User:PPelberg (WMF)/Greenhouse

I imagine this page as a greenhouse within the broader Greenhouse experiment.

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.

TBD
''#TODO: use this section to show/store "loose" ideas that have become clear/definitive enough to be "planted" outside the greenhouse. When possible, it'd be neat to be able to link the "loose" thought an idea in this section "sprouted" from.''

Planted
This section contains links to ideas that I've considered "viable" enough to be planted in the "wild" where other people might discover and contribute to them:


 * T265163: Create a system to encode best practices into editing experiences
 * T307971: Introduce a dedicated workflow for creating timelines
 * T305756: Help readers remember the time they spend on Wikipedia
 * T304382: Introduce an intuitive workflow for adding open knowledge resources to articles
 * T302531: Offer people the ability watch knowledge emerge/evolve in real-time

Loose
"With versioning, there's no need to try to prevent bad things from happening, so long as they can be quickly undone. "Detect badness? Get back to the last good version, then start out again from there."
 * i wonder what a presentation could look like for demonstrating – what i understand to be – the meaning of "a city is not a tree" an is relevance to the foundation and movement
 * [prompt] how might we help people to see Wikipedia as a nourishing, impactful, humane, and generous alternative to other modes of interacting with people online? Related: recent conversations with volunteers.
 * "Instruction creep, informally referred to as "bloat," occurs when instructions increase in size over time until they are unmanageable. It is an insidious disease, originating from ignorance of the KISS principle and resulting in overly complex procedures that are often misunderstood, followed with great irritation or ignored."
 * As I see it, a defining property of MediaWiki, and wikis more broadly, is the easy with which damage can be done. I worry that the largest projects have lost sight of this ease (for understandable reasons!) at the expense of people whose voices and perspectives the Movement so desperately needs from feeling welcomed and safe to make mistakes.
 * Clary Shirky writing in Wikis, Grafitti, and Process:

