Talk:Reading/Strategy/Strategy Process

• Kindly note that we have a Q&A which can serve as starters :)

External Perception: people don't understand how Wikipedia works

For a very simple intervention, see W:EN:Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Research_help/Demo/4. Click on the question mark... What do you think? Cheers, Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 12:39, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Definition of the problem

The problem selected is "Our core capabilities, infrastructures, and workflows are not optimized for emerging platforms, experiences, and communities" and the community is asked to think of choices and possibilities to solve it. However, this problem isn't defined beyond this sentence, and it is unclear that those who didn't attend the workshop will have the same understanding. When you say "Our", who is "We"? The Wikimedia movement in general, the editors, the developers, the Foundation...? What are "core capabilities"? What are "emerging platforms" or "emerging experiences"? Interestingly, I think I would understand better this sentence if the Editing department would have come up with it, but in the context of Reading it is harder to deduce. Without a common understanding of the problem it is impossible to join the next steps of your strategy process (which I'm *very* happy that you want to share with us!).--Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:33, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

More questions by bawolff in a similar vein at wikitech-l.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:12, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

adding @Bawolff: 's comment on Wikitech

@Bawolff: posted a reply on Wikitech --Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 21:15, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

One thing I'd like to add, is that I applaud the honesty in which the issue list was generated. Often times people seem to not want to admit issues like factionalism, or "Wikipedia has failed to become relevant on mobile presentation-wise". Its important to be able to honestly self-asses. Bawolff (talk) 23:47, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Errr...what?

What is this? this made zero sense to me on the announcement on wikimedia-l and it makes as little sense here. The team(?) went through an exercise or game I presume, and came up with a vague list and attached vague tags to them and there were problems and possibilities and more problems later - this is far from coherent. I can usually follow a lot of difficult discussions and comment on them, but this was all over the place for me. I'm confused to say the least. Thanks. Theo10011 (talk) 21:52, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Also, Why is this on mediawiki? Shouldn't this be on meta? Along with every other WMF team initiative from grants to research to community focused tech outreach? Meta, is the central point for stuff like this, it becomes harder to follow the more we move these relevant things around. Theo10011 (talk) 21:52, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

There's a long tradition of strategy documents (or other types of documents) related to engineering teams being on mw.org. This isn't new. Bawolff (talk) 23:23, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

And it isn't bad, since most Engineering planning work ends up becoming development work (unsurprisingly) and eventually in software features that Wikimedia but also other MediaWiki users benefit from. In any case, all wiki pages are one click away, and watching them / posting on them takes basically the same effort. This discussion would be easier to watch if it would sit in a Flow board, but ah well.  ;) --Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:09, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

I would beg to differ Bawolff. I started on Strategy wiki myself, it was designed for just a strategy process, an year later it was mothballed and placed in read-only mode soon after, then came an outreach wiki with the same set of tracks. Meta, is centralized at least and it's always been active, there's already strategy work going on there for the grants team and WMF own strategic plan. It is the reading team's prerogative where they choose to locate themselves but given the lack of participation - actually I see next to zero participation here from the larger community - they might want to consider a more active centralized location for this process - Meta works fine for other teams and its easier to have everything in one place. But I guess it's your decision. My primary concern however, was that the text of the document was difficult to comprehend. It made little to no sense, it was so abstract and vague that I didn't understand what participation it wanted from me. Lastly, if Flow was active here - I probably wouldn't be commenting either, just like the others. Theo10011 (talk) 19:36, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

@Theo10011: glad to see you around :). Lets see what we have here:

• Language isn't clear. This has been repeatedly brought up by everyone else who commented so far. Let me give some details on where did this originate from: While brainstorming, sometimes you tend to elaborate on a problem in what would be 3 lines of text, then trying to sum them up from the first time, sometimes doesn't work out very well. Documentation has a dilemma of either radical re-wording or leaving things as it is. Given the comments, would it help to add clarification beside every item? And, I would still need everyone's feedback on how well that went :-)
• We can add a headsup to meta. WHat do you think? I should have done this earlier, so I am doing this now. I couldn't understand the part around "Meta works fine for other teams", though.

Thanks, --Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Hey Moushira. I didn't know you were involved in this process.

• Actually the issue with the language is two fold. Brainstorming sessions are understandably hard to reflect on paper but I thought this was essentially a report of the said session, something like a summary written after the fact. It's no where near a polished document and reads more like a stream of consciousness without context. Idiomatic usage of words like "bucketing" "Construct cascades" don't translate well internationally either - I had to google bucketing and the top two reference were either to a basketball related sports term or a stock trading strategy. Add to that, a certain variety of corporate speak that obfuscates things needlessly, and the problem surmounts.
• I doubt a message at the forum would help much at this stage. As for other team reference, I meant since WMF staff is organized on team basis, a large majority of them chose to locate themselves on meta, strategizing, formulating ideas, and they haven't had much issues with participation or visibility, hence "Meta works fine for other teams". It might work fine for reading team too, was the crux of my thought.

I hope this helps. Regards. Theo10011 (talk) 20:44, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Re: moving WMF development content around, that's a perennial discussion (see Technical_communications/Dev_wiki_consolidation for a different take on it). Doing it in a one-off basis for single discussions could just increase the level of confusion, though. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 05:53, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Caps lock

wctaiwan removed most of it, can we please not add it back? 2601:646:8301:E297:158F:7316:3901:28DF 22:51, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

And while we're at it, much of the custom formatting. The clustering section should simply be a list--the colours aren't meaningful, and have consistency and accessibility (contrast, no semantic indication in markup that they form a list) issues. The colour coding could have been replaced by simply listing the categories after each item in parentheses, which would have made the accessibility fixes unnecessary. I appreciate that effort went into it, but leaving styling to the software is usually the best approach, IMO. wctaiwan (talk) 22:57, 24 September 2015 (UTC)