Wikisource talk:Wikimedia Strategy 2017

The big question that we seek to answer is the following: What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?

Potential ways to think about this question: Examples of summary sentences:
 * What will guide our work together over the next 15 years?
 * What impact or change do we want to have on the world over the next 15 years?
 * What is the single most important thing we can do together over the next 15 years?
 * What will unite and inspire us as a movement for the next 15 years?
 * What will accelerate our progress over the next 15 years?
 * What will we be known for in the next 15 years?
 * “Wikimedia stands for a purity of knowledge and facts, untainted by commercial interests or political agendas, and promotes a knowledge culture of balanced information and cited sources.”
 * “We should explore new kinds of knowledge spaces, embracing innovation in order to survive and thrive in 2030.”

If you have specific ideas for improving the software, please consider submitting them in Phabricator or the product's specific talkpage. To discuss the overall strategy process, see m:Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017. Other discussions throughout the movement are listed at Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Participate.

Don't be an island
I hope that by 2030 Wikisource has become much more widly known about and used. It should be the obvious place to go for anyone who has public domain or freely licenced source material to share. Not that it should be a 'raw' repository, such as the Internet Archive or Figshare for exmaple, but that material in Wikisource leverages the unique advantages of being open for everyone to edit and easy to interlink with Wikipedia and Wikidata. The processes of getting things into and out of Wikisource will be smoother than they are now.

It's been said before that Wikisource is the library, where Wikipedia is the encyclopedia. This is true, and is a really simple and powerful metaphor; it's usually how I explain Wikisource to people. As the library, it has room for a huge amout of material, of great variety. Maybe it's more than a library? Maybe it's an archive as well (although, I know that there are differing views on this). This would mean it accepts a much wider range of material, and would need the extra systems of tracking and annotation that come along with that.

The crux, as I see it, of the next era of Wikisource is to make it easier to to interoperate with other library and archival systems in order to make it quicker to get high quality material into Wikisource.

Wikisource should be more compelling than Project Gutenberg, LibraryThing, or AtoM!

Sam Wilson 06:55, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

Resource for smaller GLAMs

 * wikisource will provide transcribed sources for wikimedia projects.
 * wikisource will provide a training ground for the standard layout and issues common to transcription projects, and network about standards of practice.
 * as the larger GLAM organizations incorporate transcription into their practice and websites, wikisource will provide a welcoming place for smaller institutions, and individuals to do transcription.
 * wikisource will provide solutions for institutions seeking to transcribe more difficult works with minimal text layers. Slowking4 ‽ SvG's revenge 13:50, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Greater scope for data, citation reform and integration on Wikipedia, and make the clear case for our place in education
Wikipedia's mission takes it where the information is. So far it has pursued with success two of Tim Berners-Lee’s visions of the Web, "Enquire Within" from the early days, and linked structured data, at a timelag of about a decade in each case. So we just don’t know about 2030: there may come a new direction, such as “open notebook”, that assumes importance.

What can be said, in the era of Wikidata, is that the accretion of many kinds of structured data on Wikimedia sites has a broad scope. Wikidata as we now know it should reach 1 billion statements. It should be a massive resource lexically, for both translation and coping with aliases. At that scale one can see GLAM metadata being taken very seriously; and that includes bibliographic data. Other major areas include taxonomic and other scientific data (without trying to swallow bioinformatics whole); genealogical data subject to verifiability and other constraints; open corporate data. Data in tabular or time series form should be included in Wikimedia's scope.

There is also the "library" and referencing issue. Fact-checking and citing done piecemeal are not the ultimate solution; and on Wikipedia the way references are presented should be a matter for the reader, rather than the authors. For the "back office" support of that project alone, much needs to done to tokenize references to most mainstream sources, in a highly granular way. For its display, we would have to start attaching references explicitly to areas of wikitext. This approach would require major work, to dwarf the effort that went into the Visual Editor.

The education front also needs to advance. Wikimedia should have its own concept and toolbox for educational materials. From the point of view of assignments, more work must be done to make explicit the scholarly considerations that are implicit in Wikimedia workflows. As the Wikimedia sites become more integrated, which seems the inevitable result of the introduction of Wikidata and its native mindset, those workflows become more concrete in our terms, more abstruse for the public.

The quotidian issues of reliability, disambiguation and “plain style”, neutral prose are not shallow matters. Scholarship is, after all, quality control of information. "We'd Like to Teach the World to Edit (In Perfect Harmony)".

Keywords: structured data; translation; aliases; citation token; fact-checking; wikitext area; workflow; implicit scholarship; disambiguation; quality control.


 * Hi. Re: "The education front also needs to advance. [...]", could you elaborate? I'm not sure if you're describing "using wikimedia material for basic worldwide education", or, "educating the world about how to contribute to wikimedia". Possibly both!
 * Thanks for the rest of those good thoughts, too. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:56, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
 * The Comprende! tool and Magnus Manske's blog about it are a start in the direction I mean (see also https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Wikiqu). I worked with Moodle from 2012 with WMUK, and discussed it with leading figures in the WMF in 2013-4; with conclusions that some of its functionality would be seriously useful (in training and for educational use of Wikimedia material); while Moodle itself was not going to be the long term solution, because its direction of travel as a software project. Now, this was also the time when MOOCs were fashionable - we hear less about them these days. Wikidata, or rather WikiBase, has given a new opportunity to consider what Wikimedia might do for "OERs", with the focus much more on the underlying data and navigation (thought of graph-theoretically, so also in data terms). I've talked about this a couple of times now at WMUK events. What we have now is not definitive, but does represent a new point of view, and technically is not baffling. As a WikiBase project it could come under the wing of Wikidata. In a brainstormy way, I certainly think in a few years its potential could be realised. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:20, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

FYI, I have to finish summarizing the discussion before midnight UTC. You're welcome to answer to my question, but please don't add anything new to the discussion. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't understand how this applies to Wikisource instead of Wikipedia. Wikipedia values "reliability and “plain style” neutral prose" highly, yes, but those issues are completely irrelevant here on Wikisource, as we are not writing original texts. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:40, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, the topic is Wikimedia strategy, period (see Scriptorium). And currently Wikisource is the "library" (slash archive, slash whatever). I could unpack this a bit more, but as I said on the Scriptorium, I think we are in for a period of integration much sooner than 15 years off, and the roles of sister projects to WP are to some extent up for grabs in this debate. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:01, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
 * could you please put here a link to the Scriptorium section you're referring to? Is it related to the strategy discussion? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 13:16, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
 * FWIW, I meant Scriptorium. Charles Matthews (talk) 05:04, 21 April 2017 (UTC)