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  On the Radar:  An Occasional Newsletter on Wikipedia's Challenges

"Comments?" links go to OtR's own talk page, not those of the original news-item sources.

According to WashPo, WMF has tapped a South African nonprofit executive and lawyer to be its new executive director. While I've been saying for a decade that WMF has to stop hiring software- and online-services-industry people to run an NGO, and hire NGO people, this one – Maryana Iskander – is rather cagey and bureaucratic, or comes off that way in the interview.
  • First up is a belief that the WMF Universal Code of Conduct (drafted in supposed consulation with all WMF editorial communities but largely ignoring all their feedback) is the key to diversifying Wikipedia's editorial pool. (And as always in mainstream media, "Wikipedia" means wiki.riteme.site.) The entire UCC is basically a restatement of some key WP (and Commons, and Wiktionary) policies plus some WMF "vision" hand-waving. It's questionably reasonable to expect a largely redundant document, which was created for projects that lack sufficient policy development, and which has and will continue to have little impact on en.Wikipedia, to cause a sea change in who volunteers to edit here. That takes real-world outreach on a major scale. One would think a nonprofit CEO would already get that.
  • Next up, Iskander makes rather unclear reference to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This content-liability shield has been much in the US news lately, as a target of the Republican Party in its feud with "big tech", especially social media sites deplatforming far-right writers for anti-democracy propaganda and misinformation about the public health crisis. Iskander is correct that WMF isn't in a danger position in this, but the article strongly implies that Iskander and WMF are keenly interested and involved. Even when prompted, Iskander does not meaningfully elaborate, and just offers an education-is-important dodge. So, we need more actual information on what WMF is doing with regard to efforts to revise section 230.
  • Moving on, Iskander says something alarming: "Wikipedia has seen a huge amount of increased traffic around covid-19, [so has] worked on a very productive partnership with the World Health Organization to provide additional credibility to that work." That's hard to distinguish from a statement that WHO has editorial plants who WP:OWN the relevant articles. But it's cause for concern whatever the truth is. WMF should not be "partnering" with any external body to influence the encyclopedia's content (especially not one that has taken as many credibility hits as the WHO).
  • There's something potentially interesting in here, though devils could reside in the details: "a lot of the basic access issues might technically look different [between SA and US], but how people understand what information is available to them – how they access it – those issues exist everywhere". What is this going to mean on a practical level? Is MOS:ACCESS going to be better-enforced? Is Simple English Wikipedia going to be reintegrated into the main site as alternative articles? Is the mobile version of the site going to stop dropping features? Is WP:GLAM going to turn into a bigger effort? There are a hundred ways (sensible and otherwise) this statement could be made to affect policy, funding, and the end "product" (though one suspects nothing important will change for the better unless the internal culture of WMF's organizational leadership also changes in a major way, such as by diversifying the board of directors, toward more academics and nonprofit people instead of tech-industry rich people).
In short, I have hopes that Iskander's NGO background will make for a better exec. dir. fit than that last two we've had, but right out of the gate she's saying strange, too-vague, and even troubling things. And nothing in the interview actually suggests anything like a fix for WP's editorial diversity problem, which the headline suggested was going to be the focus.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:48, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
[Comments?]
"It is possible to detect eerie echoes of the confessional state of yore", and today's far left is recycling techniques from fun times like the Inquisition." I've been saying this for years, and the article is a good summary of how "left-wing" and "leftist" do not always align with "liberal". It's an observation too few mainstream writers have been willing to make, but the truth of it explains a great deal of disruptive PoV-pushing on Wikipedia. Illiberal left-wing activism is often harder to detect, and harder for the average editor to publicly resist, than far-right extremism, which we tend to recognize then delete on sight.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:51, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
[Comments?]
An Information Research survey shows that people's editing motivation is often "their desire to change the views of society", and also that they view Wikipedia as a "social media site". This isn't news to us, and the material doesn't have a huge statistical sample, but I would bet real money that it will be re-confirmed by later studies. This has systemic bias, neutrality, and conflict of interest implications (also not news). What we don't really think much about it is what this means for Wikipedia long-term, as everyone with an agenda becomes more aware that they can try to sneakily leverage Wikipedia articles to boost their side of any story, especially after the Trump 2016 US presidential campaign proved that powerful results can pulled off by organized manipulation of "social media" sites (whether WP really is one or not is irrelevant if the public thinks it is).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:28, 1 June 2018 (UTC)
[Comments?]
The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey has closed; the results are here, and as disappointing as in previous years. This process is fundamentally flawed, for numerous reasons:
  • Only the top-ten proposals will get any resources devoted to them, no matter how many there are, or how urgent or important they are.
  • It's a straight-vote, canvassing-allowed, no-rationale-needed, short-term "popularity contest" – normal Wikimedian consensus-building is thwarted.
  • This setup encourages people to vote for the 10 things they want most, then vote against every other proposal even if they agree with it. Proposals cannot build support over time.
  • There's no "leveling of the playing field" between categories. Important proposals of narrower interest (e.g. to admins, or to technical people) never pass, only the lowest-common-denominator ones do – and the most-canvassed ones.
  • Too few Wikimedians even know the survey exists or when it is open, which greatly compounds the skew caused by focused canvassing – the intentional spikes actually determine the outcome.
I've drafted some suggestions for making it work better.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  18:08, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
[Comments?]


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