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22 December 2016

Year in review

Looking back on 2016

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WMF leadership struggles

Relationships between WMF and volunteer communities

Volunteer communities have had their own governance structures for producing and maintaining Wikimedia sites, many of which predate the existence of the WMF. Many volunteers also take a strong interest in the work of the WMF itself, and its efficacy in serving the Wikimedia vision and mission. Governance and transparency issues, which impact communication around strategic and tactical work, are closely entwined with the WMF's relationships with the volunteer community. 2016 saw much discussion about governance issues, in various venues.

The WMF increasingly advertises specific ways for community members to weigh in on decisions in a variety of areas. For instance, the Community Wishlist process, now in its second iteration, has successfully invited community input, in a structured format that first collects and then ranks proposals, to help determine the priorities for developing technical features. The process has produced worthy results, and has earned praise from many quarters.

In another example, the WMF's most recent strategy consultation presented three strategic priorities, and an open invitation for responses in a two-week window in March, after a similar "Stage 1" comment period on the same three priorities in January. For anyone who wanted to express views in that relatively narrow scope, the opportunity was straightforward and efficient; but community members wishing to address strategic questions more broadly may not have had much opportunity to do so.

“

Two community quotes addressing organizational communication, from the talk page of Tymkiv's status report:

"If your communication channels are clogged, it may be because you do not have facilitated communication...." – Slowking4

"The WMF has hundred of employees and tens of millions of dollars of income. It spends money on a wide variety of things, many of which are not obviously more important than securing its own good governance. The costs of lack of transparency, both in terms of loss of opportunity and reputation, and more directly in terms of waste of staff, board and volunteer time and "bandwidth" are already large. How much did the "Knowledge Engine" row cost? How much did the Geshuri row cost? How much did removing James Heilman from the Board cost? How much did Superprotect cost? Would it not have been better to try transparency instead?" – Rogol Domedonfors

”

Community members often self-organize to express concerns where feedback has not been explicitly solicited. But fully absorbing unsolicited input presents challenges, and the WMF lacks the structures to do so effectively. According to trustee Dariusz Jemielniak, "currently, [the WMF doesn't] have the staff bandwidth" to be substantially more transparent, which suggests it also may not be adequately staffed to process input.

2016 was the third year in which the WMF declined to formally acknowledge receipt of a 2014 letter signed by more than 1,000 people, concerning the controversial "Superprotect" software feature. Tretikov's vacuous statement upon removing Superprotect—that it had created a "precedent of mistrust"—is all the organization's leadership has had to say in public on the matter; it was made at a moment of extraordinary political upheaval in the WMF. In April 2016, Tretikov became the third and final recipient of the letter to leave the organization (after deputy director Erik Möller and board chair Jan-Bart de Vreede). It has become clear that the organization considers the matter closed, and expects to address its communication challenges to the community without reference to this significant event.

There were bright spots during 2016. In October, the WMF's grantmakers provided a substantive accounting of the impact of 2014 criticism of the Foundations funding of a controversial Wikipedian in residence program at Harvard University's Belfer Center. And of course, a great deal of effective staff–volunteer collaboration took place in day-to-day improvements on technical features—to which the Signpost's Technology Report section offers frequent testimony.

In January, as the controversies around Heilman and Geshuri were unfolding, WMF staffer Adam Wight started the Wikimedia Foundation transparency gap page on Meta, and encouraged staff and community members to engage. The page saw a flurry of activity, with several dozen editors building a list of 21 areas in need of improvement. Although there was no explicit connection, newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv started a similar page in October, opening with the bold statement that "Board transparency needs improvement. We lack understanding of what it means to be transparent."

Fundraising

The 2011 strategic plan predicted that the WMF's budget "might grow to approximately $50 million by 2015." In this respect, the plan's goals were massively exceeded: the WMF's 2014–15 revenue was more than $75 million. The WMF continued its success in substantially increasing its revenue every year for a decade. It also established a new endowment fund; and beyond that, formally and informally affiliated organizations—such as including the German, Swiss, and Indonesian chapters, and the Wiki Education Foundation—all generate additional revenue of their own.

The WMF's fundraising success was accompanied by efforts to improve the messaging of its banner ads, a perennial source of criticism from members of the Wikimedia community. In particular, many have questioned the propriety of messaging that conveys a sense of Wikipedia's impending doom. An October presentation from the fundraising team highlighted their evolving approach and efforts to incorporate feedback.

But criticism didn't end entirely. When the banner campaign achieved its target ahead of schedule, former Signpost editor in chief Andreas Kolbe argued in several venues that the campaign should not continue, as scheduled, through the end of 2016. A detailed rebuttal from the WMF's Lisa Seitz Gruwell and Jaime Villagomez argued for continuation, but seemed to draw little support outside the organization. The discussion spread to other sites, including Slashdot and Reddit. In the view of Slashdot user careysub, "it appears that Jimmy Wales has broken new ground in "charity engineering", operating a charity in such a way that the various scoring factors for a well-run charity are met, without actually providing any real transparency."