"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."
 * "Part of the cost of any environmental renewal is therefore a loss of potential information about the past." Kevin A. Lynch writing in What Time Is This Place?
 * I wonder the extent to which the above helps to explain what some volunteers feel is at stake when changes are made to how Wikipedia looks and feels: loss of the past.
 * As someone with some downtime who is familiar with Wikipedia and is interested in learning something, I’d like to be able quickly and easily discover something im likely to find novel, interesting, useful, etc. so that I can feel good (prob better language than “good”). E.g. show me musicians with the longest “personal life” sections, show me notable living people who have the longest “controversy” sections, show me the fastest growing article about a living person, etc. note: idea inspired by https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1577771621246504986?s=46&t=5S3svEPnEwuiuUuXn6gSFw
 * I'd like for it to be easy to go to Wikipedia and find a list of movies/documentaries about the topic of memory
 * Thought process: I was thinking about "memory" > I remembered the film en:Memento_(film) > thought to myself, "I wonder what other films explored the topic of memory?" > I visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_(film) hoping to see a category that read something like "Films about memory"...
 * Knowledge as a service: how might we meet people where they are and bring Wikipedia / the Movement's knowledge into the tools/experiences where people are ultimately going to use the information they traditionally go to Wikipedia to find.
 * Here I'm thinking about tools like Google Docs, WhatsApp, Telegram, Figma (?), Miro, Notion, etc.
 * Idea: an interview series with experts to help us – the Movement – reason about the challenges we face
 * E.g. Yi-Fu Tuan, Keller Easterling (Culture is well rehearsed at pointing to things, calling their names, recognizing their shape, but under rehearsed at describing the interactivity or chemistry between things. So infrastructure space is productively imponderable because it's not a thing. It's a large socio-technical system...it's too large to be in any one place. it can not be assessed by its name, shape or outline.)
 * How might we make longer-term thinking a satisfying act and one that we have space to do as part of our weekly work?
 * What might it look like to provide a view "alongside" an article where in you could see the notable "entities" within it.
 * E.g. scroll/swipe/etc. through a list of the notable people named in an article, the notable events, the notable concepts, the notable locations, the notable theories, the sources themselves...a way of almost turning the article "over" and abstracting out the discrete knowledge units within the long text and having those discrete knowledge units be the first things people see/consume and if/when they happen upon something that they want to learn more about, they can go deeper into the article (read: context it's embedded within).
 * Related: X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle), Concordance (publishing)
 * TODO: ADD SCREENSHOT OF KINDLE APP
 * As a project, product, movement, and community whose business model, consensus-based approach to progress, values, and objectives, constrain the number and pace at which we can experiment centrally, our biggest need is to become clear about what we are and crucially, are not, so that we can increase the likelihood that the ideas we allocate resources to are impactful in ways that align with our consented upon aims.
 * meta: what if I made an “actions/choices” section, as a way of holding me accountable to putting the thinking that happens here into practice in the “forest” so that I can learn and iterate.
 * metaphor: retrieving information on other services as discrete, transactional, time-sensitive...
 * What might it do to conceive of some portion of the time people spend on Wikipedia as taking their mind for a walk or taking themselves "outside while being online?"
 * What might it look like to conceive of structured tasks/the newcomer homepage as a set of invitations to explore the wiki while learning new things and helping others do the same?
 * E.g. could there be a task that asks you to highlight, what you perceive to be, the interesting/important/counter-intuitive part(s) of particular article?
 * How might we equip volunteers with the frameworks/mental models/guidelines we (product mangers) use to develop and iterate upon software so that they can apply them to the gadgets/vernacular improvements that surface in the contexts/projects they're active within? This thought is prompted by the comment the comment @Bluerasberry posted at en.wiki. Some ideas to get started:
 * What questions do we ask ourselves and members of our team when evaluating a new idea?
 * How do we offer constructive feedback?
 * How do we create a culture of "learning" on our teams?
 * [meta] prompted by the conversation i had with @CMadeo (WMF) on 11 August and the one @JTanner (WMF) and I had yesterday, I'd like to start bringing some language to why i see value and a need for the kind of practice and outcome this greenhouse experiment is intended to have.
 * i wonder if now is a crucial time for us – the Movement – to revisit the conversation about what defines Wikipedia as a product/experience people willingly spend time on/with.
 * the point below is what attracts me to ideas/metaphors like the collective memory metaphor. Reason: I wonder if it could lead people to think: “memory, ok. Memories are made up of events. Events are things that happen in time that get described with some text and maybe some media if it’s available. And ‘collective’ hmm…maybe that means the event needs to be relevant / significant to lots of people not just me.”
 * I wonder how much of the confusion newcomers experience when contributing to Wikipedia stems from the project being framed as an encyclopedia…this thought comes as a response to me thinking that this framing makes it difficult for people to relate to and imagine where and how adding to Wikipedia could fit into their daily life. Another spin on this: maybe so many newcomers arrive at Wikipedia seeking to create an article because that’s what the encyclopedia metaphor leads people to intuitively understand as the atomic unit of contribution: the article. When in reality, I think many people who edit Wikipedia come to realize that creating new articles makes up a minority of their contributions. It’s with this in mind that I think we ought to be in search of new metaphors that lead us to present content to people in ways that lead them to understand what a contribution to wikipedia looks like.
