(Re)Introducing Movement Strategy - Back to the Basics

well said. one major basic reason that the MS forums have been set up, is to open up the Movement Strategy process, and to give more people a greater opportunity to provide their own feedback, ideas, and input.

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actually, no we don’t. in theory, we do; in actuality, the wikis are run by a small number of determined editors. one illustration of this, perhaps, might be how there seems to be some resistance or reluctance, to parts of the idea of creating alternate forums and platforms where less-prominent voices can be heard, such as groups on the app Telegram, or on Discord, or Zoom calls, or indeed the MS Forums.

This is very interesting remark and I would agree that there are quite some things radical in practice that are not represented in policies and plans (including also super small donations and anonymous wiki-edit contributions as relevant for long-term sustainability).

“The Movement Strategy recommendations are all connected and support each other. Like the goals, it is not possible to pursue them in isolation.”

So why are WMF teams pretending as if this is actually possible?

I’m also missing any mention of the previous efforts to make the strategy more accessible. Did you stock up the number of people involved in communicating the strategy process? Did you change your approach on how you communicate the potentials of this strategy? Does broandband messaging work with such complex topics or does it need more individual communication and workshops?

It’s difficult to give feedback if there’s no visible sign of change in the what is being written/said.

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I think that they didn’t do those things. But this forum is still meant to improve things here.

There is a very practical problem the introduction to Movement Strategy shared above wants to address: many people don’t know what is the MS, why it matters to them, and how they can get involved. This draft aims to provide a basic explanation that we can use on the Movement Strategy landing page.

But before, we need to address the feedback received, with a focus on what should be changed in the current draft.

Several wiki projects are mentioned as well as the expression “sister projects” which is common among editors. But ok, yes, let’s look at ways to make the wiki essence explicit.

The draft now refers to the Vision:

Wikipedia started in 2001 as an invitation to share the sum of all knowledge.

Should we link explicitly to the Vision, to make this connection clear? The purpose of this draft is to describe the Movement Strategy, understanding that important background information is explained somewhere else. We can always link to the pages offering this information.

The draft is aligned with this idea. The section “Our future in the ecosystem of free knowledge” refers to those wikis and the challenges they face.

The focus of this topic is to produce an introduction to Movement Strategy that can be communicated easily and widely. Your questions refer to how this communication is done, and they are related to How to improve the facilitation of the Movement Strategy implementation?

I’d say there’s also people who don’t believe it’s important, or believe that it doesn’t address the important issues that the movement has (for example, an inability to get technical problems addressed).

The vision is pretty lousy, to be honest. I mean, if you read “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.” out of context, do you see something like wiki-based projects like that?

I’d also say that “Wikipedia started in 2001 as an invitation to share the sum of all knowledge.” probably isn’t an accurate statement - there has always been the idea that some knowledge is worthy of inclusion and some is not, right from the start. (The idea of ‘encyclopedic’ has become more formal, but it’s always been there.)

The Mission is a much more specific an interesting statement, especially if we transpose it from the Foundation to the movement. The mission also has a much better description of what the different parts of the movement are ‘for’, and if you read it, it’s much easier to figure out why the movement exists.

I also think the founding principles are also something that the movement strategy should address.

Re-reading that section, I can sort of see how you say that, though I’d think that it mischaracterizes the problems that the wiki projects are facing, at least as perceived by people not affiliated with the WMF. I suspects this disconnect discredits the movement strategy more than it convinces people there’s a problem with their project.

There’s also a fairly fundamentally disconnect between the Movement Strategy and the movement proper - the strategy was created in a top-down way, and hasn’t been changed since its creation. Now that we’re years in, shouldn’t there be a way for the community to update a strategy that was created in a fairly different environment?

I was previously considering creating a new central thread, as a gathering pace and collaborative workspace for sharing ideas, insights, info and strategy for actually devising and coordinating an actual movement strategy.,

yes, I know that’s the whole point of this forum at this website. I think there are many useful and valuble ideas here.

However, hypothetically, if a newcomer came to this site, they might validly ask “so what is our actual Movement Strategy?” to which we might reply, “well, that’s what we discuss here on a continual basis.” to which the hypothetical newcomer might reply, “yes, I know that, but what actually is the strategy?” so therefore I was thinking of setting up a new thread, to collect ideas and insights to answer that question.

however, when I was setting up a possible new thread, I came across this existing thread. so I decided to post my thoughts on this topic simply as a reply on this thread for now.

perhaps we could use this thread as a central gathering-place to actually come up with some sort of cohesive specific strategy of sort, to lay out some of the possible ingredients, goals, etc, and some steps to achieve those or to implement those.

as part of that, I may ask one of the moderators to allows us to rename this thread, or to perhaps add some new tags. but anyway for now, I will simply use this thread to jot down some ideas of my own, and to invite others to do so as well.

if I see a real basis for starting a new thread, then I may do so in the future. thanks!

in the spirit of true wiki-ideas, I am posting this additional reply as a collaborative workspace, and making it editable as a wiki entry.

others are free to add their ideas here, any time they wish to do so; or to add their own comments on my own ideas. or to post their own ideas in a separate reply below on this thread, if they wish. thanks!

