User talk:LilaTretikov (WMF)

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Copied to Lila Tretikov's Departing Address

Dear fellow Wikimedians,

It is with great respect that I have tendered, and the board has accepted, my resignation as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this week. I am both inspired by, and proud of, the many great things we have all accomplished at the Foundation over the last two years, most significantly reversing the loss of our editorial community. I would like to thank our Board of Trustees and Advisors, our Foundation staff, as well as the many outstanding community members for their support and encouragement on this journey. I remain passionate about the value and potential of open knowledge and Wikimedia to change the world. My last day at the Foundation will be March 31, 2016.

Wikimedia occupies a special place in the world. It is a cultural and technological revolution. Change is necessary to keep it thriving. In bringing me in as the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation the Board tasked me with making changes to serve the next generation and ensure our impact in the future. Driving these changes has been challenging, and I have always appreciated the open and honest discourse we have had along the way. However, I am moved by the accomplishments we have achieved during this time:

• Strategically, we laid out our summary of the vision for united in knowledge and future of Wikimedia last June.
• Operationally, we have reformed our procedures and initiated key performance metrics and reviews.
• Technologically we have introduced innovative approaches such as machine learning and mobile applications, started improvements in search, grew translations and dramatically improved website performance. In 2015, we made visual editor the default for all new users on English Wikipedia.
• We united our community support departments and created a new community tech team to address community needs.
• Profoundly, for the first time in seven years, highly active editor numbers have increased and overall editor decline has stopped.
• Equitably, I am proud of our efforts to address the gender gap, our growing focus on site safety and anti-harassment initiatives and child protection -- I believe these are essential to protecting the fundamental principles of tolerance, open discourse and mutual respect -- our greatest strengths.
• We fought against censorship and surveillance, which pose severe existential threats to our mission of free knowledge.
• Financially, we grew rapidly in 2014-15 to seed and launch the Wikimedia Endowment and secure our future for years to come.

I move on with confidence that the Foundation can meet new challenges in a challenging environment. I believe in our ability to continue to lead through this change. At this critical juncture for the Foundation, and for the free and open knowledge movement as a whole, solidarity, creativity, adaptability and passion will continue to propel our movement forward, and empower our vision towards our future.

I will support the process of identifying our new leadership in every way that I can, and offer my assistance to the Board as they conduct their search for my successor. It has been an honor to serve and to contribute to our great movement.

With warm regards,

Lila

I trust I am far from the only person to wish you Godspeed ("счастливого пути" if Google does not fail me) after all the strange machinations and muck-throwing done the past few months. The dichotomy between the legitimate requirements of the foundation and the interesting views of the editors on Wikipedia made for very strange discussions at best, and, in my meager opinion, unwarranted personal attacks in too many instances. Again - best wishes on leaving the fray, which will doubtless continue for some time to come. Collect (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

• Best wishes on your future endeavors. There is life beyond the WMF.:-) Reguyla (talk) 20:53, 25 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Copied to Lila Tretikov's statement on Why we've changed

I want to address some of the many questions that are coming up in this forum. From the general to the very concrete, they all touch on the fact that many things about the WMF have been changing. We are in the thick of transformation, and you all have the right to know more about how and why this is occurring. This is not a statement of strategy, which will come out of the community consultation next week. This is the ED’s perspective.

After 15 years since the birth of Wikipedia, the WMF needs to rethink itself to ensure our editor work expands into the next decade. Recently we kicked-off some initiatives to this end, including aligning community support functions, focus on mobile and innovative technology, seeding the Wikimedia Endowment, re-organizing our internal structure, exploring partnerships and focusing on the most critical aspects of our mission: community and technology. We started this transformation, but as we move forward we are facing a crisis that is rooted in our choice of direction.

The choice in front the WMF is that of our core identity. Our mission can be served in many ways, but we cannot do them all. We could either fully focus on building our content and educational programs. Or we can get great at technology as the force multiplier for our movement. I believe the the former belongs to our volunteers and affiliates and that the role of the WMF is in providing global support and coordination of this work. I believe in -- and the board hired me to -- focus on the latter. To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs. To this end we have made many significant changes. But the challenge in front of us is hard to underestimate: technology moves faster than any other field and meeting expectations of editors and readers will require undistracted focus.

What changed?

When Jimmy started Wikipedia, the early editors took a century-old encyclopedia page and allowed anyone to create or edit its content. At the time when creating knowledge was still limited to the chosen few, openly collaborating online gave us power to create and update knowledge at a much faster rate than anyone else. This was our innovation.

As we matured, we encountered two fundamental, existential challenges. One is of our own doing: driving away those who would otherwise join our mission through complex policies, confusing user experiences, and a caustic community culture. The other is external and is emerging from our own value of freely licensed content: Many companies copy our knowledge into their own databases and present it inside their interfaces. While this supports wider dissemination, it also separates our readers from our community. Wikipedia is more than the raw content, repurposed by anyone as they like. It is a platform for knowledge and learning, but if we don't meet the needs of users, we will lose them and ultimately fail in our mission.

Meanwhile, in the last 15 years revolutionary changes have taken hold. The rate of knowledge creation around the world is unprecedented and is increasing exponentially. User interfaces are becoming more adaptive to how users learn. This means we have a huge opportunity to accelerate human understanding. But to do so requires some significant change in technology and community interaction.

So let’s begin with technology: Many at the WMF and in our community believe that we should not be a high-tech organization. I believe we should. With over half of our staff fully committed to delivering product and technology, it is already our primary vehicle for impacting our mission and our community. In fact we constantly see additional technology needs emerging from our Community department to help amplify theirs and our community work.

What do we need to do in light of the changes I described above? We need to focus on increasing productivity of our editors and bringing more readers to Wikipedia (directly on mobile, and from 3rd party reusers back to our sites).

When we started, the open knowledge on Wikipedia was a large piece of the internet. Today, we have an opportunity to be the door into the whole ecosystem of open knowledge by:

1. scaling knowledge (by building smart editing tools that structurally connect open sources)
2. expanding the entry point to knowledge (by improving our search portal)

There are many ways to alleviate the manual burdens of compiling and maintaining knowledge currently taken on by our editing community, while quickly expanding new editing. We made significant strides this year with our first steps to leverage artificial intelligence to remove grunt work from editing. But that is just a start. Connecting sources through structured data would go much further and allow our editors to easily choose the best media for their article and for our readers to recieve content at their depth of understanding or language comprehension.

Wikipedia is the trusted place where people learn. Early indicators show that if we choose to improve the search function more people will use our site. We are seeing early results in use of Wikipedia in our A/B testing of search , but we have a long way to go. We want people to come directly to our sites -- and be known as the destination for learning -- so that eventually we can bring our readers into our editing community. And without community support none of this will be remotely possible.

Which brings me to the community. Over time the WMF has grown, with an opportunity of becoming a complementary, mutually empowering partner with the community. We need each other and we share one focus: humanity. Reaching and sharing with people across the world is our common goal.

In the past year we managed -- for the first time since 2007 -- to finally stem the editor decline. But that will not be enough. We need to find ways to re-open and embrace new members instead of the hazing we conduct at least in some parts of the site today. We must treat each other with kindness and respect. Technology is not the main reasons for rampant new editor attrition. It is how we talk to each other that makes all the difference.

Without tackling these issues we artificially limit our growth and scalability. And we will continue to reject those whose ideas are new or different, the most vulnerable members of our community. In this, the Gender Gap is the "canary in the coal mine". Women are the first to leave contentious and aggressive environments and are less likely to remain when they encounter it. They are less likely to run in elections because of rude and aggressive treatment. Yet in editor surveys and in our latest strategy consultation, Gender Gap has been considered a low priority. I disagree.

Over the past two years I have actively pushed funding to improve anti-harassment, child protection and safety programs; work in these areas is ongoing. We are actively exploring some tangible approaches that -- I hope -- will turn into concrete outcomes. In the latest research this year the number of female editors shown some growth.

What does this mean for the WMF?

In the past 18 months -- and thanks to hard work of the people at the WMF and our community supporters -- we have made significant structural changes. We have organized around two core areas: technology and community. We have made changes with an eye on improving our relationships between the volunteer community, the chapters and the WMF, including the creation of structures that should vastly improve the WMF's responsiveness to volunteers. We began adopting best industry practices in the organization, such as setting and measuring goals and KPIs. We’ve given managers a lot of responsibilities and demanded results. We’ve asked for adjustment in attitude towards work, our responsibilities and professional relationships. We prioritised impact and performance so that we can provide more value to our communities and the world.

This has not been easy.

In practice this means I demanded that we set standards for staff communication with our community to be professional and respectful. It meant transitioning people, shutting down pet projects, promoting some but not others, demanding goals and results to get funding. This level of change is necessary to set up our organization to address the challenges of the next decade.

All of this means stepping away from our comfort zones to create capacity for building programs and technologies that will support us in the future. It is a demanding and difficult task to perform an organizational change at this scale and speed.

I believe that in order to successfully serve our community and humanity, the WMF has deliver best-of class technology and professional support for community. This will ensure we are delivering significant impact to volunteer editors and opening avenues for new types of contributions. This requires that we choose the route of technical excellence for the WMF with support and encouragement from our community partners. Without this empowerment, the WMF will not succeed.

