Wikidata talk:Strategy 2017/Cycle 2/A Truly Global Movement

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

GerardM

When we seek to be truly global, we need to seek metrics that measure global impact. This means that we factor in where we are strong and where we are weak. So when a town in Africa has a bigger population than an European town, it follows that there could be a similar audience for this town. When the European town gets more attention from readers, we have to seek out why there is this discrepancy. What we find is what we need to address to become truly global.

As a movement we make a big effort to connect to the US Library of Congress and we should. But in order to be global we cannot hide the fact that for the majority of countries we do not know their representatives, we do not know the people with power. For many countries it is relatively easy to reach a tipping point where we become relevant. We can and should be innovative in how we do this. For the Museum of Modern Art there are generated articles waiting to happen. We can do a similar thing for politicians in any language.

When we want to be global, our metrics have to be global. But at this time we do not even know what people want to read and cannot find. We do not know what people read from different countries. When we do, we know what we can propose to authors of these areas to write articles about or what data to enrich. When we continue with everything Wikipedia is English and what fits for English fits for the rest of the world, we will never be truly global.

Yes, we need more people who are not American in the top of our organisation. GerardM (talk) 15:58, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

ArthurPSmith

In a single-language wikipedia you get interactions between people around the world with differing points of view, but to be truly global you need interactions between people who speak different languages. This isn't easy - but wikidata shows it is possible, with editors who natively speak hundreds of different languages working together. As people come to a common understanding of truths about the natural and human world, about history and science and culture, the barriers to progress will fall - bright ideas to improve things can come from any source, and we can work together to make things better. There is a fragility in homogeneity - diversity is a strength, and a truly global wikimedia will be a strong force for good in the world. ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:20, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

GerardM

When a substitute for Wikipedia is introduced, this substitute will replace us when it has an edge over what Wikipedia offers. At this time we are globally present but our content does not cover the world. In the end when we remain this lily white we are not global. GerardM (talk) 15:58, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM: I'm not quite sure if this is an answer to that particular question. Could you please clarify? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:20, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Snipre

5/5. Not the most important theme. Why ? Become we have nothing to offer: WP and WD use data from others. To have some influence and to play as global actors, we should have something to offer. And what are offering ? The data of others, not our work. Snipre (talk) 15:09, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

@Snipre: we have nothing to offer, we should have something to offer? what do you mean by that? Tu peux répondre en français. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Actually by presenting the "sum of all knowledge" as one body, integrating the information from Wikipedias, external sources etc we produce a substatial offering. That is our work and it is original. It is not research and that is not relevant at all. The notion that we can not analyse the data we hold is actually and factually wrong. It would mean that we cannot allow query on our data.. We do analyse our data and it is used to stimulate people to write articles, to seek missing data, to analyse data that may be wrong. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:39, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

According to the "No_original_research" policy we can't produce data or analyse. We can't create something original, we can only act as data reproducer and at the end reference databases can do a better job than us if they start to cooperate. We can only put pressure on reference databases to force them to open their data set and to show them the interest to collaborate. For example if I need data about population in France why do I use WD ? I can get the data from INSEE with the insurance that the data are correct. What added value can be provided by WD ? A movement has to add something new to have an influence, une raison d'être, and currently WD is just a collection of data from other sources and we can't do more than that. Snipre (talk) 17:14, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

The "no original research" is a Wikipedia thing. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:39, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Precisely, NOR applies only to the description. Wikipedia gathers freely reusable information from sources which often are proprietary and less accessible (think about the Wikipedia Library and all those paywalled databases). That's the value we add. More importantly, "we" (the movement) means more than Wikipedia. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

GerardM

Why stop doing things when we can also change how we do things? When we want people to go to a library, they will not go to a US library when they live in the Netherlands. You can link to the library for the people who access Wikipedia. THAT would do more to get them to go to their library that the current wall of text.

Think of a reader as a person and not as a representative of only one group. What can you do for me to make my experience better. Do not use as an excuse that personalisation costs bandwidth. Yes it does but we want to effectively share in the sum of all knowledge and bandwidth is an excuse. Bandwidth comes in terms of hardware and it is getting cheaper and in people. When the WMF cannot centrally diversify, ask the chapters to point to ways where a local diversification will gain us more attention/involvement from our readers. When chapters are ill equipped/have no opinion, collaborate with other organisations. When we are truly global, we are not alone.

If there is one thing we need to stop doing; it is being American and USA focused. GerardM (talk) 15:59, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

C933103

In term of wikidata I am thinking about resolution of concepts being stored in wikidata. For instance, in some languages there are only one word and consequently one article to describe what is snow. On the other hand in other languages there are tons of different description regarding different type of snows. When wikipedia readers jumping across languages with the help of interwiki links provided by wikidata, the current one-to-one model might not work best when there are some materials that are significantly more fine in one language than another. Perhaps the interwiki link function of mediawiki can provide some form of one-to-many link. C933103 (talk) 17:26, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

ChristianKl

We are currently really bad at learning what works for building new Wikipedia communities. It's not even possible to easily access data about which Wikipedia communities grow the fastest. There's data about the total number of articles but there's no data about the growth rate. The design of most modern websites is the result of a lot of experiments. Facebook runs 100,000s of split text at any single point in time. For languages that currently don't have a sizable audience, it would be good to run empiric experiments to find out whether specific strategies work. Running controlled experiments reduces the autonomy of a specific Wikipedia a bit but it's vital for us to know which strategies we try work and which don't. Without gathering good data there's a good chance that other websites who strongly optimize for grabbing users attention are better than we are at gathering users attention. ChristianKl (talk) 13:59, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

When we do research, it is based on English Wikipedia or maybe one of the bigger Wikipedias. When we see the growth in the Cebuano Wikipedia Wikimedia officials are adamant that there is nothing there that they will not study it. This attitude is wrong on every level. When we want to be global we have to admit to the bias in our modus operandi and seek out what works for small languages like the Sign Languages.. For me the main message is that as a group we only care about our own. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:49, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Lymantria

A problem with being truly global is that primary sources often are not truly global. Until now we rely on primary sources and are not primary sources ourselves. To become truly global Wikimedia might make a step by hosting and facilitating primary sources at global blind spots. Lymantria (talk) 21:25, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Lymantria, in what way could the Wikimedia movement host and facilitate primary sources? Could you provide an example of this idea? Chicocvenancio (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia could host for instance an electronic journal or like publications covering such a blind spot. That would be helpful in really stepping out of biases. Lymantria (talk) 21:42, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

When statements are supported in Wikipedia, by inference the source can be in any language. When people write an article and the text is in line with available statements, all the support is inherently available.

Do appreciate that in many languages there is no support in the same way as it is in English, German, French or even Dutch.. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 21:54, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

My point is not the language issue, but the issue that available sources concentrate on certain ("western") parts of the world, and much less on other parts. Lymantria (talk) 14:28, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

C933103

Wikidata is a great site with great functionality, but its usage as of now seems to be rather limited to wikipedia and etc.. Is it possible to connect wikidata with wikifarms or other external wikis? C933103 (talk) 17:28, 5 June 2017 (UTC)