For about a month now, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Strategy Wiki has been trundling along in a desperate attempt to try and work out how to evolve over the next five years. Trouble is, it’s become apparent that the whole process has rapidly devolved into minute detail where every tiny detail is being closely examined to try and identify a way forward. It’s really a mirror of how the concept of using a wiki has become wedded to almost everything the Foundation does, with additional requirements being plugged into the Mediawiki framework no matter how clumsily they fit. It’s not a recipe for finding good ideas, it’s a recipe for reams of documentation and ideas with no clear way to identify the wheat from the chaff.
So how should it be done? Research into crowdsourcing techniques indicates that it works best when you have a large number of people, preferably removed from the immediate problem, who then submit ideas on how to solve it. Others can then comment on those ideas and provide feedback, while even the most meagre of participants can give an idea a simple thumbs up/down to help rank and sort ideas. A great example of this is WebStorm, which is ideal for collecting a large number of ideas on a general topic and allowing them to be weighted by participants. Another possibility is InnoCentive, which also specialises in capturing ideas and helping organisations work out solutions to their problems. The important thing is that there are common web themes and platforms out there that really demonstrate with a little research how to do this kind of work, yet falling back on a Wiki seems somewhat clumsy.
What the Wikimedia Foundation desperately needs are cohesive strategies that tackle the bigger issues they face in a unified way, not in a fragmented and piecemeal approach. It needs to engage with it’s readership more meaningfully and not just relying on page impressions or Alexa rankings as an indication of how they are performing. The foundation’s biggest asset is that it faces very little competition, while it’s biggest weakness remains what would happen if someone else produced something that was easier to use and easier to participate in. This is critical – all Wikipedia content is licensed as freely available under a Creative Commons agreement, making it quite trivial for someone to assemble a better framework purely in order to pull in editors and lure others away from Wikimedia projects. The feedback gained from the silent readership could be something as trivial as “Was this article helpful to you? Yes/No” – you know, the kind of thing Amazon has been doing for years for weighting reviews and which Facebook use successfully for calculating advert popularity. It could be something as complex as promoting the use of talk pages, or organising the global Wikimedia Chapters to go out and engage the public. Hold focus groups, ask members of the public to participate, that kind of thing. Without this external view to help shape and mold an organisation’s perception of itself, it just becomes an internal feedback loop that reinforces already held beliefs.
So what should the Wikimedia Foundation be doing? Over the next few posts, I’ll be looking at one aspect of the service and describing how things could be improved. None of it will be rocket science and none of it will be demanding the impossible, but all of it should be focusing on making the experience better for the readers and editors alike. If you think something’s worthwhile, feel free to shout out in the comments.
I think it’s in good spirit that you are making this effort here; but I worry for how your spirit inevitably will be crushed by the cancerous and treacherous culture that has taken over a Wikipedia community that has learned well from its “Sole Founder”.
I think you raise a valid point. Having said that though, I don’t think my spirit will be crushed if the ideas aren’t taken on board.
Sometimes it’s useful to be able to take a look at something and work out how it could be improved. It’s one of those intellectual challenges that helps keep the mind fresh. For me, it’s as rewarding as a crossword puzzle or game of sudoku.
As to the ideas themselves, perhaps they’ll end up on Wikipedia. I suspect though that they’ll be introduced by a separate consultant brought in by the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than being picked up on here. That said though, it probably won’t matter anyway. If someone else uses these ideas to build something better than Wikipedia, I’m comfortable with that.
You see, Wikipedia’s greatest asset (apart from brand name) is it’s contributors. While some of them are fans of Wikipedia as an environment, I suspect that a fair chunk are purely involved with the idea of sharing knowledge freely. The content cannot be described as an asset – anyone else can take a copy of it for whatever purpose. The platform isn’t really an asset either – it’s an out-of-date open source project that has suffered from a lack of vision and strategy for a long time
The greatest risk to the project isn’t in lack of funding or IT resources, it’s in lack of contributors. If these ideas manage to demonstrate how a team of people can produce a better quality product than Wikipedia with fewer contributors, the Wikimedia Foundation is at risk. if it’s possible to demonstrate this while still maintaining the “anyone can edit” mantra, I’d suggest that the WMF could have substantial problems.