The world is not standing still. It will not wait for us to finish our internal battles and struggles. Time is our most precious commodity.

LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 00:19, 22 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

• This statement was posted on the Wikimedia-l mailist list where relevant replies and comments from others can be seen. BethNaught (talk) 22:01, 22 February 2016 (UTC) Reply
  • Of particular interest: Brion Vibber, Oliver Keyes, Erik Moeller, Tim Starling. BethNaught (talk) 22:07, 22 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Thanks for this Lila. You didn't ask for responses, but hey this is a dialogic place. In any case it was good to hear this kind of high level vision thing from you.

You have made some things very clear. Your vision is "To transform our organization into a high-tech NGO, focused on the needs of our editors and readers and rapidly moving to update our aged technology to support those needs" and you make it clear that the Board backs this vision. You explain the turmoil among staff as being due to starting to make the organizational changes that are required to achieve that vision. You explain where the Discovery project is going somewhat - making content on WM/WP sites, as well as other sources of open content, available through Wikipedia, and about automation to bear on improving/accelerating that process. That is clear.

With regard to your comments about the editing community; to be frank I don't think you understand two key things about being an editor, and about the editing community. The first is what it is like to build and maintain high-quality content in an environment when "everyone can edit" , and the second is the fact that the very complexity of the content and behavioral policies and guidelines, which the community itself has put in place over the years to guide itself, is a sign of the maturity of the project in grappling with the challenge of building and maintaining high quality content in a community where everyone can edit. The environment created by the policies and guidelines can be beautiful. They save this place from being a wild west. Talking about the "everyone can edit" thing a bit, you can roughly classify editors on four axes. 1) competence in knowledge: loons to world-class experts; 2) reason for being here: to serve some outside interest (a cause, a company, a client) or to serve the mission of WP; 3) competence in the policies and guidelines (newbies to the most clueful - which means understanding the heart of things); and 4) self-awareness/willingness to learn (from the most closed/arrogant, to the most open and aware) We get people all over that four-dimensional space (and of course all the variations within any one of those axes, and all the variations of good and bad character tendencies). And we get people who are self-deluded across all of them. You really deal with humanity in its all its glory and horribleness here. And it makes it very, very hard to deal with things like civility or, to the extent that incivility is what drives the gender gap, the gender gap. A lot of smart and well-intentioned people have tried for a long time. (I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I don't see how this is in the domain of WMF can do, and I don't see that you understand how hard it actually is to address)

But I don't get a sense that you understand these things and I urge you to be more careful in making claims about the editing community until you do. And I hope you start editing seriously if you haven't already, to understand what content creation and maintenance is actually like. Unless you are planning on throwing manual content creation out the window, your chances of success are low if you do not understand what its like to be an editor - you won't be able to communicate well to us, and you won't understand how technology can help, hinder, or complement what we actually do. I hope that makes some sense to you. Happy to discuss any of that, if you like.

And I don't understand how you think the WMF can intervene (or has intervened - you claim some credit for things that I don't see you can claim credit for) with regard to behavioral issues within the editing community (e.g the gender gap or editor retention). That makes no sense structurally to me, as the WMF has no 'reach' into intra-project governance. Maybe you are envisioning some major changes in governance or process between the WMF and the projects, but as it stands, your words there sound just.. confused or empty. Well-intentioned, sure. For sure. But also kind of alarming, as you should know better than anyone what the relationship is between the WMF and the communities in the various projects.

Also, would you please tell me, where is information about the "consultation" that will begin next week?

And while I understand that this is meant to be a very forward-looking statement, I want to ask while I have you - are you going to come back to the FAQ you started so we can continue figuring out what has transpired in the past year or so? You haven't commented there since the 18th. Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 22:37, 22 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

I also want to say that I find the whole mailing list thing to really bizarre. This seems to be some way that WMF communicates among itself, but it is just really foreign to me as a way to communicate in community. I guess that is something I have to adjust to. :) Jytdog (talk) 22:41, 22 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Mailing lists are always just semi-open discussions, they are some kind of hidden back-room. They are a) not in a proper wiki, where us wikimedians usually discuss, and b) slow for answers, that have to be moderated first. They are far better than google-docs or facebook or such, where you have to leave your privacy to those privacy-raping companies that run those ventures, but an ordinary on-wiki discussion is to be preferred. Grüße vom Sänger ♫ ^(Reden) 17:05, 23 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Thanks! at least it is public - I am watching it unfold now. Jytdog (talk) 19:06, 23 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

---

Hi Everyone,

As some of you know, I have been making concerted efforts to engage deeper on-wikis and to provide more insights into my thought process. As a demonstration of this commitment, I would like to share my thoughts on the Knight Foundation grant which has been called out for clarification.

The text (after the bullet points) below is from the actual grant paperwork, and is duplicated a bit further down. Here I’d just like to highlight the functional areas of our WMF strategy which these initiatives touch.

Reach:

• Test results from search and user testing
• An improved search engine and API for Wikipedia searches
• Measure user satisfaction (by analyzing rate at which queries surface relevant content)
• Can the Wikimedia Foundation get Wikipedia embedded via carriers and Original Equipment Manufacturers?

Community:

• A public-facing dashboard of core metrics used in product development
• A sample prototype on a small dataset to showcase possibilities
• Create a public-facing dashboard of key KPIs
• Use Key Performance (KPIs) to inform product iteration, and establish key understanding and feature development for the prototypes
• Measure application Programming Interface (API) usage

Knowledge:

• Test results exploring relevance of content surfaced
• Measure no results rate

Knowledge + Reach:

• Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?

Reach + Community:

• Conduct tests with potential users
• Measure user-perceived load time

It was my mistake to not initiate this ideation on-wiki. Quite honestly, I really wish I could start this discussion over in a more collaborative way, knowing what I know today. Of course, that’s retrospecting with a firmer understanding of what the ideas are, and what is worthy of actually discussing. In the staff June Metrics meeting in 2015, the ideation was beginning to form in my mind from what I was learning through various conversations with staff. I had begun visualizing open knowledge existing in the shape of a universe. I saw the Wikimedia movement as the most motivated and sincere group of beings, united in their mission to build a rocket to explore Universal Free Knowledge. The words "search" and "discovery" and "knowledge" swam around in my mind with some rocket to navigate it. However, "rocket" didn’t seem to work, but in my mind, the rocket was really just an engine, or a portal, a TARDIS, that transports people on their journey through Universal Free Knowledge.

From the perspective I had in June, however, I was unprepared for the impact uttering the words "Knowledge Engine" would have. Can we all just take a moment and mercifully admit: it’s a catchy name. Perhaps not a great one or entirely appropriate in our context (hence we don’t use it any more). I was motivated. I didn’t yet know exactly what we needed to build, or how we would end up building it. I could’ve really used your insight and guidance to help shape the ideas, and model the improvements, and test and verify the impacts.

However, I was too afraid of engaging the community early on.

Why do you think that was?

I have a few thoughts, and would like to share them with you separately, as a wider topic. Either way, this was a mistake I have learned enormously from.

Yes. Let's talk about restricted grants and the WMF. The Foundation has taken restricted grants in the past, per our policy, especially when we were a much younger organization. As our most recent audit report shows, we have received restricted grants more recently for Visual Editor and Wikipedia Zero and Mobile (in 2014-15). With this grant we brought the idea to the funder and they supported our work with this grant. To be clear, this is not an instance of a funder driving WMF's agenda. They provided financial support to the plans we presented to them.

I’d like to take this moment to call out the requirement for Board of Trustees approval for 1) grants over 100,000ドル 2) grants which do not conform to Foundation policies, and 3) grants which create financially instability for the Foundation. The Knowledge Engine grant was unanimously approved by the WMF Board of Trustees. All members voted and approved (( see minutes )) the grant on November 7th. The motion was made by James, and seconded by Denny.

While I cannot speak on behalf of the board, I can share my take: Restricted grants not only benefit budding organizations, but they also aid existing organizations with new initiatives. In the early stages of discovering what would eventually become "Discovery", we decided to apply for this grant. Our aim was to begin exploring new initiatives that could help address the challenges that Wikipedia is facing, especially as other sources and methods arise for people to acquire knowledge. If you haven’t yet, please have a look at the recent data and metrics which illustrate the downward trajectory our movement faces with readership decline (since 2013), editor decline (since 2007, which we stabilized for English Wikipedia in 2015), and our long standing struggle with conversion from reading to editing. These risks rank very high on my list of priorities, because they threaten the very core of our mission. The time for investigating new approaches at the foundation to address these risks is absolutely now. Thus, the Board approved this grant to help us fund investigating and developing new ways of reaching and serving our readers.

I would hope that for staff, the answer to this question is clear.

That brings this to a discussion more centered around, why should the community support the decisions of the WMF board and leadership? Well the honest truth is, the community has no obligation at all to support the WMF board. It is very much the other way around, the Foundation is accountable to our readers, contributors, and donors. The Board and the Foundation both act, in their own capacities and to the best of their limited abilities, to further the mission of the movement. Sometimes we get it wrong, sometimes we get it right. But it is entirely up to each individual contributor to decide whether they want to support a given initiative or not.

