How do you see the role of the collaboration with other free knowledge projects such as OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive?
This is one of the Affiliate questions selected for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election 2022. Only candidates can post their replies here. You can read these answers on Meta.
I think the collaboration with other free knowledge projects is good in the way that we can refer from the data collected by the other free knowledge projects. We can somehow even learn from them to better structure our projects.
Much of my volunteer work before joining the BoT focused on outreach and I strongly believe in its power to grow our movement. Partnerships are necessary, even crucial, to our ongoing success and our ability to fulfill our vision.
This is especially true as we strive to lead the ecosystem of Free Knowledge. We have to join forces with like-minded organizations, and OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive are great examples. There are also quite a few other organizations we can/have partner with, some closer to our values than others, but finding common grounds will help us progress towards our vision.
Supporting his free knowledge projects is a good idea. Because it allows them to work calmly without worries with the lack of technical and financial materials and especially to contribute to create passage for humanitarian aid and to allow access to other
Reply by Mike Peel (Mike Peel)
Collaboration with projects like these is very important, and I would like to see it increased in the future, where it makes sense - particularly in the interconnection between the other projects and Wikimedia. For example, both embedding OSM in Wikimedia projects, and embedding Wikimedia content in OSM - and making it easier to link between projects.
Since our vision continues to have us all working towards a world in which we can all “freely share in the sum of all knowledge,” then I think we would be well advised to grow our relationship with other projects working toward the same goal. To do this well, we can examine areas in the partnership where our contribution will be most useful (e.g., the translation of articles, the creation of datasets from groups of articles or vice versa, etc.) We may need to ensure that our partners also support our key values; e.g. equity.
I see the role of the collaboration with other free knowledge projects as a very beneficial one as no one is an island. We all have various roles to play. For example, the collaboration between the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer communities has fixed over one million broken outbound web links on the English Wikipedia. In the future, this could also be extended to the over 290 existing language Wikipedias. This also applies to Open Street Maps where volunteers have come together to do collaborative mapping as well as Wikimedia projects using OSM as a locator map for cities and travel points of interest.
WMF’s projects such as Wikipedia stands to benefit, Linking to street maps is good, but a lot of articles about places can be enhanced by having map images embedded alongside the text. OpenStreetMap is the best way to do this, while still presenting only open licensed content on the page. The Internet Archive has been a strategic partner of the Wikimedia movement since its beginning, with the Wayback Machine archiving cited sources and fixing dead links in Wikipedia articles to point to their archive directory content. This invaluable service (Turn All References Blue) has led to other projects to add permanent (archived) URLs to digitized resources.
We need more of it! A great analogy I’ve heard (from Risker) is that Wikimedia is just a small grove in a much larger forest of the free knowledge movement. We cannot do it all alone, nor should we when other projects and organizations are better established for specific niches (their own groves, to continue the analogy) of free knowledge. I am particularly inspired by “the big open” panel at the 2017 Wikimania (notes), in which leadership from Mozilla/WMF/Creative Commons expressed the need to work together to defend and advance the free knowledge movement.
Very good question ! Decentralization should be match with collaboration with other project of movement concerning by the free knowledge. That’s not them that they have to joint or follow the wikimedia movement but the wikimedia movement that must join humbly a general movement of decentralized and independent stakeolders.
We are a subset of a larger free knowledge ecosystem, so collaboration, content reuse and even support of other actors is natural. Resource Allocation Working Group actually discussed boundaries of the Movement using such entities as examples as we enjoy their work, could use it even more, and most probably would be ready to support when needed. Especially if we want to evolve and make Wikimedia even more amazing and approachable, partnerships will be highly helpful.
E.g. imagine Wikipedia, Wikitravel, Wikidata and Commons data merged with openstreetmap, public statistics etc. content to provide a novel Wikiguide. 