User:PPelberg (WMF)/Greenhouse

I imagine this page as a greenhouse. A place to gather bits of information from in and around the Movement that resonate with me, a Product Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.

This page is an experiment built on the hypothesis that taking consistent note of information resonates with me and locating these bits of resonance together in a public place where I can relate and iterate upon them will cause new ideas to emerge.

Loose
"Hi. I am Vis M from India. Please make reading & editing from mobile more friendly as it is the only internet device used everyday by common people of developing countries. Are  there plans for more support for mobile? Wiktionary, Wikisource, and Wikivoyage will benefit a lot if people can contribute and participate from smartphones."
 * related to the thought below, I wonder what if anything could get unlocked from enabling people to make inter-article links or linking to specific sentences that would map, as closely to possible, as the precisely places within the wiki where more information about that thing exists. Might there be a population of experienced volunteers who would be motivated to opt into reviewing, and potentially acting on, input from readers. What prompted this: I was reading the En:Amsterdam, I happened upon the following sentence, “ Amsterdam was founded at the Amstel, that was dammed to control flooding; the city's name derives from the Amstel dam.” Then I thought to myself, “huh, I want to learn more about this flooding control. Oh! There’s a source here…maybe that will help me learn more about this.” (Taps citation). I see that the source is encyclopedia brotwnica and I think to myself, “huh, I wonder if/why another encyclopedia is considered a reliable source. Is there some way I can flag this for someone to look into?” idea: Wikipedia gardening club. Idea would be some kind of experiment where you create a little “raised bed” and come together to garden / make sense of what you’ve planned in your green house over the past, let’s say, month.
 * thinking about what “information” is inside of the depth to which some people engage woth/edit Wikipedia…I wonder if it has to do with how relatively in constrained it is in comparison to editing other, bigger, projects where there is less low hanging fruit, less open field…fewer places to really gone on big edit “sprees” without running into anyone else. Note; this thought is entirely built on assumption. I’d be curious to learn how the number of edits that are made to wiki data are made each month distributed across the total number of people who edited in a given month. what If, as a way to, help people become a bit more comfortable with editing, feel recognized for their support of/contribution to Wikipedia, and help us better understand how Wikipedia fits into their life, we ask if, in the donate flow for people to have their contribution permanently memorialized on-wiki? Can "narrative" be encyclopedic? To what extent is a point of view core to a narrative? What might an encyclopedic narrative look like? I wonder this as I think about how prominent the "story" format has become and wonder about what Wikipedia's relationship to it is.
 * memory as a motivator for contribution…what can the future NOT afford to forget, not know, not learn from, etc.?
 * #TODO: ask @IFried (WMF) about what the Campaigns Teams has learned about this in the work they've done/are doing with campaign organizers working in Sub-Saharan Africa.
 * How might Wikipedia connect people to _their_ past? How might Wikipedia help people to better understand/contextualize their own experience?
 * Wikipedia as collective memory. This objective varies fundamentally from other participatory experiences on the internet (read: Social media) where the individual is centered. It’s about self-expression. If it matters to you, it belongs, it has a place. On Wikipedia, the collective is centered. What belongs is only that which the collective remembers. I think there in lies a question the answer to which is always evolving: what is the composition of that collective especially when the notion of a singular collective to be a false premise.
 * Wikipedia
 * Enables you to be an active reader. "Active" in the sense that Wikipedia enables you to "ask" and "answer" the questions that emerge while you're reading? "Hold on, what does term mean? Awesome, I can visit this page and answer that." "Hold on, this doesn't look quite right...what source are they using to support this statement?"
 * Doesn't ask for or direct my attention. The interface empowers me to wonder and place me attention in the places that catch my eye. This reminds me of how I feel being outside, exploring a city, in nature, etc. Again, coming back to the park metaphor.
 * Mobile
 * What questions do people on mobile devices come to Wikipedia seeking answers to? How does the effort and work required to answer said questions vary on mobile and desktop?