I’d like to have an open discussion, on a later date, on how values, policies and duty tie into interpersonal relationships and transparency, organizational productivity, technological innovation and long term relevancy of our movement and our projets.

Some reading refresh I did for this discussion:

• Five Pillars of Wikipedia in affirmation, describes the fundamental principles of Wikipedia
• What Wikipedia is Not in negation, describes the English Wikipedia Policy
• Community policies in negation, describes Wikipedia community governance and processes
• WMF Core Values in affirmation, describes an original set of core values set forth by the WMF for persons engaging with Wikimedia projects.
• WMF Guiding Principles in affirmation, describes how the Wikimedia Foundation's Mission and Vision are implemented in our work.

Generally we do not post donor documents without advance agreement, because doing so breaks donor privacy required in maintaining sustainable donor relations. In practice, I am told we have not actually published grant paperwork since 2010, but we do publicize grants in blogs when requested and agreed to by donors. A portion of the KF Knowledge Engine grant document that outlines the actual commitments we’ve made I quoted below.

We hypothesize that if we help our users discover more Wikimedia content through search, more users will come to us and perhaps more will engage in editing. Our basic search brings zero results roughly 30% of the time - a problem which, once fixed, extends our reach. We also want to learn if exposing sister-project content and other open sources (like open street maps) through our search interface will help our readers find and read more of our content. At the time we called this concept "Knowledge Engine". Today, we call this "Discovery" because that is the phase the team is in. The Discovery team is actively working with Wikidata, open maps and APIs; and you can read more about it on the Discovery FAQ page.

At the conclusion of the first stage, the results will include:

Test results exploring relevance of content surfaced

Test results from search and user testing
An improved search engine and API for Wikipedia searches
A public-facing dashboard of core metrics used in product development
A sample prototype on a small dataset to showcase possibilities

Answer key questions:

Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?
Can the Wikimedia Foundation get Wikipedia embedded via carriers and Original Equipment Manufacturers?
Use Key Performance (KPIs) to inform product iteration, and establish key understanding and feature development for the prototypes
Conduct tests with potential users
Create a public-facing dashboard of key KPIs
Measure:
User satisfaction (by analyzing rate at which queries surface relevant content)
User-perceived load time
No results rate
Application Programming Interface (API) usage

Portal First A/B/C test report (2 tests ran at the same time) .

With the first test group, we did not find reliable improvement as the delta was between -0.9% and 2.8%. Since it is not consistently positive, it is not reliable. With the second test group, 1.7% to 5.5% more sessions were likely to end in a clickthrough compared to the control. This represents between 300 [thousand^RF ] and 1.3 million more people every day likely to go through to read an article our editors wrote. These people "bounced" from our site before. This is a tangible improvement, and I’d like to thank Discovery for the great work they have been doing.

Please help provide insight on Discovery team work on the product portal pages. You can read and comment on our tests and help submit ideas in Phabricator. I am confident you can help us with both observations, opinions, ideas and safeguards. Ultimately, we’ve just started the Discovery process, and I’m hoping we can give it a clean start when it comes to ideating together, please don’t bite the newbie. I assume good faith, and I hope you do too. Let’s all treat each other with civility and etiquette, and see if we can collaborate to build a consensus on the WMF’s project direction to help readers discover the high quality content and knowledge our editors are creating.

A fellow humble child of knowledge, LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 29 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

---

Thanks Lila, that's interesting context. I believe the phrase "knowledge engine" has been used to describe WP or aspects of WM since at least 2014, when it showed up in the annual report. I've heard it used with various other connotations since then, but this seems as good a description as any of a constellation of tools, living reference works, and communications channels devoted to synthesizing and organizing information into usable knowledge. –SJ talk 06:01, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

• I have a question which I do not see covered above: whose employment is dependent on this restricted grant?
• I work on that team. The work you report as supported by this grant, is my work. I wrote the dashboards, my team performs the A/B tests. I had no idea that there was a restricted grant covering this work until now. And quite honestly it scares me quite a bit to hear that a one-off donation is the thing resourcing my work - because I feel like my work is valuable to the movement's progress - and my employment, because I like making rent. So that's my question; what specifically is this being spent on? Not, what are the goals of the project, but whose existence is supported by it? And what is going to happen when that grant expires? Ironholds (talk) 15:15, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

I don't work at the Wikimedia Foundation as a staff member and so I can't answer anything specific about your employment, but I wanted to comment on the general principle of restricted grants as I see it as a board member. In general, I think it is very unhealthy for most nonprofits to "chase funding" by looking for ideas that funders will like just in order to get funding. I've seen some sad cases of distraction in nonprofits which did that. We don't do that and I would oppose any grant which led us around in that way. (As an aside, grant makers tend to hate it as well.)

So, this work is fundamental and core to our longterm progress. We need to improve the website over time, and we need to modernize and adapt. Discovery on the site isn't very good. Tools for editors to find things aren't very good. We'll want to invest in that whether it is funded by an external grant or not.

Why do some funders prefer to give restricted grants? That should be pretty obvious. They've been engaged in a dialogue about what a nonprofit working on and what they plan to do and they come to a decision to support that. They want to make sure that the money is spent in line with what they were told. The fact that a grant is restricted does not imply - at all - that the work is a whim which will stop when the grant is finished.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:40, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

To add to Jimmy's point, Discovery work was part of the 2015-16 Annual Plan and was funded regardless of any specific grants. The KF Knowledge Engine grant is an additional validation of our thinking and efforts. While it does not change who works on what, it helps support evolution of our projects not just financially, but from thought leadership perspective from a well-respected grantor. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 03:03, 1 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

I simply don't understand what is being said here. Lila, you say that the Wikipedia search engine should be improved. Alright. But what's that got to do with a "vision" of "free knowledge as a universe"? I don't understand even the mere meaning of this phrase. I don't understand what the question means whether "the Wikimedia Foundation can get Wikipedia embedded via carriers and Original Equipment Manufacturers". What does embedding mean here, what do you mean by carriers, which OEMs? You are asking: "Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?" What's that got to mean? What is "an open channel beyond an encyclopedia"? It all sounds very high-profile, not at all like the rather understandable task of improving a search engine. Isn't it possible to put in clear words what this Knight grant is good for?--Mautpreller (talk) 19:16, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Hi Mautpreller, I realize that the grant language can be abstract and markety and I am sorry that my metaphor was unclear. Let me clarify some of the terms: we have many project besides Wikipedia itself, we also have Wikipedias many languages. Those are all knowledge projects. In addition to this, other knowledge is often linked into our projects, let's say maps or graphs that have been recently implemented by the Discovery team. In other words, we want to test if we start surfacing content from other projects (like Commons) through our search box would people find that useful? The second question about OEMs has to do with working with manufacturers that produce mobile phones to put Wikipedia on them at manufacturing time, before those devices are sold. This is especially helpful to raise awareness in emerging markets where Wikipedia is not well known. We have been working with a manufacturer in South America to attempt this. I hope this clarifies this a bit. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 16:17, 1 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

+1. Morover I have certain fears raised by this explanation (and the WMF has no credit left anymore).

First option: The lofty words about universe and stuff were a mean to lure the Foundation into funding the WMF. Well played, but then communicate at least honestly to us volunteers and drop the PR speech that is just a balloon full of warm air and nothing more. And in the end we have a better search function, ok.

Second option: The WMF tries to pull off one of the big visonary projects that it will fuck up again like all other bgger projects in the past, and tries to assure us and lure us into thinking it would be just an improvement of the search function (while blowing it up with visionary wording for the world outside the movement).

What I find most problematic about all this? The WMF recieves more donations than you can spend wisely (that'S why so much money gets burned on crap and efficiency in the WMF is a joke). The search function of our projects is a core area of your technical responsibility. Is it just me who think you could have pulled this off by the funds the WMF is already hoarding? And improvements on thos part of the system got requested by volunteers countless times over the years. Why can't you work on this issue in all seriousness and pull off a real improvement of our search engine without all this lofty PR crap? We are not a Tec Comapny, you don't ahve to sell shares to investors, you neither have to revolutionize knowledge (on which you would fail anyway). Get your business done, simple. --Julius1990 (talk) 00:03, 31 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

• This seems like an exciting piece of Innovation and I look forward to seeing the detailed proposal which will presumably be contained in the published grant application. Unfortunately it seems hard to get a view of all the exciting areas of innovation that the WMF is engaged in. The Phabricator tasks linked from the Innovation page seem mainly inactive and there have been no major contributions to that page by WMF staff for six months. Perhaps the scope of the WMF innovation activities are being documented and discussed at some other location, and if so it would be good to see the links. It would also be good to know who are the WMF's innovation partners (I made some suggestions last June, around the time you were ideating the open knowledge universe, but I am sure that the movement can give you a much wider range than I can). Where would you like to see that aspect of the community engagement, which is much wider than the so-called Knowledge Engine project, take place? Or are you satisfied that you already know all you need to know to take forward the WMF innovation programme? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 22:33, 31 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Hi Lila, thank you for the clarification so far. Please give more detail about what is "an open channel beyond an encyclopedia"? --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 17:17, 1 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

• I agree our search engine needs improvement and the majority of the ideas and KPIs above have obvious merit, and sympathize with the need to trot out the bullshit for grant applications. There are two problems here: (1) we volunteers appreciate straight talk and (2) something like this is concerning -- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that has a search engine, not the other way around. Placing a box beside existing search results that says "hey, Wikivoyage has a travel guide on X", or selecting a language automatically based on IP (with ability to disable this if not wanted) is likely to be non-controversial. Finally, this new search function needs to be for every project, not just Wikipedia. MER-C (talk) 12:36, 9 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

What has been requested is the "grant application". This is a document prepared by the WMF and submitted to the Knight Foundation rather than a document from the donor.