Curating and disseminating knowledge continued apace

Organizational challenges aside, Wikipedia's 15th anniversary was indeed a cause for much celebration. The WMF coordinated efforts to rally goodwill around the world via the site 15.wikipedia.org; India alone hosted 14 events as local communities around the world marked the occasion. Numerous media outlets around the world took note.

Wikimedians continued to build, curate, and disseminate knowledge resources. The Wiki Education Foundation ran the Year of Science, engaging higher-education institutions in North America in an ambitious effort to improve Wikipedia's science coverage. The WikiProject Med Foundation worked with Wikimedia Switzerland and Kiwix to produce mobile apps that present medical information in several languages. The Signpost archives from 2016 contain many stories about enterprising volunteers and novel organizational initiatives to realize the Wikimedia mission.

Wikidata, one of the more important yet less prominent Wikimedia projects, transitioned from funding via Wikimedia Germany to direct funding from the Wikimedia Foundation. A recent blog post, 10 cool queries for Wikidata that will blow your mind. Number 7 will shock you, highlighted the use of SPARQL queries on Wikidata, which were enabled in 2015.

The annual Wikimania conference was held in a small village in Italy—a substantial shift from recent venues in major world cities like London, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. National Wikimedia conferences in France, India, and North America earned praise from many quarters. Emily Temple-Wood and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, who edit as Keilana and Rosiestep (respectively), were named co-Wikipedians of the year due to their work with anti-harassment on Wikipedia. Months earlier, Temple-Wood had been featured in several news outlets for using harassment as motivation to write articles on women scientists. National conferences were held as well, including the second-ever WikiConference India and its notably successful hackathon.

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More to highlight for 2016

I wish this wasn't as WMF focused. Did we achieve so little as a community this year that we don't have much to highlight other than what is in the last paragraph ? That's a bit sad. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:17, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

TheDJ, my estimate of the number of important things I missed is about 9,000,000. There is so much going on in our world! I hope you and others will add items here in the comments. (But I do hear your concern, thanks for the feedback.) -Pete Forsyth (talk) 16:21, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Missed highlights

Inaugural WikiConference North America
Inaugural Bay Area WikiSalon
5 millionth enwiki article by Casliber — Preceding unsigned comment added by Checkingfax (talk • contribs) 18:01, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The start of the Challenge series of contests to improve content -- many with cash prizes. (About time people who write content got to directly benefit for their efforts.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:23, 26 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
... add your suggestion above this bullet point

Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 17:55, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Checkingfax: The 5 millionth article happened in 2015.

See last year's Signpost. Mz7 (talk) 18:06, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think everyone agrees that one article cannot hope to cover the full spectrum of such a complex worldwide movement. At the Signpost, we would love to see more news writers. It's hard with so few. Tony (talk) 10:17, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Concurring with Tony, I note that several here have written or outlined items that could easily spin off into separate articles or be incorporated in a report like this. I hope Peteforsyth doesn't mind if I suggest that anyone who might be interested in contributing to a future edition of the Signpost should drop Rosiestep, our HR specialist, a line to see how to get involved. Pinging Mz7 and Checkingfax in particular. Go Phightins! 06:22, 28 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - Done [1] Mz7 (talk) 07:56, 28 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How very 2014

"no substantial change in the overall decline in Wikipedia contributors that began in 2007" would have been trueish in an annual review of 2014 but things have moved on a bit. After the rally of 2015 numbers now seem stable, though below the 2007 peak (individual language communities will vary). Since I broke the story of the editing rally over a year ago in the Signpost it seems odd to recycle a 2014 story today. If you want to be specific to the English Wikipedia numbers are clearly up on the 2014 minima with User:Katalaveno/TBE showing a shift from 10 weeks per ten million edits to more like 9 weeks.Ϣere SpielChequers 16:57, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed the incorrect info Ϣere SpielChequers 22:56, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for this, WereSpielChequers, I regret the error. I do think it's worthwhile to note that even if stabilized, the trend has not substantially reversed -- but you're quite correct that my phrasing was inaccurate. I've restored the original text, but made reference to your comment, which should make things a bit more consistent and informative for our readers. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 02:04, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I don't dispute that the stats are complicated and among those who see the editing decline as a problem, the jury is out as to whether things are stabilising, rebounding or it is just a pause. Of course if it does continue to grow the glass half empty brigade will start to lament that we are no longer making big reductions in vandalism edits by faster reversion and edit filters. Most of the big wins there have already happened and unless someone designs some effective anti-spam filters future reductions in badfaith editing due to filter improvements will be minor. The unfortunate thing is that we don't know whether such positive reasons for the decline in raw edits are more or less significant than negative reasons such as the difficulty of tablet editing and near impossibility of smartphone editing. But if we are both still around in a year would you like a paragraph from me for the 2017 year in review? Ϣere SpielChequers 09:42, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes please! WereSpielChequers, I would certainly appreciate that, and if for some reason I've been succeeded by new editor I'm confident they will feel the same. To be perfectly honest, I can't be confident that I will remember at the relevant time...I will try to find a convenient place to leave a note, but it would be most helpful if you could also reach out in, say, November. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 18:27, 23 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

750 millionth edit

A better stat to have included would have been that the English Wikipedia's 750 millionth edit took place on the 17th November 2016. OK the actual edit was a vandalism, but it is an impressive stat. Ϣere SpielChequers 19:16, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The year of user rights

On the technical side, we saw three new user access levels created this year: extended confirmed, page mover, and new page reviewer.