 * Note: in this context, I'm using "question" in the way Bret Victor uses it in Explorable Explanations.
 * What does "deep learning" look like on Wikipedia on a mobile device?
 * What does the movement mean when it refers to “oral history”?
 * What - if any - precedents are there for a concept like “notable observer”? Here I’m thinking about a policy that would support commentary/perspective from people the wiki has deemed notable in the domain they’re commenting on. This thought and the one above it inspired by presentation deryck Chan have at 2021 wikimania.
 * en:Be bold and its lack of resonance with the experiences of people from historically marginalized and underrepresented background.


 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T305756
 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T302352
 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T304382
 * How might Wikipedia present information in ways people accessing the site on a mobile device will find engaging and useful? Or said another way: we need a way of presenting history, the encyclopedia using modern media (pictures, videos, sound, touch, etc.).
 * Requirements
 * Volunteers are already improvising ways of presenting information in this format
 * The component bits of information already exist within Wikipedia and volunteers are already adding them
 * The format will enable people reading Wikipedia to use this new representation to answer new questions or answer existing questions with less effort
 * People will be able to create these new knowledge representations using only the information present within a single article and the knowledge they have in their minds
 * People contributing these new knowledge formats will feel proud after making one
 * Readers and contributors should be able to distinguish between articles that have the new knowledge format and those that do not. Think: articles with and without infoboxes.
 * Ideas
 * Timelines and elevating knowledge formats that have naturally emerged into structured/dedicated contribution tools/workflows
 * A timeline “asks” for events (entities many people, I assume across cultures) innate key understand: something happening at a point in time, accompanied by a reliable source that verifies what you are reporting happened and at the time you reported it having happened.
 * these events could also “ask” for some kind of visual (e.g illustration) that helps readers understand/imagine the event
 * also re timeline: the format seems a format that would work well with wikitext and therefore compliant with all existing moderation/auditability experiences. #TODO add a link to the transportation map template @Whatamidoing (WMF) shared with me today as an example of the kind of fidelity that can be achieved using wikitext.
 * many wikipedia articles include events mapped to points in time. relating events to time in a visual way seems to have been valuable enough to readers that volunteers created many custom templates to support this way of presenting time-based information. [i]  and while some volunteers have discovered these templates and used them to visually relate time and events [ii], many articles A) lack any kind of visual relating time and events or B) have used existing tools to improvise doing the above [iv]  all of this has summed to me thinking: "hmm, maybe timelines are a 'first class' knowledge format that we ought to define the presentation for and create the tooling necessary for volunteers across experience levels to create."
 * i. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Timeline_templates i
 * i. https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2
 * iii. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
 * iv. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_computing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_hypertext_technology , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines
 * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Julle/Essays/Wikipedia_as_a_physical_space
 * How might Wikipedia reflect back to people the time they spend with it, so that people can better understand what they need and are interested in?
 * How might we empower people to configure Wikipedia in ways that are suited to meet their individual needs and interests? Asked another way: How might we empower people to customize Wikipedia in ways that align their individual needs with the objectives/values/policies of the project's?
 * How might we evolve category pages to help readers discover knowledge within the wiki they might not have found otherwise?
 * What verbs describe the various ways in which people use Wikipedia to learn? How might the nuance the answer to that question might produce impact how I think and talk about Wikipedia's interfaces?
 * Retrieve information they once knew and have since forgotten
 * Answer a specific question. What other movies has ___ acted in?
 * Locate and collate/combine discrete pieces of information into knowledge that leads to understanding.
 * What might it do to think of Wikipedia as a collective memory? A place where Volunteers go to document, agree on, and iterate upon the world’s collective memory to make it more complete and accurate over time?
 * Related to the above: in what ways do individuals use Wikipedia to remember? E.g. using special:contributions as a way to remember where you’ve “been” on Wikipedia.