All other moment entities, including chapters and those applying for individual engagement grants publicly post proposals for funding. I do not understanding the reasons the WMF cannot also? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:56, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

I would like to see a citation for the claim that all other movement entities publicly post proposals for funding. In particular, I would be rather surprised if all of the EU research project submissions to FP6, FP7, and Horizon2020 are being published for the chapters that participate in them. Do you have any support for this statement, James? --denny (talk) 17:39, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

I think that is certainly not the case, as you say, Denny. My guess is Doc James meant "proposals to WMF for funding". Those have indeed been publicly documented every time (with only one exception I'm aware of in my tenure (since 2011)). Asaf (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

To clarify yes I am referring to proposals to the WMF for funding. And thank you User:Asaf (WMF) for answering. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 09:28, 31 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Grants:APG/FDC recommendations/2015-2016 round 1#WMF: "...the FDC laments that the Wikimedia Foundation’s own planning process does not meet the minimum standards of transparency and planning detail that it requires of affiliates applying for its own Annual Plan Grant (APG) process. The FDC 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)."

Speaking of transparency, denny: Do i remember correctly you writing somewhere, that you were obligated as Wikidata project lead to write reports for funding institutions of wikidata (google etc.)? Is this true? Did you write reports, and if so, where can the community read them? --Atlasowa (talk) 23:47, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Slightly off-topic, no? Yes, the Wikidata reports (both the intermediary and the final one) were all published, just as was the working plan for the Wikidata grant before work started. I am too lazy to find out the links right now. Why asking for possible issues in completely unrelated topics? --denny (talk) 04:59, 31 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Comparing the degree of transparency shown by various components of the movement seems entirely appropriate for this discussion. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 13:54, 31 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

The funder has agreed to share the grant agreement publicly. It is available here. --Lgruwell-WMF (talk) 19:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lisa, many thanks for that. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:29, 11 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lila, Sj, Ironholds, Doc James, Denny: Having a document like this published on a user talk page seems sub-optimal. Those who are interested in this topic (as opposed to those interested in this user's thoughts generally) can't watchlist it here; among other issues. Any problem if I move this elsewhere for continued discussion -- e.g., Lila Tretikov's remarks on the Knowledge Engine, January 2016? -Pete F (talk) 17:56, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Or better yet, simply Knowledge Engine -- with a section reserved for Lila's comments. -Pete F (talk) 17:59, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

I reverted the move because although I agree there should be a centralized place for discussion, this is a good discussion here separate from that.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:32, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

If you'd like to discuss the topic in more depth, I recommend the discovery page talk page. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 31 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

For the record, I was not involved with commissioning that report. I was, however, interviewed at some length by its author. Asaf (WMF) (talk) 22:16, 30 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lila, the proposal uses the phrases "openly curated", "Public curation mechanisms", "curation of that data". May we know who you envisage undertaking this curation? Are you by any chance assuming that the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia will be curated by the current Wikipedia volunteer community? Since you did not put this down as a risk, it seems that you are reasonably sure that the people you expect to carry out this curation will indeed do so -- what is the basis for that assessment? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:39, 11 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

I'll take this as having been answered here with the assurance I am not aware of any actual plans for Discovery work that would rely on any human curation beyond what is already being done. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:53, 18 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

@Ironholds: The paper says "With the first test group we found no trustworthy improvement; the difference for the test group as between -0.9% and 2.8%. Since it isn’t even consistently positive, it is not reliable."

This needs explanation. How can the results of comparing two populations be a range? How are the results "unreliable" becasue they contain a negative number? What are the raw click-through percentages for each group? What are the search click-through percentages for each group? What statistical methods have been applied to measure significance?

Given that there is more clickthough, how do we measure the value of this? Are we distracting readers from the primary content onto sidetracks? If so is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Rich Farmbrough 14:32 24 February 2016 (GMT).

A new wiki search requires a community movement. This will only be successful, if the new search engine is

1. a) open source from code
2. b) open source from the database, that means, everyone can share and get and host this URL-Repository
3. c) and this might be the main point: that everyone can contribute not only in sharing, but also in hosting the infrastructure: This means, it must be a p2p system to search for URLs.

As a good practice model there is already such a system given under http://spot-on.sf.net

* The URL-Search is done both, in a central server and in a p2p search system.
* The URL-Search can index the website with full text or only with e.g. 50 top longest words. also you can adjust the number of 50, so you reach again a full indexing of the website.
* Users can join the central URL repository and share it and backup it in a p2p system: also they can share URLs to the central repository, which also can provide filter rules, so that only wikipedia URLs are added-
* There exists a web crawler for this URL repository, called Pandamonium: https://sourceforge.net/projects/goldbug/files/pandamonium-webcrawler/
* Also there is the convenient option to save all the URLs into the Database using a RSS feed.
* As a database both can be used: PostgreSQL and also SQLite.
* The Application is given and has several GUIs. It makes sense to investigate this open source software for URL indexing, as it would save a lot of money, IMHO the web search is already given and ready and needs just a roll out and a web interface.
* All the transfers and savings in the database are encrypted.

Screenshot: https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/spot-on/screenshots/Spot-On.png

Please evaluate this model for a usage in this project, as it is useable, saves a lot of money and is ready to use and extend.

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

Lila, here I am. Your are not close to me living in one of the organizational global backjards of SF, USA. WMF is a case for social workers – honestly: "techno versus anthro". Lila, you are one of a million of the Wikimedia Movement. Do you love me and everybody of iCIV? Let iCIV feel your love!--Edward Steintain (talk)

Hi Edward, we are planning the consultation as we speak. So more news will be coming in the next two weeks and at the Metrics Meeting. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 2 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Ebenen des iCIV-Empowerments^[1]

➚ Zunehmender Grad der Beteiligung

ermächtigen
(engl. empower)

kooperieren
(engl. cooperate)

einbeziehen
(engl. involve)

konsultieren Rat einholen
(engl. consult)

informieren
(engl. inform)

Ebenen des iCIV-Empowerments mit zunehmendem Editoreneinfluss – vom Informieren zum Ermächtigen (Quelle)

(quote[2]) Es scheint, Lita Tretikov (WMF) ist im Sprachgebrauch neuer organisatorischer Konzepte in der Organisation von freien Freiwilligen noch unerfahren: „Hi Edward, we are planning the consultation as we speak. So more news will be coming in the next two weeks and at the Metrics Meeting. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 2 January 2016 (UTC)"[3]
Die WMF-Schritte von der Konsultation zum Empowerment sind noch unbeholfen. Wenn WMF-Lila mich und alle der iCIV liebt, muss sie dienen: bottom-up ‘pull’ - Lila lift us up! Durch neue Ausblicke werde ich mich freuen werden können, zu Wikipedia beizutragen. --Edward Steintain (Diskussion) 20:14, 5. Jan. 2016 (CET)
Lila, please collect informations about disgust and shunning. Empowerment is like soap. Apply it liberally! Good luck, --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Hi Edward, there are some questions along those lines in the strategy consultation that starts tomorrow. Because there are many things we could do, I recommend making very specific recommendations as in: WMF should do X. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 17 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

The Fairy Tales of Lila (WMF). WMF Metrics & Activities Meeting January 2016: „ASAP". But: Patrick Hudson, Moving up the Culture Ladder (dtsch Die Kulturleiter hinauf): „One of the common simple definition of culture is "how we do things round here". This is where aspiration meets reality - where the rubber meets the road."(dtsch Eine der gebräuchlichen, einfachen Definitionen von Kultur ist „wie das bei uns üblich ist" Da trifft die Aspiration auf die Wirklichkeit – wo der Gummi die Straße berührt.). --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:13, 18 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

• Edward, I'm not sure that I understand you completely. Can you explain what you mean by "the fairy tales of Lila"?
• Lila, can you explain the diagram on page 15 of this presentation?

