User:Adamw

Greetings! I'm currently a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation Board. Also, I'm a developer working for Wikimedia Germany, previously for Wikimedia Foundation, and before that a volunteer. This page is a messy dump of my interests.

IRC: @awight email: spam+wiki@undefinedludd.net pronouns: they/he

Fully elected Wikimedia Foundation Board
Legal ownership of the Foundation should be given back to Wikimedia's contributors, who lost the right to vote directly for its Trustees in 2006.

The Wikimedia Foundation should take the organizational expectations for affiliates, and apply to its own corporate structure. Most importantly, a fully democratic Board elected by members roughly as defined in its original Bylaws, editors, uploaders, developers and so on. For more about the history, please read the article on Wikimedia Foundation membership.

The Foundation's actions should be governed by its contributors and not by only a few. Direct, democratic control is the only known way to guarantee this.

Prevent online abuse
In the 2015 harassment survey, editors say that 86% of them have experienced or witnessed harassment due to their work on wikis (p. 16). They say that harassment is disturbing, and causes them to participate less. Other-gender, women, and culturally diverse community members experience disproportionate nastiness. Not only can we not afford to allow this to happen when we might be able to prevent it working together through social and technical interventions, but it's plainly immoral and unjust. Happily, there's a funded community health initiative that you can help support.

Continue work to make IP addresses private.

Organize more "Tea Houses" for mentorship and support.

More pro-social software affordances (e.g. "thank").

Counter disinformation
We have a few options available to stop the spread of false or manipulative editing. In addition to the automated approaches, we should also look at partnerships with journalists, possibly deterring public entities from CoI editing before it happens.

Plural Point of View
Over time, I've come to appreciate and even love the "Neutral Point of View" pillar adopted by most (all?) Wikipedias. It's proven itself to be a basis for constructive co-creation and dialogue, and is fun to apply to my own writing. However, I believe that the spirit of what we do under the banner of NPOV is poorly served by the name. I've suggested on the NPOV talk page that we consider renaming to "plural" point of view, because it might better describe the actual practice. In my opinion, neutrality is self-delusion, and moreover has become a code for the status quo. Until I understood the practice as being the opposite of what it sounded like, I expected to find the banality and blind acceptance that often accompany the term "neutral".

Offline Editorship
I'm fascinated by this use case, especially since solving the offline editing problem will launch forward the same technical improvements needed to get us close to both real-time collaboration and federated wikis.

TODO: link to newer funded initiatives.
 * Submissions/Collaborative_drafts, a discussion I'd like to have with editors about making "Undo" more friendly.
 * See a human-readable description in IdeaLab.
 * Extension:Nonlinear for branching article revisioning
 * Would decouple resolving any nontrivial three-way merge from making the edit itself.
 * Represent revisions as a delta. Allows better asynchronous editing.
 * The new visual editor will likely batch operational transformations, there's yer delta.
 * Deltas would have N=||cross product|| possible combined resolutions, depending on a choice of selection. Article state at any time could be ambiguous, and multiple.
 * Extension:Protection: article protection is too difficult to improve, because it is currently managed by MW core code. Once these permissions have been componentized, it will be more clear how to hook in alternative permission schemes.
 * Extension:Offline is a stopgap offline editing mode for wikipedia.
 * Currently, this extension can more or less efficiently read the .xml.bz2 format.
 * The next big move would be to read archives in OpenZIM format, but this is modified HTML and not wiki text. Perhaps OpenZIM can be re-specified to include markup source.
 * Unfortunately, this extension requires a minimal LAMP stack, which makes it a poor fit for mobile devices.
 * Extension:Parsoid will produce an embeddable library that can parse, render and edit wiki markup. This will eliminate the LAMP requirement for offline interaction.

Wikimedia Fundraising
I'm proud of the WMF for surviving on mostly small donations. For the sake of our independence, we should keep it that way. Other revenue streams should never exceed these.

Outdated illustration:

The Wikimedia Foundation is a rare non-profit that thrives thanks to a huge outpouring of relatively small donations. The average donation is around $20 USD. This more than anything else allows the WMF to remain independent.

There's a good discussion of this problem facing non-profit fundraising generally, "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded", an anthology of essays edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.

A recurring theme among those essays is that a dependency on large donations may be harmful to your health as a non-profit, and threatens your independence. One of the strings attached to grant funding is the burden of framing your organization's mission in terms catering to the fiscal sponsor du jour, diverting significant staff time and throwing the shadow of cognitive dissonance across goals, where instead with grassroots funding there is the opportunity for deeper engagement with your programs' constituents, building a virtuous cycle of mutual education and action.