 * i find myself wanting to use wikipedia to ask questions about the knowledge contained with in.
 * E.g. yesterday, i went for a run with a friend who was wearing a pair of running pants that a swedish activewear brand makes. i forgot the name of the pants and i wanted to see if i could find the name myself. i searched google and ended up at en:Category:Clothing companies of Sweden. Another example: I'd like to be able to ask Wikipedia a question like, "What kinds of things (broadly defined) come to people or arrive to them?" The kind of response I was looking for in this case is something like a ping.
 * i'd like to be able to see how a particular comment, paragraph, or even sentence evolved over time. essentially: a more granular kind of page history.
 * considering how flexible mediawiki is, if volunteers haven't already tried to solve something in their own vernacular/improvisational way, i'd worry that an intervention wouldn't be adopted/supported widely. this thought prompted by conversation with NRodriguez (WMF).
 * speculative design idea: design Wikipedia if it were a camera roll…in Wikipedia’s case, the atomic unit would be an event (comprised of a time, location, description, and piece of media) rather than how we traditionally think of the camera roll as a photo. In Wikipedia’s spin on the camera roll, the atomic unit/event is framed through the metaphor of “event as memory” which could open possibilities for how the memories/events/atomic units are related to one another and can be explored.
 * I wonder if individual wikis have attempted to define for themselves what “being welcoming” means and looks like to them as a project/community? Do you they have a shared felt sense for what they’d like newcomers to feel? I ask this thinking about how subjective/fluid I imagine the idea of welcomeness to be and therefore in tension it likely is with being defined in the first place.
 * meta: I wonder how people can be made more causally aware of the activity in one another’s greenhouse to both serendipitously spot ideas that resonate and also lead them to feel less alone/isolated in their practices.
 * meta: I’m attracted to the idea of being able to save edits more quickly so that i can have smaller units to reference later via single purpose diffs. This kind of gets at what permalink a for comment offers, but for content contributions.
 * I think I’d like a “meta” section of sorts to articulate the experiences im Having maintaining this practice and what I’m noticing in this process
 * I wonder why we call people who visit Wikipedia “readers” instead of “learners”? The latter - to me- seems like it might help clarify what value we need to consistently be providing / outcomes we need to be building for. This leads me to wonder what the corollary for editors could be…
 * related to the below: i think I’m curious more broadly about naming what the defining features of mediawiki / Wikipedia are and sketching out ideas for how: A) these technical features influenced the culture that lives atop it and B) they can be reinterpreted to meet the needs of today’s learners
 * i wonder if people who are new to the Foundation might value hearing about how "permanence" impacts the Movement, its culture, and how they can leverage this feature to aid the work they are doing. E.g. detecting patterns in behavior, understanding history, etc.
 * what might it look like to be able to talk to Wikipedia?
 * Inspired by https://riff.quest/
 * how - if at all - does the Movement respect and acknowledge the knowledge that lives within peoples’ bodies?
 * meta: I’d like a reply tool-like, append-only gadget for adding new content to this page. Ideally, I’d be able to specify that new content gets added to the top of the page. who knows, maybe a sub-set of volunteers would value being able to enable a tool like this on specific talk pages as a way of generating ideas, making input a bit easier
 * remix the learning pathway generator User@CMadeo (WMF) as a way to:
 * create a generator that offers the questions i catalog (maybe other people can add questions they come up with as well?)
 * create a generator that cycles through agreements/principles that we can use at the start of any "gardening" session
 * would it be possible to get rid of page loads in the main namespace?
 * This thought inspired by reading the 2022 Tour de France on desktop, noticing the previous year navigation in the info box and thinning, “it’d be nice to move along this ‘timeline’ with more fluidity.”
 * Potential benefit to readers who create accounts: i'd like to be able to help make a travel itinerary based on notable places i'd like to visit
 * the above prompted by visiting en: Kengo Kuma and thinking, "If I ever go to Japan, I'd like to experience some of the buildings Kuma has designed."
 * going back to the memory thread: maybe the way memory fits into wikipedia is through the frame of learning. retention (read: memory) is a core part of learning and understandings. it's with this in mind it seems like there could be an opportunity for us to invest in help people to better recall/retain what they learned while on wikipedia. this framing was sparked by the conversation i had tonight with @MNovotny (WMF) & @Pginer-WMF
 * 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 Britannica 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 with/edit Wikidata…I wonder if it has to do with how relatively unconstrained it is in comparison to editing other, bigger, projects where there is less low hanging fruit, less open field…fewer places to really go 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 in the donate flow for people to have them/their contribution permanently memorialized on-wiki?
 * i wonder if people would be proud to share that page and show how long they've been donating. could also be an interesting opportunity to work on people sharing diffs. see T302352.
 * 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 therein 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 is a false premise.
 * Carlo Brescia Wikimania Session: Indigenous knowledge, epistemic decolonization and the power of images...
 * 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.


 * T305756: Help readers remember the time they spend on Wikipedia
 * T302352: Make diffs more shareable
 * T304382: Introduce an intuitive workflow for adding open knowledge resources to articles
 * 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"
 * Also see https://www.urban-design-guidelines.planning.vic.gov.au/guidelines/public-spaces via User:AHollender (WMF).
 * 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."
 * On Consensus and Humming in the IETF
 * 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