Thanks, --Pine ^✉ 22:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Hi @Pine:, this is the diagram our team put together to illustrate the parts of the strategy overall. Everything stems from our vision, that breaks down to strategic pillars of reach, community and knowledge and then the strategies for addressing those are established. The current strategy consultation is designed to find those strategies and prioritize them (WE ARE HERE SIGN). Then from those specific tactics will be identified for the Annual Plan. Is that clearer? LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 28 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lila, yes. Usually I think of vision and mission as forming the base, more specific goals being chosen based on the mission and vision, and then tactics being chosen that will move a situation from the status quo toward the goals. I realize that my own description here is a bit difficult to follow. Anyway, I think I understand what you're attempting to communicate in that diagram. Thanks, --Pine ^✉ 22:09, 28 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Thanks @Pine for asking. The future of WMF and WMM sounds like a fairy tale with a happy end (paper version) but it is helpful to understand Hudson. Enjoy reading it. --Edward Steintain (talk) 18:16, 23 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

„Reduce harassment issues and the gender gap". To call it Harassment is to be prejudiced. I gave it a new name: male wikipedic blick (dtsch Tunnelblick). blick – as the English synonyme „look/-ing" (not tunnel vision) is recommended that is an editor's remark describing evolutionary traits in WMx ́s developement[4]. Good luck, --Edward Steintain (talk) 18:16, 23 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

male wikipedic blick. Seriously, „Evolutionary models show that indirect reciprocity can solve the problem of free-riders (which doomed simpler models of altruism) in moderately large groups (32), as long as people have access to information about reputations (e.g., gossip) and can then engage in low-cost punishment such as shunning (dtsch Meidung )."[5] male wikipedic blick, I enjoy gossiping and making up words. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:39, 23 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

I am a Nowak fan: „Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. ... A cooperator is someone who pays a cost, c, for another individual to receive a benefit, b." (Martin A. Nowak: Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. In: Science. 314, Nr. 5805, 2006年12月08日, S. 1560–1563, doi:10.1126/science.1133755, PMC 3279745) --Edward Steintain (talk) 09:09, 27 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

In Hudson's paper you might like to substitute „safety" by cooperation or even structured cooperation to create a close connection of understanding about WMF and WMMovement.

• I see calculative organisations as being like caterpillars. Steadily munching their way through the leaves, very organised and efficient but the caterpillar looks up to the sky and sees a beautiful butterfly floating past and thinks, "I wish I could be like that." Hudson, p. 4
  
• (dtsch Ich betrachte kalkulatorische Organisationen als Raupen. Stetig ihren Weg durch die Blätter mampfend, sehr gut organisiert und effizient, aber die Raupe blickt zum Himmel, sieht einen schönen Schmetterling vorbeigleiten und denkt: „Ich wünschte, ich könnte so sein.")

This contribution tries to copy a known intervention: „Damn it! Sit down and think what is good about Wikipedia at all. Answer after two weeks! Now, get off! I can't stand it anymore."

As a single member of the iCIV (international Community of Individual Volunteers) I want to feel save and get some protection supporting me against the mob and bulls of male wikipedian binary blickers.

(Wikipedia.) Feeling safe and achieving safety is one of the basic human demands: Hudson explains the Cultural Ladder. The chapters of Wikipedia might follow this track providing a structure (like QIOP) to help decide:

• where you are now;
• where you want to go to; and
• support the process of getting there.

--Edward Steintain (talk) 19:43, 5 February 2016 (UTC) (Provocation for liberation: With Wikipedia too many do-gooders act as second-order free-riders (dtsch Trittbrettfahrer zweiter Ordnung) – no justice = the binary morality of male wikipedian blickers (wikipedia:MWB).Reply

The global Story of Wikipedia. A repercussion of the historic German Gauleiter ? The gauleiters stablize the existing system if not otherwise adviced. A repeating harsh contact with wikipedia:MWB.gauleiters triggers Meidung (engl. shunning ). --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:36, 5 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Wikipedia's He-Man with a Male wikipedic blick is ruling. The male wikipedic blicker has its own norms of morality, no one has a chance to object – MWB is protected by the shield of very many second-order free-riders. Wikipedia has no morals in a common senence but many of its own (that is WMB)! The only chance to object a male wikipedic blicker is to shun (dtsch de:Meidung). Normal norms are typicically share widely. Wikipedia does not! The only way to punish a WMB is by shunning (dtsch de:Meidung) cause a typical WMB does not accept (dtsch) „Tadel". Manchen WMB verachte ich schon lange; das ist meine soziale Sanktion! I think I feel like millions. WMF and its Chapters must learn to sanction in time by fair means. The end of Wikipedia's binary He-Man. Binary techno is going multinary anthro. Morally blow-jobbing WMB's are in tune with todays world. But Wikipedia is different – in the end. Good luck. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:34, 8 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

The new Wikipedia barn-stars shall be: „I have successfully perticipated in a WMF-training how to cooperate – the story of diversity. Please give me your vote to be an administrator! To develope Wikipeida to a really free Encyclopedia of this world we are living in." --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:55, 8 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

A senior Wikipedian with a MWB has removed Meidung. What is a second-order free-rider? The future of Wikipedia. --Edward Steintain (talk) 21:11, 8 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Harressment leads to injustice. No probleme: „When I find myself in troubles Ceo Lila speaks to me. Let it be. Let it be." This is a hit-song for shunning (dtsch de:Meidung WMF and Wikipedia – one type of solving the problem.

But if I do not want to „Let it be!" I might scream for help. How do I scream for help with Wikipedia if I feel to be a victom of injustice?

A HELP-Buttom I can press that says: „Community please. Don't leave me along. Please, support me on keeping on the discussion! Share your arguments." ?

A HELP-Buttom the members of the wikipedian community can press that says: „Community please. Don't leave them along. Please, support her on keeping on the discussion! Share your arguments." ?

Screaming for help with Wikiedia might once stop pradatorish MWBs.

Screaming for help makes some non-MWB humans to show their altruism: The take their mobile and call the police or ambulance. In the inhumane system of Wikipedia there is on chance to call for help. WMF and chapters do not care a shit (it has not been institutionalized yet)! Instead of this – there are a lot of rubbernecks and Gaffers without a chance to call for help collectively – one by one. ---Edward Steintain (talk) 23:51, 11 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Let's have fun with Wikipedia in future. Please, start laughing! Whenever there is an adverse event like a revert or the dawning of a deletion or exclusion of an editor a bot starts screaming: „HELP – discussion needed!" - ... and no one cares a shit. It's a MWB's World. --Edward Steintain (talk) 00:29, 13 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

As a successor of MCP the term Male Wikipedic Blick (MWB) is recommended for consultation. --Edward Steintain (talk) 00:47, 13 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

To support cooperation free-riding WMBer could actually be controlled by reputation. What is the reputation of an administrator who deletetd de:Meidung? Has he disowned references about practices of NAZI-Deutschland and declared „that's not the way we understand Meidung (engl. shunning) in Germany today". This might have been a severe mistake. But how do I get to know rumors doubting the administrator's decission? My conclusion: Wikipedia needs a „Please help"-button to spread the rumor and doubts. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:15, 15 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Sustainable development goals
Transforming Our World - the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
16.10 Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sustainabledevelopmentgoals#
Why should I be a star-gazer? Good luck, Wikipedia. --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:13, 16 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Within two years if iCIV (international Community of Indvidual Volunteers) picks up the UN-message I shall proudly say: „I am a member of Wikipedia – supporting a free encyclopedia and the goals of the UN by referred WP-articles and by my work for it." --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:47, 16 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

(Some existing Wikipedians (especially MWBers) might answer: „We are not used to this. That's not the way we understand things. This is not our culture; we have other habits of interaction." --Edward Steintain (talk) 19:47, 16 February 2016 (UTC))Reply

Wikipedia loves the goals of United Nations (UNO) and is persuing them as a free encyclopedia. Free knowledge supports mankind to persue happiness for each living member of the global society. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:04, 16 February 2016 (UTC) (How do people look at Wikipedia today?)Reply

The members of resistance of the old de.wp-regime are vandalizing. Trittbrettfahrer zweiter Ordnung (engl. second-order free-rider) was deleted. [6]. --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:31, 16 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Congratulations! Lila Tretikov, CEO of WMF, shuns (dtsch Meidung - deleated by de.wp) Male Wikipedic Blick (MWB) like millions of new editors before. Now Lila Tretikov is a real member of the crowd of the international Community of Individual Volunteers (iCIV). Lila, go for a second run with Wikipedia: Push the broom! Clear Wikipedia and WMF-staff from MWBers. Remove the male tunnel vision from Wikipedia. The New Deal of Wikipedia is structured cooperation. Good luck Wikipedia with Lila Tretikow for a second time with an agreed duty for a new cooperation! Stop MWBers! --Edward Steintain (talk) 20:40, 4 March 2016 (UTC) That's the time I shall be going to edit Wikipedia again.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.

