User:Adamw

Adam Roses Wight. Software developer employed by Wikimedia Foundation, in the Scoring Platform Team. This page is a messy dump of my interests.

Contact me
E-mail: awight@undefinedwikimedia.org

IRC: #wikimedia-ai, @awight

Own and Elect platform
This might be out of place, as it's a political platform I believe in rather than a technical platform, but I hold a fringe opinion that the WMF would be healthier if we could convert it to a membership non-profit, in which all Wikimedians (defined broadly: editors, bot authors, media curators, staff, donors, etc.) collectively own the organization and each person holds one vote in an assembly. Related ideas about directly electing the WMF's Board of Trustees come up regularly on the mailing list, but so far they seem to be sporadic and spontaneous, there has been no sustained attempt at building momentum towards this goal. In an interesting coincidence of WMF's history it actually began as a formal membership organization, eventually converting to eliminate membership out of concerns for the complexity of their bookkeeping.

Much of my understanding has been shaped by my time spent as a staff member, seeing that our attempts at democracy are fleeting and ad-hoc due to the lack of mandate or roots to implement an overall democratic structure.

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, there's no such thing as neutrality, and moreover the concept has been abused to become a code for "status quo". Until I understood the practice itself, I was horrified by the connotations of banality and blind acceptance that come with the term "neutral", at least to my ears.

Feel free to help develop this argument, whether you agree or disagree, I'm interested in chatting about it.

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.

Dumps
I'd like to help implement daily incremental updates for of the Wikidata JSON stream, so that I can keep a personal mirror up to date. (TBD Phabricator)

And play a role in realizing this magnificent proposal led by Ariel Glenn: Wikitech:Dumps/Dumps 2.0: Redesign.

Anti-harassment
We need this right away, yesterday truth be told. The latest harassment survey shows that other gender, women, and culturally diverse community members experience disproportionate badness. 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.

Wikimedia Fundraising


Until recently I worked with WMF's Fundraising Tech, from 2012-2017. It's been an honor to work for a non-profit that thrives thanks to the huge outpouring of relatively small donations from the people who support us—the average donation is around $20 USD. This more than anything else allows us to remain independent.

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

tl;dr, a dependency on large donations may be harmful to your health as a non-profit, and threatens your independence. One of the strings attached is almost always present, and depending on the light conditions even invisible: the burden of restating your organizational goals in terms catering to the fiscal sponsors, taking away significant staff time and causing cognitive dissonance, where instead there could be an opportunity for deeper engagement with your programs' constituents, building a virtuous cycle of mutual education and action.