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News and notes

Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)

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By Altercari
Interim Vice-President of Product Toby Negrim (pictured) made the announcement alongside CTO Victoria Coleman.

Wikimedia Foundation changes

Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a reorganization of the Product and Technology departments. The re-org is expected to deliver better product development with community engagement and an audience-based approach, a more efficient pipeline and to "better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction". In the new organization, the Product department will be renamed the Audiences department. The Editing team becomes the Contributors team; the Reading team the Readers team. The Discovery team will be distributed to the Readers team and the Technology department (but will still work together on various projects). The Fundraising Tech team will be moved to the Technology department. Team Practices group members working directly with teams in the Audiences and Technology departments will move into those teams, and the rest will move to the Talent & Culture department, under the newly-appointed T&C Chargée d’Affaires Anna Stillwell. Four audience verticals will be condensed into three: Readers, Contributors and Community Tech. The Design Director role will be reintroduced.

Brief notes

  • New administrators: There were no new administrators created since ONUnicorn as reported in the previous edition of The Signpost, and no new requests for adminship in the month of June. B.
  • Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones: 1,000 articles: Bislama (7 April 2017); Doteli (21 May 2017). 2,000: Livvi-Karelian (21 March 2017); Lao (28 April 2017). 5,000: Classical Chinese (4 February 2017); Komi (11 March 2017). 10,000: Mingrelian (1 May 2017); Min Dong (12 June 2017). 20,000: Quechua (15 February 2017); Interlingua (1 April 2017); Sundanese (16 April 2017); South Azerbaijani (27 May 2017). 50,000: Bengali (30 April 2017); Malayalam (2 May 2017); Javanese (7 May 2017). 100,000: Tamil (8 May 2017). 500,000: Arabic (6 March 2017).
  • Wikimedia Strategy: Cycle two (discussion of five thematic clusters) concluded on June 12. The strategy team is adjusting the process, and cycle three (defining a direction based on thematic clusters) is due to kick off in July. A.
  • Fair use: Wikipedia has launched FairCopyrightOz, teaming up with organisations in favor of fair use in Australia. Among the metrics, 12 million banner impressions in the first ten days, and over 67,000 landing page views in the first week. B.
  • WikidataCon 2017: WikidataCon 2017 registration, scholarship applications, and call for submissions are open. The event will be held 28 – 29 October 2017 in Berlin. B.
  • WMF Board Governance Committee: James Heilman joined the WMF committee as a volunteer and advisory member. According to the announcement on Wikimedia-l, Heilman will be a non-voting member of the Board Governance Committee and his tenure will serve as onboarding in case of future Board appointment. James edits the English Wikipedia as Doc James and is an administrator. B.
  • I4OC: On April 6, 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that they, along with 29 publishers and various organizations had founded the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) aimed at making citation data freely available for anyone to access. E.
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You can't use a linear extrapolation. The number of active administrators is proportional to a Poisson point process and is a subset of active editors, which have stabilized over the past five years. 153.120.214.254 (talk) 10:50, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Linear is simplistic, what fits better? The annual losses of active admins since 2008 are: 42, 86, 88, 33, 81, 30, 50, 1, 53 (a mean of 51.5). A simple linear regression of active totals since 2008: r2=0.96, standard error = 32, 50 loss a year., extrapolation to 0 takes 9 years, the year 2026. An exponential decay model visually fits (unlike linear), and r2=0.98, the trend halving the active admins per decade, henceforth "active admin attrition (AAA) rate" (so 1000 ten years ago, 500 now, predicts 250 in 2027).Widefox; talk 09:59, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a graph with better analysis (exponential regression fits only from mid 2011, total has r2=0.989 but a linear is similar) predicts less active admins than semi-active in a year from now, and total admin numbers 50% down from the peak by 2027:
  • User:Widefox/editors English Wikipedia administrator numbers 2003-2019, total number (and % from peak), % active, % semi-active, % inactive
    User:Widefox/editors English Wikipedia administrator numbers 2003-2019, total number (and % from peak), % active, % semi-active,  % inactive
  • User:Widefox/editors English Wikipedia administrator numbers 2011-2019 (ditto legend)
    User:Widefox/editors English Wikipedia administrator numbers 2011-2019 (ditto legend)
  • User:Widefox/editors English Wikipedia administrator numbers 2011-2029 (ditto legend)
    User:Widefox/editors English Wikipedia administrator numbers 2011-2029 (ditto legend)
Widefox; talk 21:37, 30 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Vertical market probably, and yes, the announcement is very heavy on Silicon Valley biz jargon. - Bri (talk) 21:26, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
It wasn't entirely clear in the announcement and there was no time to get clarification before the publication deadline, so I thought it would be best to stick to their lingo. I'd like the record to show that I did try to figure it out though!!! —A L T E R C A R I  ✍ 10:08, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The term "audience vertical" was introduced in the 2015 re-org. The idea is that job functions (like coding or testing) are horizontal slices through an organization, while products and features are vertical slices. In the foundation, each "vertical" focuses on a specific audience (e.g. Readers), and at least in theory each one contains personnel of all the disciplines it needs to be relatively self-sufficient. Each "vertical" is smaller than a department, but usually larger than a team. KSmith (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I know I'm confused. As I recall, the community re-elected Raystorm and Pundit as well as returned Doc James to the seat he was wrongly removed from. I can see that WMF keeps several editors in non-voting positions (no surprise) but I guess I don't understand what Doc's position means. Chris Troutman (talk) 10:09, 24 June 2017 (UTC
    • I was wondering and asked Doc James in this secion of his user talk page. The !election for the WMF Board only provides advice / recommendations to the Board, which controls the appointment of its own members. The meeting where the decision will be taken is not until August. Apparently, if Doc James is appointed to the Board, he would also move from a non-voting / advisory position on the Committee to which he has been appointed to become a full voting member of it. He sees this advisory appointment as a positive sign for the actions of the Board in appointing its new members in August, so hopefully this (temporary) advisory appointment is good news. EdChem (talk) 14:20, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
      Or you could view of it as a "probationary trial" where he has to "toe the line" as a non-voting member, or he won't be appointed in August! wbm1058 (talk) 17:25, 24 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • "We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency, confusion and demoralization." -- Attributed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c.27-66 AD).
(This was attributed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c.27-66 AD) by Robert Townsend in his book Up the Organization (1970). The original source appears to be Charlton Ogburn, Jr. writing in Harper's magazine (1957). --Guy Macon (talk) 07:38, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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