See Talk:WMF Metrics and activities meetings/2016-01#Follow-up from live question re. engagement survey. It looks like Boryana is not on Meta (I couldn't find an account on any wiki for her actually). If you could help me make her aware of the follow-up question, I'd appreciate it. Thanks! --EpochFail (talk) 20:24, 14 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

Thanks for the comment, I will ask to follow up. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 22:56, 14 January 2016 (UTC) Reply

• I too am interested in this, although perhaps for slightly different reasons. This email from HR implies to me that the situation with staff turnover and morale is generally OK. Apparently that answer omitted data suggesting a high level of discontent among staff with WMF senior management. I don't appreciate being misled, and I would like to ask for an explanation of why important information which contradicts the general tone of the email that was sent to Wikimedia-l was completely omitted from that email. --Pine ^✉ 20:07, 17 January 2016 (UTC) Reply
• Pine, I'm sorry if you felt misled. That wasn't my intention when I answered the turnover question. It was, of course, already on schedule to talk about the results of the engagement survey during metrics as HR had done in the past. In retrospect, I see that I might have mentioned that we were going to be sharing the survey results in about a week. EpochFail, I will defer to LilaTretikov (WMF) to address the Signpost article pertaining to the leadership development needs we have. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 2600:1010:b02c:60b7:a46c:8c2d:d073:ce42 (talk) January 22, 2016 (UTC)

• I've been pondering this statement, and regrettably I still have concerns. WMF would certainly know that Wikimedia-l and the Metrics Meeting are used by different audiences. Also, the delays in releasing this information and the general lack of transparency are problematic. Also, we are still waiting to hear comments from Lila about the staff surveys. My confidence is pretty shaken regarding the handling of this situation. I am taking this set of circumstances into account in considering what strategic courses of action to discuss with the community. --Pine ^✉ 20:56, 26 January 2016 (UTC) Reply
• Lila, these comments are from a few weeks ago. Will you respond, please? --Pine ^✉ 05:27, 17 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Dear Lila,

Last June I posted a message to you about Innovation [7] but unfortunately it aged off before you had a chance to answer it [8]. I raised the subject again [9] and again you allowed it to age off without answering [10]. That was disappointing. I started a page here on Meta for Innovation and one of your staff was kind enough to spare the time to post some comments [11]. Since then nothing has happened, as far as I can tell, to engage with the community on this subject at a strategic level. That's more than disappointing, it is disturbing.

Now, however, I discover that at the very time that you were ignoring my attempts to start a discussion between the WMF and the volunteer community, you were "ideating" your "Knowledge Engine" proposal. Nothing about this was shared with the community at that time. This sends me a clear, unambiguous and deeply insulting message to me -- my help, my input, my ideas are of such little value to you that you ignore them completely -- multiplied across the whole community, this is a disastrous attitude. There are people in the community who know more than you do about the topic you initiated (I do not claim to be one of them), the community collectively can engage far more widely and effectively with cutting-edge researchers and innovators in knowledge management and discovery than you can as an individual, and if you and the Board do not make use of that huge wealth of engagement, experience and expertise then you are failing the movement that, to be blunt, pays your salary. This is not to denigrate you or your staff, it is a matter of weight of numbers. If you can use the resources of the 100,000-strong volunteer community, you will surely do better than you can with 280 staff. We are trying to help you and yet you persistently rebuff those efforts: why?

Please consider what steps you can take urgently and effectively to reverse the growing gap between the volunteer community, the Board and the staff. I ask not because I am offended personally (although I am) but because it is necessary for the sake of the project as a whole.

Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 11:51, 7 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

PS: Should you find time to respond to this, as I very much hope you will, I hope you will frame your response in terms that will be maximally helpful to the community going forward. For example, it would be of benefit for you to state who your strategic lead for Innovation is, and ask that person to publish their strategy for innovation within the WMF and across the community; who you have and wish to have as your strategic partners; a list of your major innovation projects; what activities are under way or planned to develop innovation; oh, and of course, I am also asking you to publish the details of your Knowledge Engine project, as proposed in your grant application to the Knight Foundation. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 07:34, 8 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

PPS: The Knight grant application states that the Wikimedia Foundation has a proven track record of leadership and innovation. Perhaps your strategic lead for innovation could take a moment when updating the Innovation page to include a celebration of the successes that enabled you to make that claim. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:43, 11 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Dear Rogol, I am sorry I missed your previous posts. I have read through your Meta Innovation page and it is indeed full of solid analysis and ideas. I hear your message and I am working to make sure we are sharing and soliciting input on ideas early and often. You are correct, during my early days, I lacked comprehensive understanding of how to best work in public and to collaborate effectively in our community, especially during the early phases of idea development. Having a conversation with 100,000 people is still a challenge, but we have been working on it through different methods recently.

So going forward our early ideas will be published. You probably see that they are nowadays. We have portals for many teams and we are making plans to connect them together.

We do not have an "innovation lead". On the product side, each team does some innovation within their areas. Our senior team works to guide our internal work, but specific decisions usually rest with the team. We are wrapping up the strategy consultation, which is giving us signals about what is important to the community and directions to follow. Coming out of the strategy consultation we will be making choices on specific strategies as the senior team. The board plays a big part in guiding this. The annual plan will reflect these decisions.

As you know we made the grant public (although it is not our common practice due to typical donor privacy -- we have to ask each donor if we can release their grant individually).

We seek input to our innovation from many areas. Community is definetely a big part of this and I am learning on how to best gather the feedback and ideas. We have done some great collaboration last year with many ideas coming directly from the community. To see more on what we have done in product, you can read here. Other partners are like-minded organizations such as our own chapters but also other organizations such as the Internet Archive or Creative Commons. We also consult with donors and experts in the filed.

Our challenge with any type of innovation is focus. While we can do many things, and we should definetely do everything we are doing better, we must choose what we do very carefully, because our resources are limited. We are funded by donors, so we have to focus and measure impact, in other words to bring more knowledge to more people. LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 09:01, 17 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lila, Thank you for your full response. If you do not have a strategic lead for innovation then I suggest that you should appoint one, and task them with building up a coherent internal innovation programme, embedding innovation into all your activities, celebrating your successes and with building partnerships with other complementary groups. Of course the volunteer community will be your key resource here. This is a demanding job and you need the right person in it. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 22:03, 18 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lila, I hope you'll take a moment and review a new project I recently began, [12]. While it still may be a little rough around the edges, there are some excellent strategies and incentives that cover the 3 key items - Reach, Retention, Reliability - and all that's needed is for the WMF to get behind it. Following are a couple of paragraphs from the project's TP:

Project Accuracy will be an organized community effort that brings project teams together in a united effort. Since the focus of project teams is content, it aligns with the focus of PA. Perhaps each team could hold elections and appoint their own representatives to act as coordinator(s) who work with PA coordinators, and together comprise the Project Accuracy Editorial Review Board (PAERB). They are the ones who will give the ok to affix the "reviewed and approved for accuracy" seal to an article, thus the term "RAAFA sealed article". The articles we will be working on initially will be GAs and FAs that have already passed scrutiny by qualified reviewers. Those articles will be further reviewed by another team of qualified editors (as with the FA process) per the criteria of Project Accuracy, and presented for consideration to the PAERB who will affix the RAAFA seal to the article. It is not too unlike the process in a quality peer-reviewed Journal. If we can get the WMF to approve it and help with our outreach and promotional efforts, we will be on the road to credibility regarding the negative perceptions of WP by the general public, academia, and researchers. PAERB would be the highest level of review in the content review process, and the RAAFA seal will indicate a high level of reliability because of the process itself and the qualifications of editors who review the articles and comprise the PAERB. I've been putting my big toe in the water and conducted random tests presenting the concept to students, parents and teachers, and received positive results. Perhaps the WMF could create a little survey to learn more, or maybe the PA team could create a survey and ask WMF to deploy it. I'm not sure how that works but it would be helpful to get feedback from academia and the general public to see if such a process would lend more credibility to WP articles that carry the RAAFA seal.

In summary, I actually do believe all articles should be semi-protected because doing so doesn't actually prevent well-meaning IPs from editing to improve articles whereas it does help prevent vandalism because of the extra step required in the process. Well-meaning IPs can easily apply for clearance just as they do now and edit to their heart's content. I also see editor retention and the efforts of hard working content creators to be equally as important, and know how frustrating it can be when vandalism, trolling and sock activity creates disruption. It not only chips away at article credibility, it creates hurdles for editors to overcome, is a major time sink, and an incentive killer. For the sake of brevity I'll summarize simply that WP:Project Accuracy is a community project with a focus on (1) creating incentive for editors to invest more time in creating quality articles, (2) helping to strengthen WP project teams and (3) building credibility to the reliability of RAAFA sealed articles which further lends credibility to WP as an accurate and reliable source.

Thank you for your consideration. Atsme ^{📞 📧} 04:48, 9 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

PS: While the following link may not be the best topic to demonstrate some of the issues, it was handy because someone had just posted it on FB, so I grabbed it. It's one of many circulating over the internet, and these kinds of posts will grind WP down eventually if they are not properly countered. It used to be "word of mouth" among the masses; now it's text of text: [13]. It speaks to Project Accuracy, and how important such a project is to WP. Thanks --Atsme ^{📞 📧} 04:56, 9 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Most of the Wikibashers have an axe to grind. The one in question is by a proponent of w:orthomolecular medicine, who objects to Wikipedia's treatment of his particular form of quackery.

As to peer reviewed WP articles there is one at least that has been peer-reviewed and published in a suitable journal, conversely there is a programme of creating peer-reviewed journal articles which are re-published on WP.

Rich Farmbrough 21:21 13 February 2016 (GMT).