Extended confirmed

The first, extended confirmed, was originally intended solely as a means of enforcing the various arbitration remedies that prevented editors with under 30 edits/500 days threshold to edit various topic areas, such as Palestine-Israel articles – see this village pump discussion in February authorizing its creation. In a widely attended request for comment in July and August, the community expanded the scope of extended confirmed protection to include "any form of disruption (such as vandalism, edit wars, etc.) on any topic", so long as semi-protection has proven to be ineffective. Supporters argued that an intermediary between semi-protection and full protection was needed, while opponents argued that the widespread implementation of the new protection level would discourage newcomers – a consensus developed that extended confirmed protection should not be used as a first resort and that all implementations would be posted to User:MusikBot/ECPMonitor/Report, transcluded on WP:AN. There is currently a request for comment in progress as to whether the scope should be expanded to include high-risk templates and creation protection.

Page mover

The second, page mover, received wide support from the community for its creation – see the request for comment in April and May. The RfC simultaneously approved the flags to be added to the new user group: suppressredirect (which allows users to move pages without leaving a redirect behind) and move-subpages (which allows users to move subpages when moving their parent pages). There were additional proposals to include the ability to override title blacklist, the ability to apply move protection, and an increased throttle limit for page moves to the user right, but those did not receive consensus.

New page reviewer

The third, new page reviewer, was a bit more complicated. In late August and September 2016, a request for comment discussed a proposal for a new user right called “New Page Reviewer”, whose stated purpose was “to ensure that users are suitably experienced for patrolling new pages.” The RfC’s introduction presented arguments stressing the importance of the new page patrol process and the need to get it right in order to avoid biting newcomers. There was significant opposition within the RfC to any restriction to accessing functions of Twinkle, but that was ultimately deemed beyond the scope of the RfC, and it closed with a “clear, community-wide consensus for the technical changes proposed.” A second RfC was then held in October 2016 to determine the qualifications for granting this newly endorsed user right, proposing a set of criteria which received wide community approval. These guidelines for granting the permission may be read at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Reviewers.

In accordance with these consensuses, on 16 November 2016, the technical ability to mark pages as “patrolled” was restricted to users with the newly created new page reviewer right, as well as administrators. As this transition took place, a dispute was brought to ANI revolving around whether users without the “new page reviewer” user right were still permitted to identify themselves as “new page patrollers” through user boxes like {{User Newpages with Twinkle}} and {{User wikipedia/NP Patrol2}}. Some said no, arguing that as a result of the prior RfCs, users without the “new page reviewer” user right should no longer participate in the new page patrol process. Others said yes, arguing that the prior RfCs only restricted the technical ability to mark pages as “patrolled” to a group of editors, and that the general tasks of “new page patrolling” (e.g. adding maintenance tags, copyediting, nominating for deletion) could still be performed by anyone. A request for comment was started late November to resolve that dispute, which is still partially open as of now. Mz7 (talk) 17:53, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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@@ Line 18: / Line 18: @@
 {{signpost inline quote|The celebration of Wikipedia's 15th birthday threatens to be overshadowed by debates concerning governance of the various Wikimedia projects and how much of a voice the community will have in the future direction of the Wikimedia movement. These debates also threaten to overshadow another debate we should be having about the future of the community, regarding what lies at the heart of the movement and its community: the encyclopedia itself.}}
-Upheaval in the organization, of course, need not directly impact volunteers' work of building an encyclopedia and other online resources. The curation of all human knowledge into a free repository continued without apparent interruption. Our projects continued their perpetual growth; the English Wikipedia, for instance, grew to exceed 5.3 million articles. However, some trends offered less cause for celebration: there was no substantial change in the overall decline in Wikipedia contributors that began in 2007, or in the various demographic skews, like the oft-noted "gender gap", among our ranks.
+Upheaval in the organization, of course, need not directly impact volunteers' work of building an encyclopedia and other online resources. The curation of all human knowledge into a free repository continued without apparent interruption. Our projects continued their perpetual growth; the English Wikipedia, for instance, grew to exceed 5.3 million articles. However, some trends offered less cause for celebration: there was no substantial change in the various demographic skews, like the oft-noted "gender gap", among our ranks.
 ==== WMF leadership struggles ====