 * How might Wikipedia help people to answer questions that land at the intersections of multiple topics? This question brought to mind by me wondering: “How - if at all - are the concepts of memory and history related?” With this question in mind I visited en:memory and en:history seeking to answer this question using the Wikipedia iOS app. I then used the app’s in-page search looking for “history” within En:memory and “memory” within “en:history”. Finding neither, I ended up here to capture this moment and unanswered question.
 * RE creating a place people can visit to help them remember where they’ve gone on the wiki: what if they view offered people opportunities to improve the pages/categories/etc. they engage with most? Essentially, this place becomes could meet the moments when, “you know you want to be on Wikipedia and you don’t know what you want to do? Learn? Contribute in some way? Etc.”
 * as product managers at the foundation…
 * what artifact(s) are we creating, collaborating on, referencing, iterating upon, etc. as a means to developing richer knowledge of where and how we might intervene to achieve the the impact we, and the movement, has established for itself? E.g. is it the “flywheel”?
 * Related: why does the flywheel seem not to have evolved much?
 * for reference: other functions/disciplines seem to make creating/collaborating on shared artifacts a core part of their practices. Designers: design system. engineers: libraries, code bases. Data scientists: libraries(?).
 * what questions do people ask product leaders that we can equip them to answer?
 * what is “the work”? What do we currently understand to be the most complex challenges we face/questions we need to answer and what do we need to answer them?
 * Extending the "Wikipedia as a public park/reserve/etc." metaphor, how might we help people arriving to Wikipedia become aware of the small acts they can take to make the encyclopedia better for everyone. Where everyone could mean other people who will visit Wikipedia after them, their future selves, etc.
 * In what ways is Wikipedia/spending time in it similar to spending time in a park?
 * In what ways is Wikipedia/spending time in it different to spending time in a park?
 * What might be the implications of adopting this metahpor?
 * Some examples from parks that come to mind that might inform how we think about this on Wikipedia:
 * "Travel an Camp on Durable Surfaces"
 * "Dispose of Waste Properly"
 * "Leave What You Find"
 * "Minimize Campfire Impacts"
 * "Respect Wildlife"
 * "Be Considerate of Others"
 * Ideas for Wikipedia
 * "Learn something unexpected? Let the next person know."
 * "Find something interesting, save it in some way so that you can revisit it later." Here, I'm thinking about how on a hike you might take a picture of a beautiful view to try to "capture it."
 * "Want to remember where you've been on the wiki, create an account so that you can recall the articles you've read and the ones you have yet to explore." Here, I'm thinking about how you might consult trail map to decide which route you want to take by delineating the trails you've already taken from the ones you have yet to explore.
 * Continuing with park/nature metaphor: how might we enable people to see where they’ve been and inspire them to explore “paths” / “places” / “views” they have yet to visit and see? Contributions page as a way of retracing your steps…a reliably way to revisit somewhere you remember having been.
 * If parks and nature have various kinds of views (big open expanses, cozy nooks, etc.), what Kinds of views might be present / absent within Wikipedia?
 * References that have had enduring impact on how I think/understand Wikipedia and the role of product manager at the Wikimedia Foundation
 * A City Is Not a Tree
 * en:Chesterton's fence
 * Trusting Everybody to Work Together
 * The Tyranny of Structurelessness (essay | article)
 * https://return.life/2022/03/07/the-mind-made-matter/
 * "...over the course of time individuals internalize knowledge to mind and then outsource expertise to matter."
 * "the individual mind lives within a collective intelligence largely  expressed through material objects. Whether we are talking of calculators and compasses, instruments and maps, or books and puzzles, we individually absorb well designed functional schema from matter, and occasionally give back our own incremental representations to the ambient culture."
 * Rough consensus: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7282 + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_consensus
 * Helpful tools
 * Canonical datasets: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Lake
 * [deprecated] A list of the en:wiki articles that received the most traffic yesterday from four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit: User:HostBot/Social media traffic report