Not every critic of Wikipedia's reliability has an axe to grind -- indeed, as we all know, Wikipedia does not regard itself as a reliable source. But public perception is an issue, whatever its motivation, and it seems important that the Wikimedia projects in general strive not only for accuracy and reliability, but are seen in public to be doing so, and indeed to be achieving it. Are you suggesting to Lila that the rate at which the peer-review projects you mention are proceeding is sufficiently fast to make the proposal made here unnecessary? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:48, 13 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

• It is a capital waste of our time to review and re-review nonsense that is written about Wikipedia. That is not to say that there are no cogent criticisms.
• Wikipedia does not include itself as a source to be cited (generally), in the same way that a book or research paper cannot cite itself. To do so would be circular reasoning. It is not a declaration of low quality.
• I was replying to Arsme, because these are successful models in one area and may be extendable to other areas. There is also a project which shares chemical structures with en:WP, effectively maintaining a much higher reliability level than we could alone.

We do need to think about the next step in reliability. I am concerned that the community may be too ossified to make the leap. I don't think Atsme's project will fly as described, because there's too much hierarchy involved. It does, however, address an important need.

Rich Farmbrough 13:53 24 February 2016 (GMT).

Hello, I am afraid the answer to this question is not clear to me. The question being "Why should the community and staff support this decision of our board and leadership?". Could you please clarify it ? Thank you, Cenarium (talk) 16:52, 11 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

+1. Doing one's job and supporting an idea are not the same thing. BethNaught (talk) 13:46, 18 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Above you ask a question that I don't see that anyone has responded to. I think it was primarily because you come from the for-profit world, where you keep development plans secret (and rightly so, for fear of losing your competitive advantage), and I think you didn't understand the culture of the editing community and its expectations of transparency, and that it would be very costly to not engage. So, primarily a culture thing. To the extent you did consider the editing community, I would guess that you were daunted by how to even talk to us, and the potential for really crazy responses. But why were you afraid? And what kind of discussions did you have with the board about this? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 16:03, 19 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Many possible answers, only for you to indicate which ones are correct:

• Your lack of technical knowledge (wikitext, templates, whatever) made you afraid that you would commit gaffes and make a fool of yourself (even if only in your own perception)
• Your lack of "community knowledge", knowledge of how the community works, what the different groups and players are, who to listen to and who you could safely or wisely ignore, made you afraid to engage us, either out of fear of dealing with crackpots and the like, or out of fear of coming across as incompetent or lacking in knowledge, leading to social faux-pas
• You didn't know what the WMF (the other people) had said and promised (or threatened or declared) and would not like to contradict them or make false promises, out of fear of losing the trust of the people that worked for you
• You were aware that many people at enwiki (and dewiki, and ...) had little or no trust in the WMF and some of the individuals there (including key players like Erik Moeller), and expressed that dislike or contempt at times forcefully, certainly when provoked (Superprotect, while the most blatant, wasn't the first or last instance of a total communication breakdown which could largely be blamed on the WMF). As head of the WMF, you were afraid that you would feel the brunt of this community feeling and that you wouldn't get a fair chance and be treated badly instead.
• Something else I haven't thought of immediately

I'm not claiming that any of the above is accurate, but since you asked for our thoughts... Fram (talk) 12:36, 24 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Commons is a repository of (mostly) images, collected under a specific rubric.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia whose content is covered by different rules. As such "surfacing" Commons content in Wikipedia is an infringement on editorial control. En:WP treats Commons (and all other projects) as an "external website" clearly signposting links (with a few exceptions), and introducing them only by selection. Surfacing this content in en:WP risks bringing the project into disrepute by displaying or linking to content we would consider inappropriate. The same applies to other Wikipedias who may not follow the same editorial policy as we do (and vice versa of course).

Rich Farmbrough 13:40 24 February 2016 (GMT).

I was hopeful that disclosure of what has gone in the past year or so would be forthcoming. You have not responded at the FAQ you started since Feb 18th, per your contribs. Have you abandoned that effort? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 17:27, 24 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Thank you for making the decision to step down and for agreeing to help with the transition. This has been difficult for the WMF staff and for the community, and I would guess that this has been difficult for you as well. In the long run I hope that we will all end up in places that are good for each of us. --Pine ^✉ 20:38, 25 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

From the very beginning of your announcement as Director, this page was filled with many different messages of support and others... well... not so supportive, which would probably foresee how hard would be your challenge here. I bet it was hard for you to deal with that, but I hope you can leave with a good impression of the movement. Apart from everything, I keep with the idea that you tried to do your best and in fact accomplished many important tasks and that should be taken in consideration. You did what was probably the best thing to do at this moment and you did it because you care. Have my sincere "thank you" for doing your best.—Teles «Talk to me ˱_{C L @ S} ˲» 03:20, 26 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Putting aside the current fracas, we are grateful that the Foundation, under your control, became more responsive to the community's needs. The ongoing harassment consultation and the Community Tech initiatives are particularly worthy of commendation. Thank you and best wishes. MER-C (talk) 12:00, 26 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Lila, I just wanted to say that while we did not always agree, I believe that your were trying to move the WMF in the right direction, and I certainly appreciated your willingness to engage with community members. Best wishes. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 17:29, 26 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

I would like to join in and Thank Lila, as well. I don't know about anyone else, but all our interactions were pleasant. You were responsive here and in general, that was a great improvement over your predecessor. I am grateful for your hard work, working through tomes and tomes of comments here daily - it certainly wasn't an easy task but you kept at it with such a resilience - it always gave me hope. The failure here was much larger, someone failed you along the way, either in advising or acclimatising or maybe you just had wrong people around you. The disagreements here were mostly professional from the community members - do try and keep that in mind. You are probably a wonderful, skilled person who ended up here on her own merit - there's a lot to be proud of there, no matter what you feel right now. I wish you the best in all your future ventures Lila. Thanks again, and best wishes. Theo10011 (talk) 19:24, 26 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

I'd like to express my great appreciation for the very positive developments in community engagement. In fact I was planning to come here to leave a positive note, before I learned you were leaving. I wish you all the best. Thanx. Alsee (talk) 12:53, 27 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Thank you for serving as Executive Director here Lila. I'm saddened to see you go. With a big heart, you dreamed big, and left a big impression. I hope you continue to do so in all your future endeavors. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 06:20, 28 February 2016 (UTC) Reply

Dear Lila you were warned not to play against the community.ref. Please read it again:

hi Lila. to make it short and clear:

• WMF has to respect the communtiy and their decisions.(sic!)
• nobody else than the community has more competence about what is needed for the project of Wikipedia.
• as long as you do not understand Wikipedia you (sorry to be so clear) and any other parts of WMF are bad for this project.
• pls. change your mind or leave.

Regards --Gruß Tom (talk) 21:27, 28 August 2014 (UTC) P.S. WMF should not even try(see) to play chess against the communtiy. short and clear: you will loose.Reply

Hi Gruß Tom. I wanted to comment here. Lila is pretty much gone from here to reply, but I wanted to ask who you think is "them" or the sole embodiment of "WMF" in this whole community vs. WMF dynamics? - Lila served as an executive very briefly here, Sue and Erik built WMF for almost 10 years in to what it is today. Lila was hired by the board, supported, directed and championed by them - from Jimmy to our elected representatives to even Sue and all the advisors. The whole superprotect debacle at de.wp happened under Erik/Sue, not lila. Erik/Sue championed AFT, Global dev, centralized fundraiser, bigger fundraisers and several other decisions - they abandoned some or changed their mind on others - I didn't see them respect the community's decision any more or less during several of those disagreements. They made a lot more bigger decisions that left a lasting impact.

On the contrary, Lila proposed her changes but left before there was anything to even show, mostly due to internal conflicts around staff and board. I don't know why people only focus on the last year so much that they forget how we got here. A lot of collective decisions by a lot of people on a lot of issues brought us here (and we keep coming back here every year). And besides, Lila is gone - the point is more than made. Going through all this publicly was probably very difficult and hurtful for her, or anyone for that matter, and your comment here isn't particularly nice. It is like kicking someone who is down or isn't even there to defend themselves - I don't know you, but I know our community - and we are better than that. I wish you well and I wish Lila well - try and embody the best that our volunteer culture has to offer, friend. Regards. Theo10011 (talk) 20:03, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

While I very much agree that it's time to respect Lila's decision and allow her to move on gracefully, you have (unintentionally, I am sure) made an error, Theo10011. Lila had been the ED of Wikimedia Foundation for over 3 months when Superprotect was applied. Risker (talk) 20:13, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

I don't like this conversation, especially the first comment above. I wouldn't ordinarily comment on something like this, but I do want to address one detail from your post, Theo10011:

"The Whole superprotect debacle at de.wp happened under Erik, not lila."