===Some useful central threads, or threads which provide relevant broad overview of various community resources and efforts:===

===Some possible ideas from sm8900, for a movement strategy.===

  • history/society:
    –encourage editors to create entries for their own local cities, regions, or other geographic areas.
    –encourage editors to contribute to the relevant articles for the current history for their own country, region, nationality, etc.

===Compilation of useful tools and resources, for those seeking to help develop our community, or to join the ongoing group effort to craft and/or implement a Movement Strategy===

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tagging @Qgil-WMF , @NPhan_WMF , @JBrungs_WMF , simply to invite and welcome their input if they are so inclined; if not, that’s perfectly fine as well. just wanted to note that your input is always welcome. thanks!

I have made a small change in one paragraph of the draft to call out the wiki projects more clearly. We will use the current version to update the main Movement Strategy page.

@Sm8900 the purpose of this forum is to implement the Movement Strategy 2030 described in the intro above, with the 10 recommendations from which the #ms-initiatives are derived. All this was discussed and approved, and now we are in the implementation phase.

Changes to the current strategy are possible and expected. In fact there is a whole recommendation about this: Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt. Discussions to clarify, develop and fine tune the current strategy are also welcome and needed. Collaboration to implement the strategy through the projects defined in the MS initiatives is essential, and the main purpose of this forum.

Other activities like the ones you are suggesting are useful, and this Forum can be a place to accommodate them because they are aligned with the Movement Strategy 2030. I just want to stress that our priority is the implementation of the Strategy 2030 through projects that complete initiatives and fulfill the recommendations.

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hi @Qgil-WMF . thanks very much for your helpful reply above. yes, your reply is very helpful and informative. that is what I wanted to know more about. I will keep all of that infomation in mind.

just to explore the helpful resources that you mentioned a little bit, I have copied and pasted some of the basic text from that page, regarding the basic items for Movement Strategy, as shown below. thanks.

here is an excerpt. this is from the page at the bulleted link below.

EXCERPT:

in 2017, we created a strategic direction to guide our Movement into the future: By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.

Over a two-year period, people from across our Movement have come together in an open and participatory process to discuss how we can work toward this. The result is a set of recommendations and underlying principles that propose structural and systemic changes that will enable us to create the future of our Movement together.

They outline how we can grow sustainably and inclusively. They introduce ways we can make the most of new opportunities and meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. They suggest how we can strive for knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. So that everyone – those already within our Movement and anyone who wishes to join – can play a role in capturing, sharing, and enabling access to free knowledge.

The recommendations are:

I would like to note this new thread below which I have posted today. I consider this a small but hopefully helpful step towards gradually developing the MS forums into a more comprehensive forum resource, which can be of positive use to the community in general. Thanks.

the page below is useful as a summary and overview of the community’s overall discussion of the idea for the MS forum itself.

The purpose of this topic was to update the text on Movement Strategy - Meta, which we have done. If you want to discuss other topics, let’s do it where it corresponds. This helps keeping the forum usable and organized.

ok. I’m totally fine with accepting your input, and your guidance, and with following your advice in every way.

if that’s the case, then might it be possible for you to set up a new thread, which could serve as an umbrella thread here, and where general topics pertaining to Movement Strategy could be discussed?

I’d be fine with however you might prefer to present this. of course, I know that I could create any thread I wish myself, but I think that a thread that you create might be much more likely to get more response, due to your highly-respected role here.

is that something you’d be able to do? I would accept fully any approach that you might prefer to take, in setting up such a thread. could you please let me know, @Qgil-WMF ? thanks for all your efforts!

This is the Movement Strategy Forum and there is a General category for MS general topics that don’t fit in a more specialized category. If you or anyone has a new topic, you can just create it. Isn’t this better than a single thread combining multiple topics?

Actually, yes; there are many threads which might in their own right be better than a single thread combining multiple topics.

HOWEVER…

in the spirit of true wiki-ideals, and based upon solidly established past practices, precedent, procedural principles, and proven and popular platforms…

my opinion is that there is a solid basis for establishing one thread to encompass an umbrella topic, meaning the full topical area of movement strategy and/or general principles of Wikipedia, as a broad topical area to be covered by one umbrella thread, to include multiple indvidual ideas, or topics or questions, as part of an ongoing conversation within the realm of that broad umbrella area.

my reason for putting forth this idea is actually quite simple; the Village Pump is already highly useful as a single-page forum,. where multiple discussions take place. yes, you could refer to those separate topics as multiple threads; however, since they all occur on a single page, namely the specific tab at Village Pump, the reader is naturally encouraged to take in all topics on that page, in a glance, or in a single long perusal.

ok, granted that we have a different format here. however, why should we lose some of the incidental benefits of the existing Wikipedia talk forums, such as village pump, merely due to the structural nature of our new platform at MS forums?

I’m obviously not saying to dispense with our threaded format. however, my question is different; why shouldn’t we have one thread that can serve as an umbrella space for a broad topical area, similar to Village Pump, purely as a resource and collaborative space that people can use, IF, and only IF, they find it helpful, or otherwise wish to do so?

we still would have the separate-threads format full available here for use as well, if people so choose. do you see what I mean? that’s my main point on this. thanks.

Pursuant to my idea stated above, I am posting a link below to a thread that I created here a while back, on November 1. this is based on some of the ideas that I have expressed in my comments above. you are welcome to visit this thread, and to use it for any topics that you deem worthwhile. thanks!