at the moment. Thanks for the interest on this topic! feel free to ask anything else on my talk page.--EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 23:19, 16 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Lila, I've been thinking for awhile about a paradox. I hear from WMF staff with some frequency that individually they feel buried in work, yet at the same time WMF's staff growth has far outpaced the (negative) growth in contributors since 2007. Trying to unpack this further, I'm wondering if there is low-value-added and no-value-added work that WMF is doing that could be cut so that resources could be refocused on places where WMF is well positioned to add value. I'm sure that you're familiar with Lean thinking, which I am thinking is compatible with your interest in using surveys and other tools to focus WMF's work. It's also compatible with your background in design thinking, and the Evaluation team's interest in learning patterns.

Awhile back, Sue Gardner had an initiative that she called "Narrowing focus". While I'm skeptical that the initiative did much good at the time, I think that a combination of the tools that I mention that I mention above could yield some benefits in the here and now. Hopefully this would reduce the low-value-added work while increasing impact, ideally at zero net cost. I'm wondering if the Team Practices group would have the ability to seed Lean throughout WMF, such that instead of the top-down approach that's so common, there can be some ground-up improvements.

The downside of this approach is that there is some up-front cost. Getting leaders trained in Lean has cost. Investing in rethinking and redesigning processes has cost. Staff need to feel that they can step away from doing urgent tasks so that they can do the training and the redesign work. First-level supervisors need to feel that they can let subordinates speak up without threatening the authority of the supervisors or making the supervisors look bad in front of 2nd-level supervisors. Lean takes some up-front cost and some courage.

I'm wondering if you would be interested in taking an incremental approach, piloting Lean in a couple of teams and getting a few leaders trained (perhaps in combination with use of surveys and other tools to help them to focus their goals), see if the system works for those teams, and then consider making a larger investment with the long-term goal of zero net cost while improving impact (and, hopefully, employee morale).

Of the goals, improving impact is the most important of the group. If there is some incremental cost that yields high ROI, then the investment may well be worth doing. However, WMF's budget should be *far* more transparent than it is, so before increasing WMF's top-line spending I would also like to see major improvements in budget transparency. Reprioritizations and narrowing focus, small-scale pilot implementations of Lean, and large-scale improvements in budget transparency can happen in parallel. If the pilots are successful and after the budget is far more transparent, larger-scale rollouts of Lean that may include some incremental topline costs can be considered. Hopefully, with these changes, WMF and the community will both become healthier in the long run.

Comments? --Pine ^✉ 18:03, 6 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hi Pine, if you caught last metrics meeting you may have heard me say that we need to focus our efforts better. While we have a lot of opportunities and possibilities, and while the WMF grew significantly, we are still a small organization for the size of our reader and editor community. I'd like to see more focus in both of our strategic and annual plan this coming year. That said, we will always drive to continually increase the impact of our work.

With respect to training our teams on Lean method, this is something we need to discuss internally. Our staff brought up the importance of management training and a big part of it is learning to manage priorities effectively. So it is possible that some aspect may figure into those programs. And as we anything new, a "pilot" approach would be an appropriate way to start. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 6 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

OK, thank you. I just came across this article and think that it might be of interest, both in terms of how the Wikipedia community works and in terms of blue-sky thinking about WMF. --Pine ^✉ 21:45, 7 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Privet Lila! I just wanted to make sure you saw this: Russian Wikipedia Suspends Editor Who Cut Deal With Authorities, Russian media watchdog bans four Wikipedia articles on drugs. Does the WMF have any kind of opinion about this government interference? Thank you. Wikimandia (talk) 03:07, 9 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

Hello, @Wikimandia:. Thanks for the question. I asked WMF legal, and the WMF opinion is this:

Given the communities’ rigorous editorial review, any outside interference (including from governments) is unhelpful for sharing free knowledge. The Wikimedia projects are neutral platforms where you should be able to speak and share freely. We understand that the Russian Wikipedia community is facing a tremendous challenge, but we trust that the community will be able to find the best path based on the policies set by the Russian Wikipedia community.

Best, Patrick Earley (WMF) (talk) 22:26, 14 December 2015 (UTC) Reply

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