What on earth makes you say that? It seems exactly wrong to me. Lila was Erik's boss, and of course was aware of the issues around Superprotect both before and after. The board has stated that they were briefed on Superprotect before it was deployed -- surely you don't think it was Erik who briefed them? Superprotect survived long past Erik's departure. No Wikimedia official, to my knowledge, has ever stated that Erik was the driver of Superprotect. What in the world would make you attribute it to him, and not to her? -Pete F (talk) 20:16, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

Greetings Risker and Pete F. I have had this discussion on this very talk page. I have my own version of the events and there aren't any records to match up against the dates. Here are my reasons - 1) The transition period was never really made clear. 2) Then, superprotect itself was merely a salvo fired during wheel warring at de.wp against the mediaviewer activation - the mediaviewer and its activation, weren't really Lila's project - they were Erik's from what I recall (Please correct me if I am wrong?) and predate ED search period. 3) Then, As you mention yourself, She had been the ED for 3 months. Is that enough time for someone who has had zero prior exposure to the community to make any large decision like the superprotect? Even if she was in charge- could she have probably understood the implication of those actions with so little time and experience - so it eventually falls to her staff and transition team, which again points the finger back at Erik et al. 4) And to be frank, I can't be the only one who noticed so many strong handed actions during that time - the whole admin right removal at wmf.wiki which poor gayle ended up being blamed for, italian wiki blackout response from WMF, Global development (first for then against), fundraising disagreements and how AFT didn't go away after so many attempts along with so many other decisions - I saw superprotect as an extension of that same mentality, not the same mind who wanted this knowledge engine and that too, to come up at 3 months at a completely new job with a completely different background. 5) Superprotect needed much more prior knowledge of Wikimedia and the community, knowledge engine is actually proof to the contrary, that that knowledge/experience might not have been acquired, even after an year at the job. Please correct me if I have the timeline wrong. Regards. Theo10011 (talk) 20:36, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

Oh dear, Theo. You're suggesting that Lila had such a poor understanding of the movement after three months that she could not understand that application of Superprotect would be a flashpoing, and that she didn't recognize a revolt that was occurring quite literally in front of her own eyes: Superprotect was applied during Wikimania London, with dozens of German Wikimedians in attendance and loudly protesting the action, and Lila there the whole time. I get that you disagreed with other actions taken by other people at the WMF over an extended period of time. Superprotect was carried out on Lila's watch, with her right there in the middle of the entire Wikimedia community, and with her discussing it with the Board in advance of it occuring. It is unhelpful to continue to promote your revisionist history; the facts have been clear since the day Superprotect was applied, and this ongoing revisionist history is really quite damaging. I don't know in what world you would think it is helpful to anyone (including Lila, incidentally) to suggest that Lila as ED didn't understand the issues with Superprotect. Risker (talk) 21:25, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

Yes Risker , I am absolutely suggesting 3 months is not enough time to understand Wikipedia and the movement. It took me much longer, and I only edited quietly, reading the comments and the lists for an year or more. And we can agree, she might not have had the foresight to expect the revolt(s) in front of her eyes or the implication thereof - one of her big shortcomings. My impression is based on public information on Meta, news sources and the lists - I, along with 99% of the community weren't at Wikimania London, nor do we have any level of access to staff. There are gaping holes of information between events and publicly available information - my narrative, as well as yours could both be supported. So, based on the same public information, here are some quotes -

In 2014 Möller's account was blocked on the German Wikipedia because he created, implemented and used "Superprotect" rights to overrule the German Wikipedia's decision to not enable a new mechanism to view images until legal and technical problems were fixed.[14] [15]

Möller left the WMF on 30 April 2015. [16]"" -From Erik's own page on Wikipedia.

News story quote from cited source -

The Foundation recently hired Lila Treitkov as its executive director, so bringing in a professional with a background in commercial software: Treitkov was an exec at SugarCRM, an open source CRM service company. That's something that MediaWiki and Wikinews dev Möller, a programmer who owes his exalted position to being one of the first Wikipedia contributors in 2001, lacks.

There aren't a lot of favourable mentions for Erik from that time. The german news source mentions Erik's threat about removing all admin rights before being blocked himself. In fact, the narrative between the quote above and the german news article doesn't mention Lila at all, and even mentions a change in top leadership might have an affect on actions like these. I can't be the only one with this version of the events? I'm not sure which narrative you think is more revisionist, Erik's own article on en.wp supports my version of the events. Do you believe Erik was taking all this blame internally within the community and externally, only for Lila?

I don't know what happened with the board or what Erik told Lila, neither do you for that matter. And if you followed the recent drama with the board itself, you very well should know how little faith "the board being aware" carries these days. I noticed a reference to other "pet projects", not to mention, Erik had a quick change of title (lower I presume) and then a departure within months from WMF - there is a lot more between the lines. I am not saying Lila wasn't at fault, there were failures there probably of internal leadership and management but on policy it wasn't as many failures or as large as the years before. Consider now, what damage Knowledge engine did that can't be undone? what lasting legacy will remain in 2-3 years from now besides internal conflict and outside pressure of this time. Maybe you can't see that yet, so we will have to agree to disagree for now. The narrative we both have could be supported by the facts available. If I am missing any important facts, please correct me with cited sources (and update Erik's page on en.wp as well to reflect the same). This isn't revisionism, it's relativism. Kind regards. Theo10011 (talk) 22:12, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

The facts you cite are just fine, but you seem to attach a causal relationship between them for reasons I can't imagine. Yes, Erik implemented Superprotect and was blocked on dewp as a result. But I can't imagine why we should think that connects with his departure many months later. If it did connect, wouldn't the Lila you imagine (the one who couldn't see the problem with Superprotect, but finally did, and therefore had to rid the organization of Erik) have immediately removed Superprotect? She didn't do that. Your narrative doesn't match the facts well; you have to make very strong (and, as Risker suggests, offensive) assumptions about Lila's impotence for it to hold up. And we do know that others in the organization, both on the board and among Lila's staff, advocated against Superprotect. Board members have repeatedly stated that it was within her purview to make the decision. -Pete F (talk) 22:35, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

As I said, the facts (public ones at least) are limited. What we have is conjecture and gaps that can fill conflicting narratives. I don't know if I'm the only one who seems to recall things much differently - Erik was overwhelmingly blamed by all parties connected, or we can at least agree, he initiated the mediaviewer installation in a poor way. Lila's failure was what exactly? To disagree publicly with her only deputy and executive of almost 10 years - she should have done what exactly? - disagreed? admonished? fired? the only remaining executive openly and in that instance? - I don't know what your expectation is there. There are a lot of variable there like contract length and terms, not to mention staff loyalties and PR to consider - you make it out to be far too simple as failure of leadership. Indisputable facts are - Erik was demoted and left eventually while Superprotect was never used again until its removal - For what reasons we can make guesses, we also didn't see repeat of the same language and threats from Erik (like all admin rights can be removed from wiki).

As I said, one large shortcoming I saw in Lila was the inability to recognise revolt(s) and the implication thereof - repeatedly. If you read the archives of this page, you will see hundreds of comments (including mine) about Flow - editors begging her to abandon it, turn it off - she refused, she asked for bugs and trials/tests and said I will not abandon it until she "dogfood" it (or something to that effect) herself and was satisfied it wasn't salvageable. It took several months for the announcement to happen, when she agreed to abandon Flow. You say I am making assumptions for Lila - and yes, I agree, I am basing on what I saw and it makes sense. There's a lot of grey area there with little public information. You can form one narrative and I can dispute it with another. Regards. Theo10011 (talk) 23:11, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

My understanding of the responsibilities of Media Viewer: it was Fabrice's project, and his boss was Howie. I think Howie may have reported to Erik, I'm not certain. Erik ended up playing a significant role in the deployment, but it does not follow that decisions were his -- or that the short-term decisions he might have made, fully defined the long-term decisions that followed. As far as what Lila should have done if she disagreed with Erik's decisions, she should have simply overruled. That's pretty straightforward in an organization.

If your statements about Lila's lack of involvement are mere guesses, we have no quarrel. Guess whatever you like. But your words above, "The Whole superprotect debacle at de.wp happened under Erik, not lila," sounded a lot stronger to me than a mere guess. -Pete F (talk) 23:31, 2 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

I don't know what kind of regimented chain of command you are following in a transitionary period and blaming a few week old executive at the top, for actions from staff of several years but ok. You also don't notice that most(all) of the people you mention are gone. Then there are full ramifications of "overruling" Erik - it wouldn't be an easy task to do publicly with a board, community and about 200 staff watching (most hired by, and answering to Erik). What happened instead was - no further usage of superprotect and final removal after Erik's move.

I stand by my words. There are no statements or facts to the contrary to disprove - only gossip and personal statements. If there is something I am missing, please correct me. Thanks. Theo10011 (talk) 00:11, 3 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

A word or two, fwiw. I don't approve of playing the blame game on this; what matters is moving forward, and yes it's important to try to understand what went wrong in the past, but I don't think the problems of the past were, in their essence, mistakes merely by individual people. As I see it, Lila walked into the middle of a high-level-corporate culture already catastrophically ill — severe misconceptions of the role of the volunteer community, the role of the Foundation, and the role of the software design, to start with — and she failed to realize how bad the situation was; whether or not you can or should "blame" her for not realizing is kind of irrelevant. As an individual person, she seems to have understood that some changes were needed, but I'd say she failed to understand most of what was needed, and underestimated the size of the problem by perhaps an order of magnitude or more. Individuals come and go, but the cultural problems are like metastasized cancer, almost impossible to get rid of. --Pi zero (talk) 14:05, 3 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

Well said, Pi zero. Very much agree. -Pete F (talk) 23:19, 3 March 2016 (UTC) Reply

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